iscarded. The melody is played again as Elsa leads her
enemy into the house; Frederick returns to curse Ortrud and Lohengrin
in the same breath; all the sweetness goes out of the music as Elsa
disappears from view, and the scene closes as it opened, in gloom.

As daylight breaks Wagner indulges in one of the effects he was fond
of at this period. The reveille is sounded from a turret, and an
answering call comes from a distance; and the two parties trumpet it
in alternation until every one is awakened. It is a quasi-musical
effect only: there is no invention: the trumpet chords serve the
purpose and nothing more. He never reverted to this rather bald method
of filling up time while his people are being got on the stage:
compare this passage with, for instance, Hagen's call in _The Dusk of
the Gods_. The latter is rich and full of picturesque music: it means
something and is, in fact, an effective piece in a concert-room. Or
take the watchman with his cow-horn in the _Mastersingers_; the music
is redolent of the old world; it impresses the imagination more than
an entry in Pepys--"the watchman calling two of the morning and a
thick snow falling." In the _Lohengrin_ days his method still requires
these _longueurs_, these dry patches: later his mastery over his
material enabled him to deal his theatrical and his musical stroke at
the same time. As knights and retainers flock in, a long and elaborate
chorus is sung--a musical, not a dramatic, chorus, almost as much in
the _Rienzi_ manner as in the manner of _Tannhaeuser_. It is curious to
observe how cautious and tentative Wagner was at this stage of his
growth. He was still groping, seeing only very dimly the destination
he would reach by the way he was taking. _Lohengrin_, had he followed
the plan he would certainly have adopted ten years later, would have
been terser, more closely dramatic, and would have made only a short
opera; there would have been fewer set numbers and a much smaller
quantity of the magnificent music. The whole idea, I have already
said, is not a dramatic one, but a musical one; and the advance on the
_Dutchman_ lies in the skill with which the musical opportunities seem
to grow out of the drama and are not pressed into it. In this respect
it is hardly an advance on _Tannhaeuser_; indeed three of the great
ensembles have not an adequate dramatic motive. That at the end of the
first act, splendid music though it is, is a quite operatic finale, so
conv