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Page 29
And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the
sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have
never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely the most beautiful,
the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's operas. Some thirty or
forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in
the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming
feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner's creative work;
and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical
world of to-day would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites
and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and
the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one
will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of
Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will
have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself will be regarded by
the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to
the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce
assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then the younger
critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and
ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what
originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter
hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make
life interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the
right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of
what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like,
even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall so low as to
be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws. But even if
it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven,
in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be
necessary to give up a belief in "Lohengrin"; for in that case my fate
is fixed--I shall be among the reactionaries, the admirers of the
thing that cannot be admired, the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed
it is incredible that "Lohengrin" should ever cease to seem
lovely--lovely in idea and in the expression of the idea. The story is
one of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had
been told a hundred times before. The maiden in distress--we know her
perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress--we
know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues her--we know
him nearly as well. But the details in which "Lohengrin" differs from
all other tales of the same order are precisely those that make it the
most enchanting tale of them all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail,
redeemer, yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the
river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land
of perpetual freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion
than the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and
even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his wife to
take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he
tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself.
Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary distressed medi�val maiden,
if only because a woman who is too weak to be worth a snap of the
fingers does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary medi�val is cut out
of pasteboard, and does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps
merely a stage figure; Ortrud is just one degree better than the
average witch of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful,
but so superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife, is human
enough to interest us. And Wagner has managed his story perfectly
throughout, excepting at the end of the second act, where that dreary
business of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal procession is a
mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft of Scribe, and quite
superfluous. But if there is a flaw in the drama, there cannot be said
to be one in the music. The mere fact that, save two numbers, it is
all written in common time counts for absolutely nothing against its
endless variety. Wagner never again hit upon quite so divine and pure
a theme as that of the Grail, from which the prelude is evolved; the
Swan theme at once carries one in imagination up the ever-rippling
river to that wonderful land of everlasting dawn and sacred early
morning stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background
and relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the
ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and the
spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is Elsa's
dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of the Bridal
procession in the second act, the great and tender melody first sung
by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud
allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of the
Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin's farewell. To
whatever page of the score you turn, there is perfect beauty--after
the first act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be
powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you merely as
absolute music without poetic significance, and that seems doubly
entrancing by reason of the strange, remote feeling with which it is
charged, and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing
ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a
fairy-story imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the
music is exactly adapted to it.
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