In 1845 Tannhaeuser was produced.  When the score was published—­those quaint lithographed scores:  I believe some of them still exist in the British Museum—­Schumann got it, and seemed to like it, since he showed it as a treasure to Hanslick, a musical critic of Vienna.  Mendelssohn also liked a canon in the second act—­Mendelssohn, who ought to have understood and loved the picturesque in it better than anyone.  All fantastic dreams of another Rienzi and a huge popular success had long since melted away:  the creative instinct in Wagner was master of the situation; never again did he plan anything to please the public, save, comical to relate, when he began on the story of Tristan.

In The Flying Dutchman Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhaeuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works—­the Mastersingers.  It is the most delicately beautiful thing he wrote; its freshness is the freshness that seems unlikely to fade with the passage of time.  Curiously, too, while full of the spirit of Weber—­it is the most Weberesque of all his operas—­of Weber who loved darksome woods, haunted ruins and all the machinery of the romantics, it is full of sweet sunlight and cool morning winds:  the atmosphere of Montsalvat, the land where it is always dawn, pervades it.  As a painter in music of landscape, seascape, of storm, rain amongst the leaves, spring mornings, and calm sunny woodland scenes, Wagner has no equal.  There is nothing theatrical on this side of his art:  the footlights and back-cloths disappear, and the very thing itself is before us.

In or about 1847 Lohengrin was finished.  The tale is of the simplest.  Elsa is in distress.  She is the daughter of the late Duke, and her brother, the heir to the title and lands, has been changed into a swan by the enchantments of Ortruda, wife of Frederick, who says that Elsa has murdered him.  Ortruda’s tale is believed and Elsa is charged with the crime before the King, Henry the Fowler.  Frederick brings the charge and claims the possessions and everything as the rightful heir.  Henry asks whether she is willing that some champion should fight on her behalf.  She consents.  The herald calls for the champion; no one appears, and the case is about to be decided against her when a knight is seen in a magic boat on the river drawn by a swan.  He offers to fight for her on one condition:  that she will never ask his name or whence he comes.  She promises, and in a few minutes Frederick is overcome and, with his wife, disgraced, and the act ends with a regular opera finale.  Next, Ortruda comes as a suppliant in the night to Elsa, gains admittance, and poisons her mind with doubts about Lohengrin.