The music is like the stagecraft:  now and then simply dramatic, now and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes threadbare and vulgar.  And by this I do not mean that the old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions necessarily good.  Good and bad may be found in the new and the old Wagner alike.  That sailor’s dance is to me as odious as anything in Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more tolerable.  On the other hand, not even in “The Valkyrie” did Wagner write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act.  The shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at sea,—­these are suggested with wonderful vividness.  At times Wagner gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some passages are as original as they are magnificent.  The finest bars in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her “mission,” and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration.  Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous self-effacement.  It is perhaps a young man’s mood; certainly it is identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid expression.

“LOHENGRIN”

“Lohengrin” has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling the real “Lohengrin” for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner’s operas.  We had come to regard it as a pretty opera—­an opera full of an individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can come forth strength.  Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner’s music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to the touch-and-go conductors.  But there is so much of sweetness and delicacy in “Lohengrin” that the whole opera, including the sweet and delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly handling—­gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who heard it under Mr. Seidl’s direction must have felt that here, at last, was the true “Lohengrin,” the “Lohengrin” of Wagner’s imagination.  It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing out with all their