A solemn bridal march opens the next act, while the maids of honour conduct Elsa and Lohengrin to the bridal chamber.  There, after a love scene of enchanting beauty, her doubts break forth once more.  ’How is she to know,’ she cries, ’that the swan will not come some day as mysteriously as before and take her beloved from her arms?’ In vain Lohengrin tries to soothe her; she will not be appeased, and in frenzied excitement puts to him the fatal question, ‘Who art thou?’ At that moment the door is burst open, and Telramund rushes in followed by four knights with swords drawn.  Lohengrin lifts his sacred sword, and the false knight falls dead at his feet.  The last scene takes us back to the banks of the Scheldt.  Before the assembled army Lohengrin answers Elsa’s question.  He is the son of Parsifal, the lord of Monsalvat, the keeper of the Holy Grail.  His mission is to succour the distressed, but his mystic power vanishes if the secret of its origin be known.  Even as he speaks the swan appears once more, drawing the boat which is to bear him away.  Lohengrin bids a last farewell to the weeping Elsa, and turns once more to the river.  Now is the moment of Ortrud’s triumph.  She rushes forward and proclaims that the swan is none other than Godfrey, Elsa’s brother, imprisoned in this shape by her magic arts.  But Lohengrin’s power is not exhausted; he kneels upon the river bank, and in answer to his prayer the white dove of the Grail wheels down from the sky, releases the swan, and, while Elsa clasps her restored brother to her breast, bears Lohengrin swiftly away over the waters of the Scheldt.

The interest of ‘Lohengrin’ lies rather in the subtle treatment of the characters than in the intrinsic beauty of the story itself.  Lohengrin’s love for Elsa, and his apparent intention of settling in Brabant for life, seem scarcely consistent with his duties as knight of the Grail, and, save for their mutual love, neither hero nor heroine have much claim upon our sympathies.  But the grouping of the characters is admirable; the truculent witch Ortrud is a fine foil to the ingenuous Elsa, and Lohengrin’s spotless knighthood is cast into brilliant relief by the dastardly treachery of Telramund.  The story of ‘Lohengrin’ lacks the deep human interest of ‘Tannhaeuser,’ and the music never reaches the heights to which the earlier work sometimes soars.  But in both respects ‘Lohengrin’ has the merit of homogeneity; the libretto is laid out by a master hand, and the music, though occasionally monotonous in rhythm, has none of those strange relapses into conventionality which mar the beauty of ‘Tannhaeuser.’  Musically ‘Lohengrin’ marks the culminating point of Wagner’s earlier manner.  All the links with the Italian school are broken save one, the concerted finale.  Here alone he adheres to the old tradition of cavatina and cabaletta—­the slow movement followed by the quick.  The aria in set form has completely disappeared, while the orchestra, though still often used merely as an accompaniment, is never degraded, as occasionally happens in ‘Tannhaeuser,’ to the rank of a ’big guitar.’