The opening notes of ‘Lohengrin’ indeed prove incontestably the increased power and facility with which Wagner had learnt to wield his orchestra since the days of ‘Tannhaeuser.’  The prelude to ’Lohengrin’—­a mighty web of sound woven of one single theme—­is, besides being a miracle of contrapuntal ingenuity, one of the most poetical of Wagner’s many exquisite conceptions.  In it he depicts the bringing to earth by the hands of angels of the Holy Grail, the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the last drops of Christ’s blood upon the cross.  With the opening chords we seem to see the clear blue expanse of heaven spread before us in spotless radiance.  As the Grail motive sounds for the first time pianissimo in the topmost register of the violins, a tiny white cloud, scarcely perceptible at first, but increasing every moment, forms in the zenith.  Ever descending as the music gradually increases in volume, the cloud resolves itself into a choir of angels clad in white, the bearers of the sacred cup.  Nearer and still nearer they come, until, as the Grail motive reaches a passionate fortissimo, they touch the earth, and deliver the Holy Grail to the band of faithful men who are consecrated to be its earthly champions.  Their mission accomplished the angels swiftly return.  As they soar up, the music grows fainter.  Soon they appear once more only as a snowy cloud on the bosom of the blue.  The Grail motive fades away into faint chords, and the heaven is left once more in cloudless radiance.

A noticeable point in the score of ‘Lohengrin’ is the further development of the beautiful idea which appears in ‘Tannhaeuser,’ of associating a certain instrument or group of instruments with one particular character.  The idea itself, it may be noticed in passing, dates from the time of Bach, who used the strings of the orchestra to accompany the words of Christ in the Matthew Passion, much as the old Italian painters surrounded his head with a halo.  In ‘Lohengrin’ Wagner used this beautiful idea more systematically than in ‘Tannhaeuser’; Lohengrin’s utterances are almost always accompanied by the strings of the orchestra, while the wood-wind is specially devoted to Elsa.  This plan emphasises very happily the contrast, which is the root of the whole drama, between spiritual and earthly love, typified in the persons of Lohengrin and Elsa, which the poem symbolises in allegorical fashion.

CHAPTER X

WAGNER’S LATER WORKS

The attempt to divide the life and work of a composer into fixed periods is generally an elusive and unsatisfactory experiment, but to this rule the case of Wagner is an exception.  His musical career falls naturally into two distinct divisions, and the works of these two periods differ so materially in scope and execution that the veriest tyro in musical matters cannot fail to grasp their divergencies.  In the years which