earth to which the coming of the White Christ had banished all the gods of the older world, there to become the malevolent, malignant divinities of the new world, and believed in as such by the first adherents of the new religion.  Frederick was a Christian, mediaeval style, and he implicitly believes that Ortrud can call up wicked spirits, and by their aid weave enchantments when the God of the East is not looking.  The same may be said of the king, and indeed all the characters in Lohengrin:  again I say the opera is a fairy drama in which these things must be assumed and accepted.  That wondrous passage must have sounded doubly wonderful in the ears of two generations back; blent with that second sinister Ortrud theme, it accomplishes as much in a dozen or so bars as Weber could accomplish in as many pages.  That Ortrud theme seems to wind round Frederick’s soul until at last he is wholly in his wife’s grip; and the scene ends with an invocation to “ye Powers that rule our earthly lot”—­the malignant gods of the underworld.  We, knowing the kind of music Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the libretto of Lohengrin, can easily understand Schumann’s dismay when this scene was read to him:  nothing of the sort had been composed before.

Suddenly Elsa appears on the balcony, and the character of the music changes at once:  all now is sweetness and light.  Her serenade (to herself) is a simple and very lovely thing, making full half of its effect through its contrast with the harshness, agitation and gloom of all that has gone before.  There is a master-touch when Ortrud calls softly, “Elsa”:  by one stroke, an abrupt strange chord, the whole atmosphere is for the moment altered:  the dreariness of the call is unforgetable.  There are many hints of Ortrud’s purpose given out more and more plainly till the climax is reached in her invocation to Wotan, chief of the malignant divinities. (It is strange to think that when he wrote this Wagner must already have had the other and more celebrated Wotan in his thoughts.) Much of Elsa’s melody is of a very Weberesque quality—­and is none the worse for it:  far better that than the touches of Bellini, Marschner and Spontini that abound in the earlier operas.  One or two other points may be noted.  At the words “Rest thee with me” we get a tune which might have grown out of one previously heard and one in the bedroom scene—­not only does the tune resemble the others closely, but the rhythm of the phrases Elsa addresses to Ortrud is the same as that of the phrases with which Lohengrin seems to caress Elsa.  There is, of course, no “significance” in the sense in which the word is used by the Wagnerians.  The short duet following contains a divine melody, but Ortrud’s “aside” is a fairly lengthy one—­forty bars—­and is a bit of conventionalism which Wagner soon discarded.  The melody is played again as Elsa leads her enemy into the house; Frederick returns to curse Ortrud and Lohengrin in the same breath; all the sweetness goes out of the music as Elsa disappears from view, and the scene closes as it opened, in gloom.