The scene of the interruption of the procession first by Ortrud and then by Frederick has always seemed to me superfluous as well as stagey.  The whole thing is pure melodrama of the kind that used to be popular until a very few years ago; and the music is as melodramatic as the two incidents.  The scene is far too long, and is thus rendered doubly nonsensical.  Only a few minutes before, the Herald has announced the King’s decree:  any one harbouring either of the offenders “will share his [it ought to be their] doom with life and limb.”  Yet the offenders themselves are allowed to break up an orderly procession and to hurl angry diatribes at the very people they have been banned for seeking to injure.  For many minutes Ortrud, encouraged by a furious orchestra, pours forth a stream of insult directed at Lohengrin and Elsa:  she is not immediately seized and carried off to be tortured:  the bystanders utter a few exclamations, and leave Elsa to reply for herself.  When the king and Lohengrin enter they content themselves with gentle remonstrances:  even Frederick draws from them only dignified if somewhat scornful protests.  There has been some other rather futile business:  a few conspirators planning to support Frederick in attacking not only Lohengrin, but the king.  The flower of a loyal army look on at all this and go on their way, leaving Frederick free to make an attempt on Lohengrin’s life in the third Act.  Again I emphasise a point because it reveals exactly how far Wagner’s art had got at this period.  Well might he feel it necessary, before proceeding to other masterpieces, to discover where he stood, what was his ideal, and how he might attain it.  For, observe, he wanted to depict in music an imperious, ambitious, unscrupulous and wicked woman with a temper that in the end is her own undoing; he felt the necessity of contrasting her with Elsa, sweet, gentle and lamentably weak—­Elsa, who is strong, or, rather, pertinacious, only once, and at the wrong time; and, third, he felt that his act would terminate rather tamely with a mere wedding-march.  The result is this noisy melodramatic scene, with its melodramatic music.  It could not be otherwise.  Music cannot express anger—­at best it can only suggest.  By anger I mean human anger—­the god’s wrath of a Wotan is a different matter.  Bruennhilda knows Wotan to be angry by the raging storm that marks his path through the heavens, by the lightnings and thunders; and we have all enough of our primitive ancestors in us to feel in some degree as they felt—­indeed, plenty of people to-day see in a storm a manifestation of the wrath of the Almighty.  Human anger has never been put into music.  Why, Ortrud alternates her rantings (mere recitative) with beautiful phrases of the same pattern as those sung by Elsa!  The music for the orchestra is turbulent rather than forcible; it is incoherent in the old-fashioned way:  essentially—­in spite of a free use of discords—­it is as old-fashioned as anything in Don Giovanni.