is fast bound in the spell of suspicion which Ortrud put upon her.  She gets nearer and nearer to the fatal question, and suddenly in the impotent rage of a fretful woman who cannot get her way—­a woman driven mad by baseless jealousy—­in fancy she sees the swan coming to lead Lohengrin away from her; with mournful and dreary effect a fragment of the swan theme sounds from the orchestra.  This simple touch is weird to a degree never dreamed of by all the purveyors of operatic horrors; it is unearthly, uncanny, in its wild beauty.  The climax is immensely powerful, but very simple, and, above all, sheer art of the theatre.  There is a crash as Frederick rushes in to be instantly killed; a bass passage tears down the scale to the depths; and the horns sustain two pianissimo chords, two notes in each; then silence, broken only by soft drum-beats to make the silence felt.  Elsa has fainted, and as she revives we hear a bit of the duet—­Lohengrin’s tenderness as he tends her, and a fleeting dream of Elsa’s, perhaps, seem to blend in it.  All is finished.

To compare this duet with that in Tristan would be profitless but for one reason.  Wagner had not yet reached that perfect mastery of his art which enabled him, so to speak, to fuse the dramatic and the musical inspiration.  We saw how in the Dutchman the music rose to its full height and splendour when the drama was sincere and true; in Tristan drama and music are inseparable.  In Lohengrin, where the inspiration is, if not wholly, at any rate mainly, musical, the drama seems at times to be somewhat of a hindrance.  I have mentioned the fine dramatic or stage touches; but the finest things occur when the pair, singly or together, are singing music that would be as effective on a concert platform as on the stage.  The art, that is, is far away from the art of the Tristan duet.  At many points the situation is saved by Wagner’s stage dexterity:  only when the music is almost as completely self-moulded as in a symphony, or any other form of “absolute” music, is it at its best.  For practical purposes with Wagner the songs are “absolute” music:  the words were his own, and he could alter them to suit the musical exigency.

V

The opening of the next scene is spectacular, and the music is not striking—­for Wagner, though Marschner or Spontini might have owned it with pride.  The entry of the nobles bringing Frederick’s corpse, the entry also of Elsa, “like Niobe, all tears,” are theatrically powerful.  Elsa’s entry is a particularly beautiful example of what I have previously called Wagner’s dramatict use of the leitmotiv.  There are twenty bars of accompaniment, and in that space we have three motives, so arranged that those who knew their significance, but had never seen the earlier portions of the opera, might easily read the whole of Elsa’s sad history.  As she is led in, stricken down and miserable, the