VI

Lohengrin cannot be called Wagner’s greatest achievement, but it is a “fine,” if not a “first careless rapture” whose freshness he never quite recaptured.  Yet, in a way, it is the most mannered of his works.  I know of no opera where one phrase, one harmony or set of harmonies, or one violin figure is made to serve so many and such widely different purposes; and not since the early seventeen hundreds had the perfect cadence been so hard worked.  Only two numbers are in other than four-four time—­the prayer and the wedding song.  The melodies on page upon page consist of regular four-bar lengths, commonly terminating in a full close.  We can admit all this—­indeed, we must admit it all—­and then we are only bound the more to admire the vast amount of variety Wagner got in spite of all the obstacles self-placed in his way.  His fondness for the diminished seventh, constantly exploited throughout, was perhaps a fondness for his own adopted child—­for no one had ever properly employed it before:  to him and to every one at the time his use of it was new.  Many points in his prolonged passages which are simply arpeggios of the chord of the diminished seventh must have seemed novel in the eighteen-forties, though we hardly notice them now.  The four-bar lengths send the music along with a swing very different from the jerkiness of contemporary opera music.  The cadence is used only to attain, so to speak, a fresh jumping-off place:  there is no moment of real rest:  simultaneously with the attainment of a point of rest the new impulse is felt, and away the thing flies again.  But what compensates for all these defects—­and defects they are—­is the perpetual presence of the Montsalvat music:  we are never long without hearing some of it.  The Montsalvat music is the source of the charm and fascination of the opera, and its purity and freshness seem likely for ever to keep the opera sweet.

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CHAPTER X

EXILE

I

The journey to Zurich was a risky one.  Wagner, the composer of what is now the most popular of all operas, Lohengrin, might indeed pass unnoticed, for the work had not been heard; but the composer of the Dutchman and of Rienzi, and perhaps of Tannhaeuser, and above all the organizer and conductor of the largest musical festival ever held in Dresden, could not easily slip past unobserved.  As a matter of fact, few or none of the officials seemed very anxious to catch him; still, thousands of innocent persons were being taken by the Prussians, “tried,” and sent to long terms of penal servitude for having done nothing—­it being argued, apparently, that any one against whom nothing could be proved must of necessity be guilty of some crime.  Wagner’s first idea was simply to keep out of the way until things had quieted down.