A prohibition which rests upon all who are served by a Knight of the Grail having been violated, he must depart from thence; but before going he gives his sword, horn, and ring to Elsa, and tells her that had he been permitted to live but one year at her side, her brother would have returned in conduct of the Grail.  The swan appears to convey him back to his resplendent home.  Ortrud recognizes the chain around its neck and gloats over her triumph; but Lohengrin hears her shout.  He sinks on his knees in silent prayer.  As he rises, a white dove floats downward toward the boat.  Lohengrin detaches the chain from the neck of the swan.  The bird disappears, and in its place stands Gottfried, released from the spell put upon him by the sorceress.  The dove draws the boat with its celestial passenger away, and Elsa sinks lifeless into the arms of her brother.

In this story of Lohengrin there is an admixture of several elements which once had no association.  It is the story of an adventure of a Knight of the Holy Grail; also a story involving the old principle of taboo; and one of many stories of the transformation of a human being into a swan, or a swan into a human being.  This swan myth is one of the most widely spread of all transformation tales; it may even be found in the folk-stories of the American Indians.  To discuss this feature would carry one too far afield, and I have a different purpose in view.

* * *

The two Figaro operas, the discussion of which opened this book, were composed by different men, and a generation of time separated their production.  The opera which deals with the second chapter of the adventures of Seville’s factotum was composed first, and is the greater work of the two; yet we have seen how pleasantly they can be associated with each other, and, no doubt, many who admire them have felt with me the wish that some musician with sufficient skill and the needful reverence would try the experiment of remodelling the two and knitting their bonds closer by giving identity of voice to the personages who figure in both.  The Wagnerian list presents something like a parallel, and it would be a pleasant thing if two of the modern poet-composer’s dramas which have community of subject could be brought into similar association, so that one might be performed as a sequel to the other.  The operas are “Lohengrin” and “Parsifal.”  A generation also lies between them, and they ought to bear a relationship to each other something like that existing between “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.”  Indeed, the bond ought to be closer, for one man wrote books and music as well of the Grail dramas, whereas different librettists and different composers created the Figaro comedies.  But it will never be possible to bring Wagner’s most popular opera and his “stage-consecrating play” into logical union, notwithstanding that both deal with the legend of the Holy Grail and that the hero of one proclaims himself to be the son of