The leitmotiv (a) is of a serene beauty.  I must cut out of it a little bit (b) which colours the opera and gives it atmosphere from the beginning far more than the complete theme.  It is this, more than anything else, which gives Lohengrin the vividness of reality combined with the vanishing loveliness of a sweet dream.  The idea of the swan, symbolizing the broad, shining river flowing from afar-off mysterious lands to the eternal sea, is given us in this phrase, as delicate and as firm, as unmistakable, as ever painter drew with his brush.  Here we have, not indeed Montsalvat the domain of monks, but the land of ever-enduring dawn—­a land that other poets have dreamed of, a land where hope could be subsisted on.  From beginning to end Lohengrin, the man on the stage, moves in the atmosphere of this strange, dreamy, fresh and silent land:  if he did not, no one would tolerate for a moment his behaviour.  It is the magic charm that reconciles him to us; it is this that makes us feel how he is conditioned, chained, cribbed, cabined and confined.  In obedience to inexorable law he comes down the river, drawn by the swan; in obedience to the same inexorable law he is drawn away, as helplessly as a needle drawn by a magnet.

The prelude opens with a series of chords, ascending, all on A. Handel might have done this:  none of the Viennese composers could, or perhaps I should rather say, would, have done it.  Beethoven got as near to the naked truth as ever composer did in dealing with the emotions of humanity; Mozart, too, worked his miracles; Weber, non-Viennese though he was, gave us weird, fantastic pictures of fairy adventures in the darkness of grim woods, but nothing more.  It was left for Wagner to give us in a few bars a picture, such as no painter could have painted, of the blue heavens on an almost unimaginably fine day.  The blue sky, the thin, clear air, the sunlight, are all given us in the first few bars.  It is far from my wish to intrude my personal history into these pages, but I wish to give a convincing example of an episode of a sort familiar to all those who have experimented with Wagner’s music.  A relative of mine, who had spent many of his earlier years in travelling the southern Atlantic and the Pacific in sailing vessels, heard me play on the piano, as an illustration of some argument I was foolish enough to advance, these opening bars of the Lohengrin prelude.  He immediately said, “That takes me back into the Trades”—­the sweet days of perfect peace in southern climes, where the sky was blue for day after day and week after week, where the wind sang cheerfully without change for weeks on end, where a delicious sun made all men (no matter what the feeling was on those foul old ships) feel good-natured and good-hearted.  That is to say, my relative at once felt the magical truthfulness of Wagner’s touch:  the sweet, clear air, the sunlight; and that is the atmosphere Wagner wanted to establish at the beginning of this most magical