In the music, as in the drama, the second act presents a total contrast to the first.  The music of the first is throughout full of sunlight.  At times it may be strident, violent, rather tumultuous; but sweetness is the prevailing note, and as soon as Elsa comes on we have the sheer loveliness of first her answers to the king, and then of her vision; then comes Lohengrin, bringing with him the breath of the land of eternal dawn, and of the shining river down which he was drawn by the swan; then after the (rather theatrical) prayer, a few moments of noise while the fighting is being arranged and carried out; then, so to speak, the glorious midday sunshine of the finale.  The second act opens with two sinister phrases heard in the darkness (e and f)—­Ortrud is planning vengeance, and the theme of Lohengrin’s warning and threat to Elsa is presently heard; that warning gives her the hint as to the way of achieving vengeance.  Ortrud and Telramund, outcast, crouch there in the night; Ortrud deeply scheming, Frederick, poor dupe, madly fuming, while the lights blaze at the palace windows, and the trumpets sound out as the feast proceeds within.  He rages, and a theme (f) quoted is abruptly transformed into (g) as he bitterly casts upon Ortrud the blame for their downfall.  The vocal parts are neither recitative nor true song; the orchestral tide is developed in much the same symphonic style as in Tannhaeuser.  We are still no nearer to the perfect blending of the orchestral stream and the vocal parts that we get in Tristan and in the Mastersingers.  The style is not homogeneous:  the stream is broken by theatrical exclamations and snatches of recitative that not only break the flow, but differ in character from the rest.  But the elasticity of motion is a great advance on Tannhaeuser:  Wagner was coming to his own, and much of Tannhaeuser strikes one as cumbrous and heavy in comparison.  That sinister atmosphere of mystery is never lost; the gloom and the wretched crouching figures, the fierce anger and Ortrud’s alternate cajoling and threatening may be said, without exaggeration, to sound from the orchestra with as powerful an effect on the imagination as the sights and sounds on the stage.  Most magnificent is the descending chromatic passage that accompanies Ortrud as she casts her spell again over Frederick.  It resembles closely an Erda theme of the Ring—­as is quite natural, for one chromatic scale cannot but resemble another.  The significance of the resemblance is that the strange harmonies are also much alike, and the central idea is the same in the two cases:  the idea of old Mother Earth, her everlasting stillness in strange places, her never-ceasing internal workings, her mysterious power.  In the Ring there is nothing baneful in the conception:  it is Nature at work in her sleep amongst the silent hills:  mysterious, indeed, but doing no evil.  Here it is the earth as conceived by the mediaeval mind, the