syncopations, in which the piece as a whole is conceived.  The melody in the bass that follows, and the more tender strains of a middle section, are familiar to every one nowadays—­in fact, so familiar that we are likely to overlook the intense originality of the whole thing.  When we remember the course the drama has now to take, the tragic beauty of its close, we can perceive how exactly right Wagner’s feeling was when he left the plan he adopted throughout the Dutchman and Tannhaeuser—­the plan either of summing up or foreshadowing the ensuing scenes, or of making the prelude part of the first scene.  Of course the music at the beginning of Act II is rather in the nature of an introduction than of a distinct prelude; but Act III is not prefaced by so much as that.  Rather, it suggests that since Elsa and Lohengrin entered the church all has been rejoicing, and that we catch only the tail-end of the feast as the party comes on the stage.

The wedding chorus I pass over as rather trivial; and it contains between the middle section and the repetition the eight most trivial bars Wagner put to paper—­I do not except the weakest portions of Rienzi.  The opening of the great love scene—­the most curious love scene in the world—­is pure deliciousness.  Nothing of the passion, flaming hot and terrible, of Tristan is here; only a sense of sheer delight and happiness.  Melody after melody—­of a very Weberesque pattern, of course, but sweet, voluptuous—­is poured forth; and a graver tone comes into the music only when Elsa begins timidly to lead up to the questionings of Lohengrin which are her aim.  She hints at what she wants, and Lohengrin gives her, to a very pretty tune, an answer that can merely be called sublimely fatuous.  Drawing her to the window, he bids her breathe in the odours from the flowers in the moonlit garden beneath.  “But,” he blandly adds, “don’t ask whence their sweet scent comes, or you will its wondrous charm destroy.”  The song is, I say, a pretty one; indeed, it is so pretty that but for the enchantment of each successive phrase no one could stand the monotony of so long a series of four-bar phrases.  Of that fault in Lohengrin I shall have more to say presently.  More dramatic, living, and less mechanical stuff follows at once:  Elsa is not to be put off in that way, and in agitated strains to an agitated but not spasmodic accompaniment she presses on towards disaster.  Lohengrin’s warning sounds out, sinister; Lohengrin pleads, always stupidly, but to music of growing intensity and grip; the measures are no longer cut to a pattern, not incoherent as they are in the squabbles of the second Act; and at last a passage of Wagner at his theatrical best is reached when he solemnly warns her again—­“Greatest of trusts, Elsa, I have shown thee.”  To another most lovely theme he tries again to soothe her:  she will not listen, and the Ortrud theme begins to writhe in the orchestra, and we know that Elsa’s soul