and with youthful tenderness, which approaches ecstasy as he draws a picture of the ideal life of humanity made free.  Then he paints War and Death, and the disorder and darkness that they spread over the world.  He addresses himself directly to the Prince; he shows him his duty, and how the love of his people would be his recompense; he threatens him with the hate of the unhappy who are driven to despair; and, finally, he urges the nobles to rebuild the towns, to liberate their prisoners, and to come to the aid of their subjects.  His song is ended amid the profound emotion of his audience.  Duke Robert, feeling the danger of these outspoken words, orders his men to seize the singer; but the vassals side with Guntram.  At this juncture news is brought that the peasants have renewed the attack.  Robert calls his men to arms, but Guntram, who feels that he will be supported by those around him, orders Robert’s arrest.  The Duke draws his sword, but Guntram kills him.  Then a sudden change comes over Guntram’s spirit, which is explained in the third act.  In the scene that follows he speaks no word, his sword falls from his hand, and he lets his enemies again assume their authority over the crowd; he allows himself to be bound and taken to prison, while the band of nobles noisily disperses to fight against the rebels.  But Freihild is full of an unaffected and almost savage joy at her deliverance by Guntram’s sword.  Love for Guntram fills her heart, and her one desire is to save him.

The third act takes place in the prison of the chateau; and it is a surprising, uncertain, and very curious act.  It is not a logical result of the action that has preceded it.  One feels a sudden commotion in the poet’s ideas, a crisis of feeling which disturbed him even as he wrote, and a difficulty which he did not succeed in solving.  The new light towards which he was beginning to move appears very clearly.  Strauss was too advanced in the composition of his work to escape the neo-Christian renouncement which had to finish the drama; he could only have avoided that by completely remodelling his characters.  So Guntram rejects Freihild’s love.  He sees he has fallen, even as the others, under the curse of sin.  He had preached charity to others when he himself was full of egoism; he had killed Robert rather to satisfy his instinctive and animal jealousy than to deliver the people from a tyrant.  So he renounces his desires, and expiates the sin of being alive by retirement from the world.  But the interest of the act does not lie in this anticipated denouement, which since Parsifal has become rather common; it lies in another scene, which has evidently been inserted at the last moment, and which is uncomfortably out of tune with the action, though in a singularly grand way.  This scene gives us a dialogue between Guntram and his former companion, Friedhold.[172]

[Footnote 172:  Some people have tried to see Alexander Ritter’s thoughts in Friedhold, as they have seen Strauss’s thoughts in Guntram.]