he astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the
beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the
conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led,
compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a
background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour
for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude,
the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering
would have been a flawless one.

And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the
sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have
never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely the most beautiful,
the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's operas. Some thirty or
forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in
the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming
feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner's creative work;
and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical
world of to-day would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites
and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and
the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one
will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of
Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will
have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself will be regarded by
the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to
the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce
assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then the younger
critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and
ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what
originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter
hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make
life interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the
right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of
what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like,
even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall so low as to
be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws. But even if
it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven,
in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be
necessary to give up a belief in "Lohengrin"; for