Mendelssohn's _Midsummer Night's
Dream_ overture, that here we had not fairies but gnats, one might
retort that in his own opera we have not fairies but baby elephants at
play. But throughout there is a quality almost or quite new in music,
a feeling for light, a strange, uncanny light. It is worth noticing
this, because it is just this sense of all-pervading light which marks
off _Lohengrin_ from all preceding operas. The hint came, it goes
without saying, from Weber; but there is a vast difference between the
unearthly light of Weber and the fresh sweetness of _Lohengrin_, and
here, in his first boyish exploit, we find Wagner trying to utilise in
his own way Weber's hint.

For a boy of twenty the opera is wonderfully well planned. Whether,
had it been written by Marschner, we should take the trouble to look
at it twice is a question I contentedly leave others to solve. But, as
it is by Wagner, we do take the trouble to look at it many times, and
the main thing we learn is that from the beginning the composer could
write his best music for the theatre, while for the concert-room he
could only grind out sluggish counterpoint. In addition we may see
that it is a work of much nobler artistic aim than _Rienzi_.
Preposterous as is the idea of a woman sacrificing herself to "save"
a man, it is an idea, and it stirred the depths of young Wagner's
emotional nature. In _Rienzi_, as we shall see in a later chapter,
there is no idea of any sort; that opera did not spring from his
heart, nor, properly speaking, from his head, but simply and wholly
from a hungry desire for fame and fortune.

The clumsiness of the music is due to several causes. He modelled it,
he says, upon three composers, Beethoven, Spontini and Marschner--the
second and third being by far the more potent influences. Now,
gracefulness is not a characteristic of either of them. Then we must
consider that Wagner was not yet one-tenth fully grown, and it is the
hobbledehoy who is so heavy on his feet, not the athlete with all his
muscles completely trained: Wagner needed years of training before he
gained the sure, light touch of _Lohengrin_ and the _Mastersingers_.
His very deadly earnestness over the "lesson" of his opera and his
desire to express his feeling accurately and logically led to his
overweighting small melodies with ponderous harmonies. The
orchestration of the day was heavy. The art of Mozart had been
forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously--as was inev