ens on an almost unimaginably fine day.
The blue sky, the thin, clear air, the sunlight, are all given us in
the first few bars. It is far from my wish to intrude my personal
history into these pages, but I wish to give a convincing example of
an episode of a sort familiar to all those who have experimented with
Wagner's music. A relative of mine, who had spent many of his earlier
years in travelling the southern Atlantic and the Pacific in sailing
vessels, heard me play on the piano, as an illustration of some
argument I was foolish enough to advance, these opening bars of the
_Lohengrin_ prelude. He immediately said, "That takes me back into the
Trades"--the sweet days of perfect peace in southern climes, where the
sky was blue for day after day and week after week, where the wind
sang cheerfully without change for weeks on end, where a delicious sun
made all men (no matter what the feeling was on those foul old ships)
feel good-natured and good-hearted. That is to say, my relative at
once felt the magical truthfulness of Wagner's touch: the sweet, clear
air, the sunlight; and that is the atmosphere Wagner wanted to
establish at the beginning of this most magical of operas. Out of the
blue sky comes the Montsalvat (not necessarily the Grail) motive; it
descends with ever-gathering fulness, through key after key, until at
last it culminates in a tremendous climax for the brass: then comes a
wondrous cadence, falling slowly, as a mountain stream falls over
slabs of smooth-worn mountain rock, until we get back to the original
atmosphere. The Montsalvat vision has faded away into the blue whence
it came. Wagner afterwards achieved some marvellous things, but none
more marvellous than this.

The curtain rises: there is a rum-tum-tum by the orchestra. We are at
once in the discord of a turbulent armed camp: the fury of Telramund
against those who are not convinced of his evidently prejudiced view
that Elsa holds the lands he wishes to hold, is made to resound in the
orchestra as not the most expert Italian composer could make it
resound by the voices. When Elsa enters to defend herself the music
changes its character utterly; it is the embodiment of the sweetness
of young feminine kindly nature; and it is odd that Wagner, when
writing this music, which he fancied was the most German ever written,
should have gone so far as, in some of its finest parts, to steal bits
of the Austrian hymn, composed, as we may remember, by not