The second act of Richard Wagner's Tannhaeuser opens with Elisabeth's scena; then follow her duet with Tannhaeuser, the march and chorus as the company troop in to hear the contest of minstrels, the various songs, Tannhaeuser's fatal mistake, Elisabeth's intercession for him, the voices of the pilgrims setting out for Rome, and Tannhaeuser's rush to overtake them. No use is made of the leit-motif; only when Tannhaeuser loses his wits and sings in praise of Venus do we get reminiscences of the Venusberg music. In the third act the structure is the same. Number flows into number, it is true, without full-closes—without full-stops, so to speak; but those who have never before heard a note of Wagner can follow as easily as they could a Gluck or Mozart opera. The Pilgrims' Chorus occurs again, and again we have the Venus music, when Tannhaeuser, demented, sees her in the heart of the mountain and hears her calling him.
In 1845 Tannhaeuser was produced. When the score was published — those quaint lithographed scores: I believe some of them still exist in the British Museum — Schumann got it, and seemed to like it, since he showed it as a treasure to Hanslick, the Viennese music critic. Mendelssohn also liked a canon in the second act — Mendelssohn, who ought to have understood and loved the picturesque in it better than anyone. All fantastic dreams of another Rienzi and a huge popular success had long since melted away: the creative instinct in Wagner was master of the situation; never again did he plan anything to please the public, save, comical to relate, when he began on the story of Tristan.
In The Flying Dutchman Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhaeuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works — the Mastersingers. It is the most delicately beautiful thing he wrote; its freshness is the freshness that seems unlikely to fade with the passage of time. Curiously, too, while full of the spirit of Weber — it is the most Weberesque of all his operas—of Weber who loved darksome woods, haunted ruins and all the machinery of the romantics, it is full of sweet sunlight and cool morning winds: the atmosphere of Montsalvat, the land where it is always dawn, pervades it. As a painter in music of landscape, seascape, of storm, rain amongst the leaves, spring mornings, and calm sunny woodland scenes, Wagner has no equal. There is nothing theatrical on this side of his art: the footlights and back-cloths disappear, and the very thing itself is before us.
Richard Wagner's Lohengrin.
