[[audio/mpeg]] [[XML]]
THE ORDEAL.
This makes its appearance in Act I. after the nobles shout "Zum Gottesgericht!" ("a judgment of God!"), and immediately before the King addresses Telramund asking him if he will do battle. In the major mode it is sounded by the trumpets on the stage as the summons to Elsa's champion to appear, and its fundamental rhythm becomes that of the music to which the six nobles pace off the measurement of the ground. In the fight itself this motive is worked out orchestrally as an accompaniment to the action. It belongs strictly to the music of the scene, yet it is treated thematically and developed as far as needed.
These are all the leading motives of "Lohengrin." The rest of the music is freely composed, but the attentive hearer will note that while ethereal string harmonies intone the Grail motive, Lohengrin's knighthood is announced by the brass, and to the wood wind choir is allotted Elsa's music. For the rest the lover of this opera must seek his intellectual enjoyment in the general fidelity of the score to the thought of the text, to the increasing freedom from the shackles of formularies, and to the flexible, changeful, constantly significant harmonic plan.
The enormous variety of the rhythmic effects is obtained without frequent changes of time. The first act, for example, is all in common time up to the beginning of the King's prayer, which is in three-fourths measure. At the beginning of the combat the common time returns and is continued till the end of the act. The entire second act is in common time. In the third act two-fourths time is used for the "Bridal Chorus" and then the composer returns to common time and retains it to the end. These facts are alone sufficient to show the wide gulf which separates the Wagner score from that of the old-fashioned Italian opera, wherein the elementary dance rhythms are all used with as much variety as possible. Wagner attains an infinitely greater variety of styles and expression with only two interruptions of his original time signature.
Yet the one thing which Wagner felt most keenly in the composition of this opera was his subserviency to rhythm—not musical, but poetical. He admits that he had not yet freed himself from old melodic ideas and that the dominance of the cadence was still felt in his work, but his real difficulty was the inflexibility of verse written in modern metre, which makes such rigorous demands for imitation in the form of the musical setting. He was in later works to find the solution of that problem and enter the kingdom of perfect freedom from textual rule. The music of "Lohengrin," then, must be regarded as standing midway between the style of "Der Fliegende Holländer" and that of "Die Meistersinger." Its extraordinary popularity is due to the external and sensuous charms of its melody, which make their appeal to the aural palate of those incapable of comprehending a dramatic scheme such as Wagner's. This outward attractiveness of the music Wagner himself would have been the first to blame, and he always felt that his own beautiful conception of the character of Lohengrin was not revealed to the public.