At times Wagner
gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some
passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars
in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her
"mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration.
Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous
self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is
identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid
expression.
"LOHENGRIN"
"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one
fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling
the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl
crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We
had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an
individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came
all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can
come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older
type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or
nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's
music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against
Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too
strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
the touch-and-go conductors.
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