Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/213

 grin, just as, speaking generally, he has written no fresher, more youthful or more sweetly radiant music than that of Lohengrin. What matters the presence of a few out of date musical forms when the thrill of genius animates them, and the ardour of the artist's happiest poetic period colours them?

As to the duet in the second act of the Valkyrs, while not denying its opulence, its extraordinary musical bloom, I confess that I am not so strongly affected by it. Its prelude is delicious poetry, and all music lovers remember that music of wood and harps unfolding its masterly harmonies while the door of the hut where the lovers are secretly to exchange their vows opens to the breath of the April night. Siegmund's song "Spring has routed Winter" is not unworthy of this opening. Some one has reproached it for being Mendelssohnian. Is the implication that Mendelssohn was a minor musician? What follows, though the movement is so spirited, seems to me richer in ravishing forms and sonorities than in accents that reach the heart. I am not speaking of the superb peroration of Siegmund as he wrenches the sword from the ash trunk, but of those long confidences about the past that take place between the young couple, in which there is a procession (and there are to be so many in the course of the work) of all the mythologies and all the leit-motiv of the Tetralogy. I prefer the pathetically caressing inflexions of the song with which the same Siegmund, in the second act, lulls the sleep of his unhappy mistress who has been entrapped with him in the depths of the woods.

The duet in the second act of Tristan has proportions that may be called formidable! I pass hastily over the first part, in which I have never been able to take