No changes are made in this theme. It occurs again and again, without
wearying the ear; it keeps the atmosphere charged with mystery and
suggestions of that far-away land where it is always dawn. It is the
calm, refreshing, gently-rippling river; the cool, placid water sliding
through many countries, with the swan as symbol and token of all that is
strange and beautiful where it has its source. It is less a theme
capable of purely musical development to form pattern after pattern of
entrancing beauty, like the Grail or Montsalvat theme, than the
equivalent in music of tender colour. It never sings out from the
orchestra without carrying the imagination for a moment from the scene
before one's eyes to the _fernem Land_. It blends the actual with the
dream, and imbues all the drama with a delicious romantic mysticism. I
dwell on it because without this prevailing colour and atmosphere the
story of _Lohengrin_ is a plain prosaic fairy-tale to amuse children.
Further, in the most important musical theme in the opera it is there
also--the Montsalvat theme:

[Illustration: Some bars of music]

The characteristic chords in the second bar cannot escape notice. This
motive, one of the sweetest Wagner invented, is long, and less of the
nature of a _leit-motif_--as I have explained the _leit-motif_--than a
passage like the Venus music in _Tannhäuser_. Just as Senta's ballad of
the Flying Dutchman is the germ of that opera, so this is the germ of
_Lohengrin_. It is worked out at great length when Lohengrin's narrative
arrives, and he declares his name, parentage, and country. The Swan or
River theme can scarcely be called a _leit-motif_ in the elementary
meaning of the phrase. For a fair example of this we must go to the
passage used by Lohengrin when he warns Elsa that she must ask no