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Updated: July 13, 2025
That wondrous passage must have sounded doubly wonderful in the ears of two generations back; blent with that second sinister Ortrud theme, it accomplishes as much in a dozen or so bars as Weber could accomplish in as many pages.
Fraulein Stoger, daughter of the manager there, sang Ortrud, and wrote me a letter full of enthusiasm about the enthusiasm of the public and the musicians. She was engaged at Weymar until last season. Farewell, and be patient, dearest friend, and write soon to Your March 25th, 1856. Your letter has grieved me very much.
I shall never forget my first sight of Rosetta Rosa as, robed with the modesty which the character of Elsa demands, she appeared on the stage to answer the accusation of Ortrud. For some moments she hesitated in the background, and then timidly, yet with what grandeur of mien, advanced towards the king.
"If in the encounter you had struck off one of his fingers," Ortrud continues, "nay, but one joint of a finger, that hero would have been in your power!"
Her intelligent remarks on the character of Ortrud attracted me especially, as well as the comparison she makes between the efforts of the previous and the actual representative of that part. To which side of the question I incline your valued friend will recognize at once when I explain to her my view of the character by simply saying that Ortrud is a woman who does not know love.
To another most lovely theme he tries again to soothe her: she will not listen, and the Ortrud theme begins to writhe in the orchestra, and we know that Elsa's soul is fast bound in the spell of suspicion which Ortrud put upon her.
What a Fricka, Brangaene, Ortrud, Sieglinde, Erda, this clever girl might become! She was musical, she was dramatic in temperament he let his imagination run away with him. She only sang an Oberbayerische yodel, and, while her voice was not very high, she contrived a falsetto that made her English listener shiver.
With dark artfulness she rouses in Elsa more than proportionate compassion for her plight, by casting upon the tender-conscienced creature the whole blame for it. In no scene does the youthfulness of Telramund's ward appear more pathetically than in this. "In the solitary forest, where I lived quiet and at peace, what had I done to you," Ortrud upbraids, "what had I done to you?
The scene of the interruption of the procession first by Ortrud and then by Frederick has always seemed to me superfluous as well as stagey. The whole thing is pure melodrama of the kind that used to be popular until a very few years ago; and the music is as melodramatic as the two incidents. The scene is far too long, and is thus rendered doubly nonsensical.
A chord is heard in "Lohengrin" to sustain Elsa's voice, and it performs its purpose; a motive is heard to attract attention to a certain part of the story, and it fills its purpose, when Ortrud shrieks out the motive of the secret, and in its simplest form, at the church door, the method may be criticised as crude, but the crudest melodrama is better than this desert wandering.
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