In 1845 _Tannhäuser_ was produced. When the score was published--those quaint lithographed scores: I believe some of them still exist in the British Museum--Schumann got it, and seemed to like it, since he showed it as a treasure to Hanslick, a musical critic of Vienna. Mendelssohn also liked a canon in the second act--Mendelssohn, who ought to have understood and loved the picturesque in it better than anyone. All fantastic dreams of another _Rienzi_ and a huge popular success had long since melted away: the creative instinct in Wagner was master of the situation; never again did he plan anything to please the public, save, comical to relate, when he began on the story of _Tristan_. In _The Flying Dutchman_ Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in _Tannhäuser_ he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in _Lohengrin_, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works--the _Mastersingers_. It is the most delicately beautiful thing he wrote; its freshness is the freshness that seems unlikely to fade with the passage of time. Curiously, too, while full of the spirit of Weber--it is the most Weberesque of all his operas--of Weber who loved darksome woods, haunted ruins and all the machinery of the romantics, it is full of sweet sunlight and cool morning winds: the atmosphere of Montsalvat, the land where it is always dawn, pervades it. As a painter in music of landscape, seascape, of storm, rain amongst the leaves, spring mornings, and calm sunny woodland scenes, Wagner has no equal. There is nothing theatrical on this side of his art: the footlights and back-cloths disappear, and the very thing itself is before us.