splitting up these groups still further." Latham gives as an example, the sonority of the opening of the opera Lohengrin, where "the ethereal quality of the music" is due to the violins being "divided up into four, five, or even eight parts instead of the customary two." "The A major chord with which the Lohengrin Prelude begins, in the high register, using harmonics and held for a long time, lets us take in all its detail. It is undoubtedly an A major chord, but it is also high strings, harmonics, long notes – which gives it all its expressivity, but an expressivity in which the acoustic features play a central role, as we have still heard neither melody nor harmonic progression." As he matured as a composer, particularly through his experience of composing The Ring Wagner made "increasing use of the contrast between pure and mixed colours, bringing to a fine point the art of transition from one field of sonority to another." For example, in the evocative "Fire Music" that concludes Die Walküre, "the multiple arpeggiations of the wind chords and the contrary motion in the strings create an oscillation of tone-colours almost literally matching the visual flickering of the flames."Robert Craft found Wagner's final opera Parsifal to be a work where "Wagner’s powers are at their pinnacle… The orchestral blends and separations are without precedent." Craft cites the intricate orchestration of the single line of melody that opens the opera: "Parsifal makes entirely new uses of orchestral colour… Without the help of the score, even a very sensitive ear cannot distinguish the instruments playing the unison beginning of the Prelude. The violins are halved, then doubled by the cellos, a clarinet, and a bassoon, as well as, for the peak of the phrase, an alto oboe [cor anglais]. The full novelty of this colour change with the oboe, both as intensity and as timbre, can be appreciated only after the theme is repeated in harmony and in one of the most gorgeous orchestrations of even Wagner’s Technicolor imagination." Later, during the opening scene of the first act of Parsifal, Wagner offsets the bold brass with gentler strings, showing that the same musical material feels very different when passed between contrasting families of instruments: On the other hand, the prelude to the opera Tristan and Isolde exemplifies the variety that Wagner could extract through combining instruments from different orchestral