Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle
each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer
night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark
breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the
mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of
the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change is completed
in the next act, where we have the scene laid before Tristan's
deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea in the
distance (it should shine like burnished steel); and here Tristan lies
dying of the wound he received from Melot in the previous scene, while
a melody from the shepherd's pipe, the saddest melody ever heard,
floats melancholy and wearily through the hot, close, breathless air.
Kurvenal, his servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had
cured him before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with
joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters.
This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after some
other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the
death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of
"Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning
to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is
wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair,
has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera--failed to see that
two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find
Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining
themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of
bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight,
and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this
world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain
would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is
forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing--not honour,
shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of
all, life--is to be considered in comparison with their love; their
love is the love that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is
as much their enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than
the sword of Melot.

Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit that should go to
the music; and at least there is not a dramatic situation whi