ch the
music does not immeasurably increase in power. But indeed the two are
inseparable. The music creates the mood and holds the spectator to it
so that the true significance of the dramatic situation cannot fail
to be felt; while the dramatic situation makes the highest, most
extravagant flights of the music quite intelligible, reasonable. It
cannot be said that the music exists for the sake of the drama any
more than the drama exists for the music: the drama lies in the music,
the music is latent in the drama. But to the music the wild atmosphere
of the beginning of the first act is certainly due; and though I have
said that possibly "Tristan" might bear playing without the music, it
must be admitted that it is hard to think of the fifth scene without
that tremendous entrance passage--that passage so tremendous that even
Jean de Reszke dare hardly face it. To the music also the passion and
fervent heat of the second act are due, and the thunderous atmosphere,
the sense of impending fate, in the last, and the miraculous sweetness
and intensity of Tristan's death-music, and the sublime pathos of
Isolda's lament. Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic chords in
the scene following the death of the Commendatore in "Don Giovanni,"
nothing so solemn and still, so full of the pathetic majesty of death,
as the passage following the words "with Tristan true to perish" has
been written. This is perhaps Wagner's greatest piece of music; and
certainly his loveliest is Tristan's description of the ship sailing
over the ocean with Isolda, where the gently swaying figure of the
horns, taken from one of the love-themes, and the delicious melody
given to the voice, go to make an effect of richness and tenderness
which can never be forgotten. The opening of the huge duet is as a
blaze of fire which cannot be subdued; and when at last it does
subside and a quieter mood prevails we get a long series of voluptuous
tunes the like of which were never heard before, and will not be heard
again, one thinks, for a thousand years to come. And in the strangest
contrast to these is the earlier part of the third act, where the very
depths of the human spirit are revealed, where we are taken into the
darkness and stand with Tristan before the gates of death. But indeed
all the music of "Tristan" is miraculous in its sweetness, splendour,
and strength; and yet one scarcely thinks of these qualities at the
moment, so entirely do they seem to be