is unintelligible and
illogical. So far as Wagner could he let music and drama grow up
together; then to start with the right atmosphere he took certain
themes and spun a piece of music from them, letting the themes, as I
have said, unfold themselves logically and determine the form. The
result is always a fine piece of music; and thousands of listeners
have derived artistic enjoyment from the _Mastersingers_ overture,
the _Lohengrin_ prelude and _Tristan_ prelude without troubling to
trace the story as it is plainly told. In the prelude to Act II here,
for example, no one need seek a story, though it is obvious enough.
First we have the daylight theme, peremptorily, harshly announced;
then the impatience of Isolda, then her longing, then her thoughts of
love and her hopes of fulfilment, and just before the curtain rises
the crash which accompanies the extinction of the torch.

I have already alluded to the old-world atmosphere got at once by the
horn calls and the lovely passage in which Isolda sings of the brook
"laughing on" in the still night; but in this first scene, which is by
comparison a mere introduction to the duet, we find a thousand
beautiful things. At this period of his life Wagner was by no means so
economical as he afterwards became; he squandered his pearls with
prodigal hands. In a few pages are enough melodies and themes to set
up a Puccini--or for that matter a Strauss or an Elgar--for life. The
blending of the death-theme with one of the love-themes, when Isolda
speaks of love's goddess, "the queen who grants unquailing hearts ...
life and death she holds in her hands," is one of the miracles of
music--stern beauty made up of defiance of fate and careless
voluptuousness. In the very next melody to make its appearance, the
second bar after the change to the key of A, we may note what I think
is the first sign of one of the many mannerisms of Wagner's "third
period," as we call it--the period extending from _Tristan_ to the
finishing of the _Ring_ (_Parsifal_ being as the tail to the dog, or
perhaps the tin-kettle tied to the tail). It is the phrase quoted
(_l_). Those five notes of the second bar were to be made to serve
many purposes hereafter; and the Wagnerites will insist that this was
done for a high artistic reason. Perhaps it was; but to me it seems
that it is found so frequently sometimes because Wagner wanted to
utter precisely the same emotion as he had employed it for earlier,
and somet