es the gate; Mark, Melot
and the rest break it down, and there is a terrible hand-to-hand
fight; Kurvenal is run through with a spear, and creeps to his
master's side, to die, groping for his hand. Brangaena enters, and she
and Mark try to explain how she has told the whole story of the potion
to Mark; how Mark has come, too late, to unite the lovers. Isolda does
not listen; presently she rises to sing the matchless death-song; she
sees Tristan before her, smiling, transfigured, his love envelopes her
as in billows; she is his now, at last, for aye; and, exhausted, she
again sinks down beside Tristan, and dies.

There is thus in _Tristan_ next to no action--no more than serves to
turn spiritual forces loose and helps to interpret various spiritual
states. The spectator is interested, indeed, in the _doings_ of the
people on the stage only in the first act. Isolda's command to Tristan
to come before her, Tristan's evasions, Kurvenal's rude answer, the
rough gibing bit of sailor chorus, the episode of the two chalices
--the love potion and the poison--the scene between Isolda and Tristan
in which he offers her his sword and tells her to take her revenge by
killing him forthwith, the drinking, the wild embraces and the arrival
of the ship in port amidst the clatter of triumphant trumpets--such
things might have been, and were, done by Wagner in his _Tannhaeuser_
days. But consider how little is done in the second act and in the
third. These two portions of the music-drama are more symphonic than
operatic, and it is small wonder that in the days when good folk
expected to see opera when they went into an opera-house, they thought
they had been diddled when they were given _Tristan_ for their money.
If anything so new and unexpected were sprung upon us to-day we should
raise the same cry as was raised when _Tristan_ was given nearly half
a century ago. The introduction opens with a phrase (_m_) of threefold
meaning. It is clearly derived from the second phrase of the first
love-theme (_a_, page 274); it is a realistic representation in music
of Tristan's stertorous breathing; it expresses his delirious state of
mind--chiefly, however, in the upward-drifting thirds and fourths with
which it ends at each occurrence. Then comes the music associated with
his suffering and the "lady leech." The whole passage is then
repeated, and afterwards we get the shepherd's pipe (_n_). This forms
the prelude, and the music of the short scene