to match Isolda's
lament--Donna Anna's grief over her father's body in _Don Giovanni_.
The rest of the act is largely made up of music which has been heard
before. The death-song is an extended and glorified version of the
hymn to night; and the close is of sad, tragic sweetness. The lovers
are joined together and at peace--but in the everlasting darkness of
the grave.

Any one who has heard _Tristan_ a few times will begin to notice that,
despite the endless variety of the music, it possesses an odd
homogeneity. After hearing it fifty or a hundred times one begins to
feel it to be comparable--if such a comparison could be made--to an
elaborate oration delivered in one breath. The whole thing, complete
in every detail, must (one thinks) have come bodily into the
composer's mind in one inconceivable moment of inspiration and
insight. Of course we know it was not so. A god may think a world into
being in that way: a mortal requires time and unflagging energy to
produce a masterpiece. We know that Wagner incorporated his own
studies in his masterpiece; we can see how theme is evolved from
theme. But the unity is so complete that if some sketches were to come
to light showing that the last form of some of the music was in
existence before the portions from which it seems to be evolved, I
should not be in the least surprised, so perfect is the unity, so
inevitably does every note fall into its proper place to express the
feeling of the occasion. I take it that when he drafted the words he
had before him a prophetic shadow of what the music was to be; and
when he came to compose, the uninterrupted white heat of inspiration
and enormous cerebral energy and intellectual grip of his matter, and
the boundless invention which provided that matter for him, so to
speak, so that he had only to pick it up ready made, enabled him to
make that more or less dim, prophetic shadow a living, concrete
reality. Never, from the first bar to the last, does the inspiration
fail him; there is not a phrase that says less, or says it less
adequately than the situation demands, than he has led us to expect.
Old Spohr, when he heard _Tannhaeuser_, though his ears rebelled
against the unaccustomed discords, spoke about the Olympian
inspiration and energy he felt in the work; and this criticism--and
very just and fine criticism it was: as just and fine as it was
unexpected from an old-world musician such as Spohr--is equally
applicable to _Tristan_.