What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with such instant and stupendous effect?  Quite as amazing is the second act.  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 which 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,