The second act is practically one vast love duet.  Isolde is waiting in the castle garden, listening to the distant horns of the King’s hunting-party, and longing for the approach of night, when she may meet her lover.  In spite of the entreaties of Brangaene, she extinguishes the torch which is to be the signal to Tristan, and soon she is in his arms.  In a tender embrace they sink down among the flowers of the garden, murmuring their passion in strains of enchanting loveliness.  Brangaene’s warning voice falls upon unheeding ears.  The King, followed by his attendants, rushes in, and overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, reproaches his nephew for his treachery.  Tristan can only answer by calling upon Isolde to follow him to death, whereupon Melot, one of the King’s men, rushes forward, crying treason, and stabs him in the breast.

In the last act Tristan is lying wounded and unconscious in his castle in Brittany, tended by Kurwenal, his faithful squire.  He is roused by the news of Isolde’s approach, and as her ship comes in sight he rises from his couch and in wild delirium tears the bandages from his wounds.  Isolde rushes in in time to receive his parting sigh.  As she bends over his lifeless body, another ship is seen approaching.  It is the King, come not to chide but to pardon.  Kurwenal, however, does not know this, and defends his master’s castle with the last drop of his blood, dying at last at Tristan’s feet, while Isolde chants her death-song over the fallen hero in strains of celestial loveliness.

‘Tristan und Isolde’ is the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ of music.  Never has the poetry and tragedy of love been set to music of such resistless beauty.  But love, though the guiding theme of the work, is not the only passion that reigns in its pages.  The haughty splendour of Isolde’s injured pride in the first act, the beautiful devotion of the faithful Kurwenal, and the blank despair of the dying Tristan, in the third, are depicted with a magical touch.

Some years ago it was the fashion, among the more uncompromising adherents of Wagner, to speak of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ as the completest exposition of their master’s theories, because the chorus took practically no share in the development of the drama.  Many musicians, on the other hand, have felt Wagner’s wilful avoidance of the possibilities of choral effect to detract seriously from the musical interest of the opera, and for that reason have found ’Tristan und Isolde’ less satisfying as a work of art than ‘Parsifal’ or ’Die Meistersinger,’ in which the chorus takes its proper place.  It is scarcely necessary to point out that, opera being in the first instance founded upon pure convention, there is nothing more illogical in the judicious employment of the chorus than in the substitution of song for speech, which is the essence of the art-form.