rage may easily be supposed to go beyond the truth when she speaks of having exchanged love-vows with Tristan.  She knows that he loves her.  They have only a few minutes to live and to love:  why not speak?  They stand gazing at one another in a state of tremulous emotion, and at last rush into each other’s arms.  The hoarse voices of the sailors are heard outside hailing King Mark; the ship has reached land; Brangaena enters, and is horrified to find that both have taken the potion; the pair cling to one another; a stream of the most passionate music in existence sweeps on:  Brangaena tries to attire Isolda in the royal cloak; Kurvenal shouts to Tristan that the king is coming; Tristan can understand nothing—­“What king?” he asks; the deck is crowded with knights; and the curtain falls as the lovers embrace and the trumpets announce the arrival of King Mark.

Before dealing more fully with the music of this act let me quote a few words I wrote elsewhere on the dramatic course of the whole opera.  “The end of each act sees the lovers in a situation which is at heart the same, though in externals different.  Rapt in each other, they care nothing about the sailors, attendants, approaching crowds, and the rest, at the end of the first act; at the end of the second they scarcely understand Mark’s passionate affection—­they only know it is an enemy of their love; and, finally, they are glad when death frees them from life, which means an incessant trouble and interruption to them.  The tragedy deepens and grows more intense with each successive scene; each separates them more widely from life and all that life means, until in the last act the divorce is complete.  This is the purpose of the drama:  this is the drama....”  When Wagner conceived Tristan he was as fine a master of stage-craft as has ever lived; and certainly by very far the finest who ever wrote “words for music.”  The first scene prepares us to understand clearly and to grasp firmly the forces that are presently to be let loose and run the drama on to its tragic denouement; and after that, scene follows scene with absolute inevitability.

III

During Wagner’s five years of theorising after quitting Dresden in 1849 he had thought of subjects and written parts of the Ring.  Tristan is the greatest work he completed.  A reservoir full of music must have accumulated in his brain; and he seems now to have opened the sluices.  Never did a more fiery impetuous stream flow from any composer:  never was there, in a word, more inspired music.  The profusion of the material is wonderful, and even more wonderful is the concentrated quality of that material.  In the Ring and Parsifal—­as in Lohengrin and Tannhaeuser—­there are longueurs; in Tristan there are none:  not a bar can be cut; there is not a bar that does not hold us.  In a paradoxical mood, or irritated, by being obstinately, wilfully, stupidly