There are not many leitmotivs in Tristan, and they are used for ideas and passions—­never for personages.  Tristan, Isolda, Mark, Brangaena and Kurvenal have none of them a representative theme.  Each act has its own themes—­a multitude of them—­each carried through the act in which it appears, and nowhere else employed; only (a) and (h) appear throughout the opera.  Some small use is made of (c), but once the poisoning episode is done with the subject ceases to have any significance.  That marked (h) is of great importance.  Its effect is terrible when Isolda is enticing, or compelling, Tristan to drink the cup.  The sailors break in with their “Yo, heave ho!” and Tristan, bewildered, asks, “Where are we?” Isolda, with sinister purpose, replies, “Near to the end!” The intense originality, due to their being closely allied to the dramatic meaning, of all the themes should be noted:  only one, the second part of the love-theme (a), suggests any other music.  It is reminiscent of the introduction of Beethoven’s Sonata “Pathetique,” and, after all, the phrase was not new when Beethoven employed it.

IV

We have seen in this first act, if not the birth of love, at any rate the avowal.  The scene is laid on the sea, fresh, breezy, salt, bracing, suggestive of infinite energy and possibilities.  We are now to witness it in its ripeness:  not by any means a healthy ripeness, but ecstatic to the point of frenzy, burning to the point of madness, tumultuous, unbridled passion and lust; and, as these violent delights have violent ends, ending in tragedy.  When the curtain rises the picture is in exquisite contrast with that presented in the first act.  Well did Wagner know the value of the scenic environment; he always got it just and true and, from the artistic point of view, in sympathy with the prevailing emotion.  The demands on the scene-painters and stage-machinists are nothing in Tristan compared with those made in the Ring and Parsifal; but when the directions are complied with, as I understand they occasionally are (I have seen them carried out once), nothing more gorgeously effective can be dreamed of.  Instead of the morning air of Act I we have a warm summer night in a luxuriant garden; on the left is a castle with steps leading up to the door, and a burning torch makes the dark night darker; trees at the back and on the right are massed black against the dark sky; in the centre under a tree there is a seat for the convenience of the lovers.  At the very first glance we are taken into the atmosphere for a great love-scene—­the most magnificent love-scene ever conceived; and also we are carried ages back—­back to a time that never existed.  This old, world-old feeling, this sense of the past, is present to some degree in the first act; but here the music makes it of overwhelming power, and just as in the first act the sea is always present, so here the sense of a remote period is never allowed to leave us.