dies murmuring “Isolda.”  She laments over his body and sinks down beside it.  Another alarm is given; Kurvenal barricades the gate; Mark, Melot and the rest break it down, and there is a terrible hand-to-hand fight; Kurvenal is run through with a spear, and creeps to his master’s side, to die, groping for his hand.  Brangaena enters, and she and Mark try to explain how she has told the whole story of the potion to Mark; how Mark has come, too late, to unite the lovers.  Isolda does not listen; presently she rises to sing the matchless death-song; she sees Tristan before her, smiling, transfigured, his love envelopes her as in billows; she is his now, at last, for aye; and, exhausted, she again sinks down beside Tristan, and dies.

There is thus in Tristan next to no action—­no more than serves to turn spiritual forces loose and helps to interpret various spiritual states.  The spectator is interested, indeed, in the doings of the people on the stage only in the first act.  Isolda’s command to Tristan to come before her, Tristan’s evasions, Kurvenal’s rude answer, the rough gibing bit of sailor chorus, the episode of the two chalices —­the love potion and the poison—­the scene between Isolda and Tristan in which he offers her his sword and tells her to take her revenge by killing him forthwith, the drinking, the wild embraces and the arrival of the ship in port amidst the clatter of triumphant trumpets—­such things might have been, and were, done by Wagner in his Tannhaeuser days.  But consider how little is done in the second act and in the third.  These two portions of the music-drama are more symphonic than operatic, and it is small wonder that in the days when good folk expected to see opera when they went into an opera-house, they thought they had been diddled when they were given Tristan for their money.  If anything so new and unexpected were sprung upon us to-day we should raise the same cry as was raised when Tristan was given nearly half a century ago.  The introduction opens with a phrase (m) of threefold meaning.  It is clearly derived from the second phrase of the first love-theme (a, page 274); it is a realistic representation in music of Tristan’s stertorous breathing; it expresses his delirious state of mind—­chiefly, however, in the upward-drifting thirds and fourths with which it ends at each occurrence.  Then comes the music associated with his suffering and the “lady leech.”  The whole passage is then repeated, and afterwards we get the shepherd’s pipe (n).  This forms the prelude, and the music of the short scene with the shepherd is practically the same.  Some new matter is brought in, for dramatic rather than sheer musical purposes, as Tristan awakens; but the next subject that I need call attention to is the noble one which comes in when Kurvenal assures him he is safe in his own castle (o).  The whole of Tristan’s subsequent ravings are made up of reminiscences, more or less distorted, of various