passages out of the first and second acts, as he goes over, as in a dream, his recent life—­the sight of Isolda, the scene on the ship and that in the garden.  Another new theme to be noted is blazed out by the orchestra when Kurvenal tells him Isolda has been sent for.  When he sinks back exhausted and no ship is in sight the shepherd’s pipe keeps wandering through his brain with strange, weird, terrible effect, mixing with fragments of other themes; he gathers strength, and his despair rises to frenzy as he curses himself—­“’Twas I by whom [the draught] was brewed”—­to a phrase overwhelming in its intensity of expression (p), and again collapses.

Presently follow a few pages of perhaps the divinest music to be found in Wagner’s scores, Tristan’s dream of Isolda crossing the summer sea.  To an evenly pulsing gentle accompaniment we hear first the second part of a love-theme (q), then fragments of others, till the point of supernal, Mozartean beauty is touched at “full of grace and loving mildness.”  The pathos of it is almost intolerable:  no one could stand the strain another second, when after the cry, “Ah, Isolda, how fair art thou,” he rouses himself to anger because Kurvenal cannot see on the rolling waters what he with his inner vision sees so bright and clear.  How any one could, even at a first hearing, fail to realize that the composer of this sublime passage was by far, infinitely far, the mightiest and tenderest composer of opera music who has lived—­this is a phenomenon that passes our comprehension nowadays.  The scene where the shepherd sounds his pipe to signal the coming of the boat, and Tristan, his delight wrought up until it grows into anguish, goes mad and tears off his bandages, baffles description.  It is made up of the love music of the first and second acts, the melodies being metamorphosed in marvellous fashion.  At the last he sees Isolda throwing down the torch as she did in Act II, and as darkness comes over his eyes we hear the same music combined with the love-themes.  There is only one thing of the kind to match Isolda’s lament—­Donna Anna’s grief over her father’s body in Don Giovanni.  The rest of the act is largely made up of music which has been heard before.  The death-song is an extended and glorified version of the hymn to night; and the close is of sad, tragic sweetness.  The lovers are joined together and at peace—­but in the everlasting darkness of the grave.

Any one who has heard Tristan a few times will begin to notice that, despite the endless variety of the music, it possesses an odd homogeneity.  After hearing it fifty or a hundred times one begins to feel it to be comparable—­if such a comparison could be made—­to an elaborate oration delivered in one breath.  The whole thing, complete in every detail, must (one thinks) have come bodily into the composer’s mind in one inconceivable moment of inspiration and insight.  Of course we know it was not so.  A god may think a world into being