In the introduction to the second act, based upon this restless phrase,—­

[Musical excerpt]

we have a picture of the longing and impatience of the lovers before a meeting.  When the curtains part, we discover a garden before the chamber of Isolde, who is now Cornwall’s queen.  It is a lovely night in summer.  A torch burns in a ring beside the door opening into the chamber at the top of a stone staircase.  The king has gone a-hunting, and the tones of the hunting-horns, dying away in the distance, blend entrancingly with an instrumental song from the orchestra which seems a musical sublimation of night and nature in their tenderest moods.  Isolde appears with Brangane and pleads with her to extinguish the torch and thus give the appointed signal to Tristan, who is waiting in concealment.  But Brangane suspects treachery on the part of Melot, a knight who is jealous of Tristan and himself enamoured of Isolde.  It was he who had planned the nocturnal hunt.  She warns her mistress, and begs her to wait.  Beauty rests upon the scene like a benediction.  To Isolde the horns are but the rustling of the forest leaves as they are caressed by the wind, or the purling and laughing of the brook.  Longing has eaten up all patience, all discretion, all fear.  In spite of Brangane’s pleadings she extinguishes the torch, and with wildly waving scarf beckons on her hurrying lover.  Beneath the foliage they sing their love through all the gamut of hope and despair, of bliss and wretchedness.  The duet consists largely of detached ejaculations and verbal plays, each paraphrasing or varying or giving a new turn to the outpouring of the other, the whole permeated with the symbolism of pessimistic philosophy in which night, death, and oblivion are glorified, and day, life, and memory contemned.  In this dialogue lies the key to the philosophy which Wagner has proclaimed in the tragedy.  In Wagner’s exposition of the prelude we saw that he wishes us to observe “the one glimmering of the highest bliss of attainment” in the “surrender of being,” the “final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander farthest when we try to take it by force.”  For this realm he chooses death and night as symbols, but what he means to imply is the nirvana of Buddhistic philosophy, the final deliverance of the soul from transmigration.  Such love as that of Tristan and Isolde presented itself to Wagner as ceaseless struggle and endless contradiction, and for this problem nirvana alone offers a happy outcome; it means quietude and identity.

In vain does Brangane sing her song of warning from the tower; the lovers have been transported beyond all realization of their surroundings; they sing on, dream on in each other’s arms, until at the moment of supremest ecstasy there comes a rude interruption.  Kurwenal dashes in with a sword and a shout:  “Save thyself, Tristan!” the king, Melot, and courtiers at his heels.  Day, symbol of all that is fatal