OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC CONTINUED
ACT III.--Wagner has described the slow introduction to Beethoven's C sharp minor quartet as the saddest music ever written. If there is anything sadder, it is the instrumental introduction to the third act of Tristan und Isolde. Tristan, after being wounded by Melot, has been carried off by Kurwenal to his own home, Kareol in Brittany, where he is discovered lying asleep on his couch in the castle garden, Kurwenal by his side. Nothing could exceed the desolation of the scene, nor the utter woe expressed in the music which begins with a new transformation of the love-motive (1a). Isolde alone can cure the sick man, and word has been sent to her to come from Cornwall. Her ship is just expected, and the shepherd who is on the watch outside plays a sad strain so long as the ship is not seen, to be changed to a joyful one when she appears in sight. The plaintive strain is played on the English horn, an instrument which in the hands of a skilful player is capable of very great expression, and, unlike most of the wood, has a considerable range of soft and loud, a quality of which Wagner has made very happy use.
The melody itself seems to have caused some heartburning to many excellent critics. Even Heinrich Porges describes it as a sequence of tones apparently without rule,[[43]] and has not a word to say about its enthralling melodic beauty. Really what difficulty there is, is only for the eye, and only in one note, the constantly recurring G flat, which is easily accounted for. In a later part of the scene (p. 200), it will be found fully harmonized.
[43.] "Eine scheinbar regellose Tonfolge."
SCENE I.--In the first scene of the third act, Kurwenal attains an importance far beyond what he had in the first and second acts. He, too, is changed; he is no longer the rough, unmannerly servant, the events which have passed and the responsibility now resting upon his shoulders, have brought out the finer qualities of his nature. There is noticeable in his melody all through the act an air of freedom and lofty devotion quite different from his former self. He is, as it were, transfigured, and there is a refinement in his tenderness which may surprise those who have never observed what delicacy and sensitiveness are often hidden beneath a rough exterior among the lower classes.
After a short conversation between Kurwenal and the shepherd, who looks over the wall to ask how the patient is progressing, Tristan awakes, asking with feeble voice where he is. Kurwenal relates how he has brought him to his own home in Kareol, where he is soon to recover from wounds and death. It is some time before Tristan fully understands, and as memory begins to awaken, he tells of where he has been, speaking as one inspired:
I was there where I have ever been, whither for
ever I go, in the wide realm of the world-night, where
there is but one knowledge--divine utter oblivion,
i.e. in that Brahm, that eternal negation, in which all physical life has its existence. The words are accompanied by pianissimo chords of trombones with tuba. It is the first time that the heavy brass has been heard in this act, and the effect is excessively solemn. He continues:
How has this foretaste (of eternal night) departed
from me? Shall I call thee a yearning memory that
has driven me once more to the light of day?
The music of this and the following part is very interesting, but the modulations are too subtle and too evanescent for analysis. The motive, which has throughout been associated with the metaphor of daylight, is united with the languishing love-motive and with No. 4, of which three motives the following part is chiefly made up. The combination is expressed in Tristan's word, "Todeswonne-Grauen," "the awful joy of death." The culminating point is reached at the strongly alliterative words, "Weh' nun wächst bleich und bang mir des Tages wilder Drang," when for the moment there is quite a maze of real parts in wood-wind and strings. Immediately following is a very curious passage, nothing else than a succession of augmented chords in an upward chromatic scale, seemingly illustrating the words "grell und täuschend sein Gestirn weckt zu Trug und Wahn mein Hirn." For a moment Kurwenal seems overawed by the words and sufferings of his beloved master. His free bounding spirits are gone, and he speaks like a broken man. But he soon recovers his former mood as he tells of Isolde's expected arrival. The news, scarcely comprehended at first, is the signal for an outburst of joy on the part of Tristan expressed in a new motive, No. 17, p. 193'4. His joy is so violent that it brings on a return of delirious raving. He seems to see the ship, the sails filling to the wind, the colours flying, but at that moment the sad strains of the shepherd's song tell him that the ship has not yet appeared. He knows the tune, which once bewailed his father's death and his mother's fate when she brought him forth and died. And now it tells of his own lot:
to long--and die; to die--and to long. No! Not
so! rather to long and long, dying to long, and not
to die of longing.
He cannot find the death for which he longs.
In the following soliloquy the plaintive melody is woven into the orchestral accompaniment and taken by various instruments in turn. I resume at the words "Der Trank, der Trunk, der furchtbare Trank" (p. 207'1), where the full orchestra accompanies with brass and drums, the tempo being still rather slow.
The draught! the draught! the terrible draught!
How it raged from my heart to my head.... Nowhere,
nowhere may I rest. The night casts me back
on the day for ever to feed the sun's rays on my suffering....
The fearful draught which has consigned me
to this torment, I, I myself brewed it! Out of [my]
father's woe and [my] mother's anguish, out of tears
of love ever and aye, out of laughing and weeping,
joys and wounds, I have gathered its poisons. Thou
draught which I brewed, which flowed for me, which I
joyfully quaffed, accursed be thou, accursed he who
brewed thee.
He sinks once more into unconsciousness. This drink, this fearful draught which has brought him into his present state, is the work of his whole life, the outcome of all his former deeds. The despair which he feels now as his end approaches is expressed in the motive No. 18, in unison in the wood-wind. Both music and words of this soliloquy offer great difficulties and need close study, with special attention to the tempo.[[44]] It ends with the F sharp minor chord in the 6-4 position with full brass and drums; then sudden silence in the orchestra as the voice sings the words "furchtbarer Trank."
[44.] This is the passage which perplexed the greatest of all Wagner singers, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, so much that it hindered him from taking the part of Tristan until light came to him from Wagner himself. See the interesting account in Wagner's Reminiscences of Schnorr von Carolsfeld in his collected works, viii. 221.
As he lies in a swoon the wood-wind in turns continue the malediction. The tone then changes as Kurwenal stands beside him, uncertain whether he is alive or dead. The wood softly sound the chord which we have so often heard before, No. 12, in syncopated triplets, as in the great duet in the second act (pp. 131 seq.). Above there floats a melody of exquisite tenderness, first in the oboe, then in the clarinet, continued later in a solo violin. A horn quartet then begins the soft theme No. 13, Tristan's failing voice telling how he sees the vision of Isolde floating towards him over the sea. It is as if the strains of the garden scene were hovering in his dreams and calming his troubled thoughts. As he reads in Kurwenal's looks that she is not yet in sight, he once more threatens to become violent, when suddenly the joyful tune, the signal of Isolde's approach, is heard.
SCENE II.--The catastrophe which now follows is one of the most terrible ever conceived by a dramatist. Directly Kurwenal is away, Tristan begins to toss in his bed; he seems almost to rise from the dead. Strange, restless orchestration and 7-4 time seem to show that something is pending. Several motives are hinted at, and at last there breaks out in the lower strings and wood the motive No. 13 from the second act, but now how changed! The tender, dreamy melody, now in distorted 5-4 rhythm, appears like a dance of death, first in C major. A short climax brings it in A major and again in C major with the utmost fury and the force of the entire orchestra. It is as if the very gates of hell had burst and every fiend were dancing around him, shouting: "Live! live! and be for ever damned! false knight! perjured lover!" He springs from his couch, tears the bandages from his body; the blood streams from his wound; he staggers to the middle of the stage as he hears Isolde's voice and sinks into her arms as she enters. The love-motive is heard in the wood-wind like a long dying breath as, breathing the word "Isolde," he expires. The orchestra dies away; one chord is heard alone on the harp, and the violoncello continues the love-motive as he breathes away his life.
Isolde is left alone with Kurwenal, who has followed her. The soliloquy in which she laments the cruel destruction of the plan for saving Tristan is profoundly touching, both in the words and in the melody:
Art thou dead? Tarry but for one hour, one only
hour. Such anxious days longing she watched, to
watch but one more hour with thee. Will Tristan
beguile Isolde of the one last ever-short world-happiness
(No. 4). The wound? where? Let me heal
it, that, joyful and serene, we may share the night
together. Not of the wound--die not of the wound!
Let us both united close our eyes to the light of
heaven....
Sounds are heard without. Another ship has arrived, and with it Marke in pursuit of the fugitive princess. Hastily the gates of the castle are barricaded. Brangäne's voice is heard imploring them not to resist. It is vain; Kurwenal leaves no time for parley, but rushes upon them and is at once pierced through. He is just able to reach his master's body and die at his side; when Marke has forced an entry he finds nothing but death. Brangäne notices that Isolde is still living, and they now explain. The secret of the love-potion has been told to King Marke, and he has hurried up to renounce his intention of wedding Isolde and to unite her to Tristan.[[45]]
[45.] Another proof, if any were needed, that he is not united to her by any indissoluble tie.
It needed but a few minutes' delay for all to have ended happily. Why did not the poet take the opportunity offered and spare us the harrowing scenes at the end? Why could he not have lowered the curtain on the lovers united with Marke's full approval? Dramatically there was no reason why he should not have done so, but poetically it was impossible. The whole of the story is brought about by Tristan's guilt which had to be expiated; it is not diminished by Marke's generosity.
Isolde now rises to bid the world her last farewell before she departs with Tristan. The words of her swan-song have been described by an English writer as "no more poetry than an auctioneer's catalogue."[[46]] Of that I must leave my readers to form their own judgment; they must, of course, be read with their context in the drama. She is speaking in a trance, with ecstatic visions before her eyes. The voice melody is mostly built upon the song of union in death in the second act (No. 14), passing into the exultant motive which occurs in the great love-duet (No. 15). The orchestral accompaniment, beginning quietly, gradually swells into a torrent of music quite unrivalled among Wagner's great finales. The end of Götterdämmerung is impressive because of the wonderful gathering together of the musical motives of Siegfried's life, but as a musical composition it cannot compare with the end of Tristan. As it approaches the end the love-motive absorbs the whole orchestra, passing into No. 10 from the prelude of the second act, rising higher and higher. The wonderful euphony of tone, the harmony and peacefulness which pervade the surging mass of instruments are due to the consummate art of the instrumentation, and at last as the music seems to leave this earth in its heavenward flight we feel borne away upon its wings. Isolde does not die; she is carried upwards on the pinions of love, dissolved in the ocean of endless melody.
[46.] A comparison which, by the way, seems a little severe against auctioneers, if, as I presume, the objection is to the want of clearness of the language!
Her finish has given occasion to the witticism that the most beautiful thing in the work is the last note. To this I see no reason to demur; it contains nothing more entrancing than the rise to the fifth of the chord at her final cadence
Once more the love-motive is softly breathed in the oboi and the whole closes on the chord of B major three times repeated by the orchestra.