It was half-past six when word came from the palace that his Majesty, indisposed, had left for Linderhof; the last bell rang, darkness descended upon the house, the overture began. As Ordham sat with his eyes closed lest they be diverted by the fat red necks and plastered heads, which shone in the dusk, mayhap by hungry jaws munching chocolate or peppermint, his high spirits slid down into a fathomless abyss; that tide of sweet despair swirled round and over him, driving repose, content, gayety from every chamber of his soul, and filling it with unrest, vague delicious terrors, that made him move his arms restlessly until he succumbed utterly.
Never had been and never will be so full an expression of unsatisfied longing. Surge upon surge from the opening phrase, presaging a yearning that is not all bliss and a torment that is not all pain, so long as mortals may die; surge upon surge of aching passion, sweet oblivion, mortal disappointment, infinite desire, a love that only the immortals could satisfy and only death can quench. The imagination reels along with this appalling betrayal of mortal love. The curse and the boon of imagination, the indomitable pursuit of happiness, even while the mind holds its sides like a chuckling monk, the inevitable awaking, the cry for death, annihilation, Nirvana,—all and far more are in this mighty tonal dirge of the human heart to lift Wagner’s masterpiece to the apex of all the masterpieces the world has preserved.
Unsatisfied longing! Ordham never listened to this music-drama that he did not wonder its keynote should possess him irresistibly throughout the performance and desert him when it was over. Even in the foyer, during the pauses, he was the cool young modern with inherited experiences in his brain that pushed him far from the sources of nature; but when the surges beat on his spirit once more he was the immemorial lover.
On the stage Styr was always beautiful and never more so than as Isolde, with her soft golden wig, her dark eyes enlarged, their natural mobility enhanced by subtle arts which other stage women secretly studied in vain, her ivory-white luminous skin. In the first act she wore a flowing gown of an imperial blue shade, the perfect lines of her long arms enticing under floating gauze, her long throat rising bare with the plastic firmness which she might have inherited from the women that inspired the dreams of Solomon.
When Isolde raised herself slowly from the cushions of the couch in the pavilion of the ship which was bearing her to the old king of Cornwall she had consented to marry, abandoning something of her first attitude of utter despair, and lifting her head toward the joyous singing of the sailors, her eyes in one long look expressed everything. The dullest could not entertain the delusion that here was merely an unhappy young princess of “Irenland,” speeding against her will to fulfil a detestable marriage, but a woman of the maturest passions, who had already drunk deep of the cup of love, scornful of every law that might exist for princess or peasant, and who had watched and waited, and accepted the fact of betrayal.
And the audience felt itself, not in the presence merely of a woman eaten with hatred, fury, desire for vengeance, but of a primeval force, passion incarnate, such as Earth unlooses in convulsions that have annihilated millions and buried continents. No other Isolde has ever been as great as Styr, for no other has been able to suggest this ferocious approach of a devastating force, this hurricane sweeping across the mind’s invisible plain, tearing at the very foundations of life. And all this she expressed before singing a note, with her staring moving eyes, her eloquent body, still and concealed as it was, a gesture of the hand. It was a concentration of the mental faculties, such as gives weak women superhuman physical strength in moments of terror or anger; in her own case they were whipped up like a whirlwind by the released horrors in her soul, and used with a supreme exercise of art that made her the risen Isolde.
When she started up, crying out to the wind and waves to shatter the ship, the passion in her voice hardly expressed the rage consuming her in plainer terms than that first long silent moment had done.
Styr’s transitions from wildness to gloom, to bitter wildness again, then to a regal imperiousness, when she ordered Brängane to summon Tristan (which must have made the royal women present envy the majesty of soul that could inform poor commonplace flesh with so dread a mien), were all done with that complete abandonment to her rôle of the great artist who never for a moment addresses her audience. Then, once more, she betrayed in her strained eyes and body her outraged womanhood as Brängane was courteously repulsed by Tristan (alas! very fat), standing with folded arms at the helm, and taunted by Kurwenal and the sailors. Upon the tirewoman’s return, after a moment’s futile attempt at self-control, she broke forth into a furious denunciation of the false lover, mingling it with bitter reminiscences of a time so fatal to herself when he was ill and at her mercy, and she healed and loved him. The anger gradually faded from her voice, which softened into the most exquisite tenderness and sweetness. “His eyes on mine were fastened. . . . the sword dropped from my fingers!” In that brooding moment every woman in the audience recalled the unforgettable, the eyes of the young widened with terror and hope.
But that moment was brief. Her wrongs beat upon her brain again. With their recital to the trembling Brängane she worked herself up to that tremendous climax where, flinging her back against the drawn curtains, with arms outstretched, she screamed out her curses, invoking vengeance and death.
Never theatrical, and conveying the impression throughout the greater part of that act, in which she ran the gamut of the passions, that she let escape but the smoke of the terrible fires below, when she did give way to ungovernable fury, she gashed the hidden rivers of blood before the footlights to such a pitch that it is no wonder the Germans keep on calling for more sensation, more thrill, with an insatiety which will work the ruin of music and drama in their nation unless some genius totally different from Wagner rises and diverts them into safer channels. Beyond Wagner in his own domain there is nothing but sensationalism. Rather, he took all the gold out of the mine he discovered and left but base alloy for the misguided disciple.