Brangäne is not heroic. There is not a line in Wagner's text to justify such a conception of the character. Wagner's Brangäne is a maid, a serving-woman. She is simple-minded, even innocent. In some respects she is foolish. Her one dominating note is devotion to her mistress. She is doglike in nature. She is Isolde's feminine Kurvenal. But she lacks in every essential the emotional and intellectual initiative of Tristan's esquire. She is passive. She is necessarily thus. From the point of view of dramatic character construction she must be so in order to afford an effective foil to Isolde, with whom she is continually placed in contrast. In more subtle but none the less influential opposition does she stand to Kurvenal, the embodiment of active, working devotion to the master. Brangäne does nothing but what she is bid, and does that wrong.
Her simple-minded innocence leads her to become what the dramatist needs to complete his scheme, an unconscious agent of fate. Acting wholly under the influence of devotion to her mistress, and without sufficient wisdom to foresee the terrible consequences of her deed, she administers to the lovers the potion which drowns their self-control and plunges them into the sea of passion. She does this on the unthinking impulse of the moment, solely because she is frightened out of such wits as she has by her mistress's determination to share with Tristan the drink of death.
Is that a heroic act? Would not a heroic nature have grasped the significance of the moment, and, foreseeing the approaching shame, have acquiesced in Isolde's decision? Nay, more; filled with such devotion as that of Brangäne, raised to a divine ecstasy by innate heroism, she would have swallowed her share of the poison and laid her down at her lady's feet to die, as Kurvenal did at Tristan's.
But there is not a single element of the heroic in Brangäne. She is, if anything, a coward, or at least a temporizer. The makeshift of the moment is what appears most desirable to her. Her naïve mind, which was so astonished to learn that the Tantris she helped to nurse was the Tristan she had just addressed, could project itself into the future no further than the next quarter of an hour. If that chanced to be a bad one, no matter. Those which were to follow were all blank for the good Brangäne.
So must it be, for in all versions of the story except that mysterious one which Scribe unearthed for use in Auber's "Le Philtre," and which reappears in the first act of Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore," the potion is taken by the two lovers unwittingly. It is administered by mistake. Wagner has accentuated his meaning as to the character of Brangäne by modifying this feature of the legend. His Brangäne does not give the love potion by mere mistake, but in order to save her lady's life. To enact her as a heroic personage makes her exchange of the potions inexplicable. Yet Wagner did not wholly abandon the notion of a mistake, for Brangäne's error in preferring Isolde's dishonor to her death is surely a mistake of the direst kind.
In the poem of Gottfried von Strassbourg—here let us fall into the widening trail of the historic exploration party—Brangäne does not give the potion at all. Neither is she a maid. She is a lady of high position at the court of Isolde's mother and in the confidence of the Queen. This Queen is a magician and gives the love potion to Brangäne to administer to Isolde and King Mark as soon as they are wed. On the voyage, Tristan, desiring wine, calls for it, and a maid attending the Princess brings to him the phial containing the potion. It looks like wine, and neither Tristan nor the maid suspects that it is anything else. Isolde, too, knows naught of it. Then, says Gottfried:—
"To Tristan first she passed the same:
He gave it to the royal dame.
Thereof she drank reluctantly,
Gave it to him, and then drank he;