LOVE CALL.
These are the principal and most significant new motives which appear in the love music of this wonderful act. Of course, some of the themes heard in the first act are employed here again, and nothing in the entire score is more charged with meaning than the combination of the motive of the Triumph of Love with the harmonies of that of Death at the instant of Isolde's extinction of the torch. Such feats of musical depiction the attentive listener will find on every page of the score, yet the actual number of motives to which special meanings have been attached is not large enough to tax the memory. The appearance of King Mark in the action is noted by two motives, one used to indicate his personality and the other his grief:
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MARK.
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MARK’S GRIEF.
The third act opens with music descriptive of bitter grief and loneliness. The first phrase, that of grief, is a remarkable thematic development of the second half of the Love motive: