pains with the lesser characters, and Brangaena never opens her mouth without giving us something of magical beauty and tenderness.  Quite unconscious of the impending tragedy, she remarks that they are drawing near Cornwall, and that before evening they will land there.  The gently-rolling sea is kept before us by an accompaniment made out of a phrase of the sailor’s song.  “They will land”—­that means to Isolda that she will become the property of the old man she has never seen, and lose for ever the man she has no hope of gaining, the man whom she has every good reason to hate and despise.  This is a drama of passion pitted against reason—­against everything excepting passion, and Wagner loses no chance of making the situation clear.  Here, as in every other opera, he is, if not first a dramatist, yet always a dramatist.  “Never!” screams Isolda, and curses the vessel and all that it holds.  Astounded, Brangaena tries to comfort her; but Isolda is a woman, and means to have her way.  There must be plenty of air in such a deck-tent, but Wagner, with a spite that is itself somewhat feminine, makes her, in feminine fashion, complain of a want of it; so one of the curtains is drawn aside, and she can see what she wants to see:  Tristan standing on what seems to be the prow, but is really the stern, of the vessel.  There he stands, the man she hates and loves, and shows no sign of discomposure, although the helmsman invariably holds the tiller at such an angle that the ship must be gyrating like a teetotum, thus offering a simple, if coarse, explanation of Isolda’s qualms.  The music up till now has been made up of the fragment last quoted of the sailor’s song, and one of the love themes—­a simple phrase of four notes, out of which lengthy passages are woven.  When the curtain is drawn a fragment of the sea-song is again heard, and then this love phrase is taken up by the orchestra and filled with sinister, smouldering passion.  Isolda’s anger gathers and mounts against Tristan, and when this theme arrives

[Illustration:  Some bars of music]

it is the announcement of her determination that death for both of them shall end an impossible situation.  This, however, we do not learn until later; for the moment the theme conveys little special meaning to us.  It is when we hear the drama a second time that its appalling tragic force is felt.  Isolda tells Brangaena to command Tristan to come to the pavilion.  Kurvenal, his servant, sings a scoffing song, in which all the sailors join, in spite of Tristan’s endeavour to stop them.  Brangaena rushes back and hurriedly closes the curtains.  Isolda, half-crazed, tells the whole story as it occurred previous to the rising of the curtain—­how she nursed the wounded Tristan, found him to be the slayer of her betrothed, took his sword and was about to kill him, when he opened his eyes, and the sword dropped from her listless fingers.  Brangaena is sufficiently astonished; Isolda works herself up into a paroxysm