the wound, and feels his way to his master’s
side, and dies groping for his hand. Mark and
Brangaena come in. She has confessed to the mistake
she made in giving the wrong potion, and he has come
to make all well. Isolda pays no attention, but,
after a beautiful phrase from Brangaena, rises and
sings the wonderful Death song. The drama is now
ended; the lovers’ passion has led them whither
they knew it was leading them from the beginning.
Night has come on, and Isolda falls on Tristan’s
body and dies, fulfilling the promise she had made—that
where he went she would follow. And so ends the
greatest music-drama ever written, and the greatest
likely to be written for centuries to come.
We must pass on now to The Mastersingers, an
old idea of Wagner’s. The music was completed
at Triebschen. Here is nothing of the tension,
burning passion, and unfathomable depth of Tristan,
but a pretty love-story, with some comedy and more
than a little of very broad farce. In it Wagner
determined to satirize the musical pedants, and he
did so with considerable acerbity. But it is
not to see his enemies roughly handled that we go
to The Mastersingers: it is to hear one
of Wagner’s two most beautiful operas.
There is no need to go through it closely, as in the
case of Tristan. The methods are those
of Tristan; we have the themes used as leit-motifs,
and also long passages woven out of them and new matter;
we have the harmonic freedom of Tristan, the
same gorgeous orchestration, and even more than the
same marvellous polyphonic writing. But, broadly
speaking, the drama counts for comparatively little,
and the opera consists of a series of enchanting songs
and scenes. The very title tells us that we are
not simply to follow the destinies of a hero and heroine.
The person mostly in evidence is Hans Sachs, a sort
of heavy father, who has some of the most glorious
music. The young lover comes along—Walther—and
tries to win Eva by gaining the prize in a contest
of minstrels; Beckmesser, a pedant, opposes him.
Sachs supports him, and he wins. Every note of
the music can readily be understood. There are
regular set numbers provided for in the structure
of the libretto, so as to come in naturally; there
is even a sextet—which I have often heard
encored—and the opera winds up with a chorus.
It disproves Wagner’s theory that in the Ninth
Symphony Beethoven had said the last word in pure music,
and that henceforth words would always be necessary;
for here the text is often a mere excuse for using
the human voice, and little of the music would be
unintelligible without it.
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