other, they care
nothing about the sailors, attendants, approaching crowds, and the
rest, at the end of the first act; at the end of the second they
scarcely understand Mark's passionate affection--they only know it is
an enemy of their love; and, finally, they are glad when death frees
them from life, which means an incessant trouble and interruption to
them. The tragedy deepens and grows more intense with each successive
scene; each separates them more widely from life and all that life
means, until in the last act the divorce is complete. This is the
purpose of the drama: this _is_ the drama...." When Wagner conceived
Tristan he was as fine a master of stage-craft as has ever lived; and
certainly by very far the finest who ever wrote "words for music." The
first scene prepares us to understand clearly and to grasp firmly the
forces that are presently to be let loose and run the drama on to its
tragic denouement; and after that, scene follows scene with absolute
inevitability.

III

During Wagner's five years of theorising after quitting Dresden in
1849 he had thought of subjects and written parts of the _Ring_.
Tristan is the greatest work he completed. A reservoir full of music
must have accumulated in his brain; and he seems now to have opened
the sluices. Never did a more fiery impetuous stream flow from any
composer: never was there, in a word, more inspired music. The
profusion of the material is wonderful, and even more wonderful is the
concentrated quality of that material. In the _Ring_ and
_Parsifal_--as in _Lohengrin_ and _Tannhaeuser_--there are _longueurs_;
in _Tristan_ there are none: not a bar can be cut; there is not a bar
that does not hold us. In a paradoxical mood, or irritated, by being
obstinately, wilfully, stupidly regarded as one of the trade setters
of opera-texts, Wagner declared to Buelow that "one thing is certain, I
am not a musician." This has been interpreted as meaning, "I am no
musician," whereas, of course, he meant he was very much more than a
musician: which, in a sense, he was. He was not a greater genius than
Mozart and Beethoven, who had nothing of the dramatist in them, nor
than Shakespeare, who was not, technically at least, a musician; but
he was something different from both species of men--a dramatist who
could not get the drama out of himself without the aid of music, and a
musician who could not beat out his music without the aid of drama.
Music and drama had simultan