o the door, and
a burning torch makes the dark night darker; trees at the back and on
the right are massed black against the dark sky; in the centre under a
tree there is a seat for the convenience of the lovers. At the very
first glance we are taken into the atmosphere for a great
love-scene--the most magnificent love-scene ever conceived; and also
we are carried ages back--back to a time that never existed. This
old, world-old feeling, this sense of the past, is present to some
degree in the first act; but here the music makes it of overwhelming
power, and just as in the first act the sea is always present, so here
the sense of a remote period is never allowed to leave us.

When the first chord of the brief, passionate introduction was first
heard in a theatre nearly half a century ago, it sent a shudder
through every professional class-room in every conservatoire in
Europe, and the theme is perhaps the most important in the act (_j_);
and the cutting, almost raucous chord lets us know at once that big
doings are at hand. Another theme follows--one of impatience and sick
anxiety: it is that which is played again when Isolda, hardly able to
contain herself while waiting for Tristan, wildly waves her
handkerchief, beckoning to him. Another and most lovely melody is
heard (_k_); and then some of the love-music which is played when he
does come and rushes to her arms. This leads straight to the rising of
the curtain, and Brangaena is seen on the steps by the torch, keeping
watch and listening to the horns of a hunting party; the sounds are
growing fainter in the distance.

Isolda enters, and Brangaena vainly tries to dissuade her from meeting
Tristan. This night hunt, she swears, is a scheme of Melot's for the
betrayal of Tristan, his foe. Isolda laughs. Melot is Tristan's
friend, and the night hunt was arranged that the lovers might meet.
They dispute to some of Wagner's loveliest melodies. The theme (_k_)
flows along as an accompaniment, and becomes more prominent when
Isolda says she can no longer hear the horns; she hears the gentle
plash of the brook running from the fountain--as "in still night alone
it laughs on my ear"--the party of hunters must be many miles off. The
signal for Tristan is the extinguishing of the torch, and the music
associated with this deed now is used again in the last act in another
form. Brangaena prays her mistress not to put it out: it means death,
she says, and as a sort of subsidiary d