Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 25, 2025
'You understand, he explained, staring absently at the double page of music, 'this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her husband, has just gone off hunting you will hear the horns dying in the distance and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan.
If not, it was strange that she should have been left free enough apparently to see Tristan whenever she wished, and Mark's expostulations at the end of the act seem rather unwarranted in the mouth of a man whose honour, in the Divorce Court sense, has not been smirched; yet, on the other hand, it is unlikely that a legendary King, with the bride in his palace, would wait so long for the marriage as to allow the many pretty incidents mentioned by Brangaena to happen.
Brangaena is the most difficult part to sing and act, and it is also the most grateful to the actress. She has not a phrase that is not beautiful, from her first dozen bars to her last recitative. Kurvenal has his song in the first act and scarcely appears again until the last, when all his music is of an unspeakable pathos.
Wortley, shifting his position behind the Italian Ambassador's wife, thought that Brangaena was a trifle hoarse; and suspended in the gallery many feet above their heads, Edward Whittaker surreptitiously held a torch to his miniature score; and ... and ... In short, the observer is choked with observations.
Brangaena has betrayed her: the cup contains not the poison but the love-potion. In this stroke there is no fairy-tale or pantomime foolery. The course the drama now pursues is determined not by a magic draught, a harmless infusion of herbs, but by the belief of the lovers that they have taken poison and are both doomed.
Brangaena is sufficiently astonished; Isolda works herself up into a paroxysm of fury; and now the drama is indeed on foot. Brangaena has a long, lovely, soothing passage to sing, and in her over-anxiety to serve her mistress she accidentally suggests to Isolda the very means of revenging herself on Tristan, and terminating at the same time her own misery.
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.
Brangaena and Isolda are there listening, and Brangaena, to music of enchanting beauty, is warning Isolda that the hunters can be no great way off. "Listen to the brook," says Isolda. "How could I hear that if the horns were near?" Then comes one of Wagner's matchless bits of painting the brook rippling through the silent night.
Kurvenal enters, and tells them to get ready to land. Isolda tells him point-blank that she will not stir until Tristan has come to demand her pardon for a sin he has committed. Brusquely, Kurvenal says he will convey the message; Brangaena again prays to her mistress to spare her. "Wilt thou be true?" replies Isolda; and the voice of Kurvenal is heard: "Sir Tristan!"
And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's any one's to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no we must choose.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking