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Updated: July 8, 2025
Brangaene drags together the curtains, shutting from sight the cruel rabble. Isolde, who has with difficulty controlled herself, seems on the point of an outburst, but she quells it, and in the restored silence asks with forced composure: "But now, about Tristan? I wish to be told exactly." Brangaene, at first unwilling, reports the interview.
Tristan is in a reverie, scarcely conscious of what is going on around him; the love-motive once in the oboe shows how his thoughts are occupied. He starts at the word Isolde, but collects himself, and tries to conceal his evident distress under a manner of supercilious indifference. Brangaene becomes more urgent; he pleads his inability to come now because he cannot leave the helm.
But the mad Queen declares bafflingly that Frau Minne, Madam Love, desires that it shall become night, that she herself may illumine the place whence Brangaene's torch banishes her. To the watch-turret with Brangaene, whence let her keep faithful look-out. "The torch," Isolde cries, grasping it, "were it the light of my life, laughing, without a tremor, I would put it out!"
In it a sick and suffering man, in woful plight, at the point of death...." She tells the story of her recognition in this Tantris of Tristan; of her resolve to take immediate vengeance upon him; of the look which disarmed her, her dismissal of him, healed, that he "might go home and burden her no more with the look of his eyes!" "Oh, wonder!" breathes Brangaene. "Where were my eyes?
Brangaene hurries to her, alarmed and wondering at the hurricane of passion she now lets loose, calling upon the arts of magic to restore to her the lost power of commanding sea and storm, calling upon the winds and waves to wreck this insolent ship and drown everyone upon it! Brangaene stands aghast. What she had but dimly apprehended, then, was true.
Often since then she has come upon him eavesdropping. Against Melot let Isolde be warned!... Melot? Isolde rejects the idea with light scorn. Is not he Tristan's dearest friend? When Tristan is forced to keep afar from her, with whom does he spend the time but Sir Melot? "The thing which makes him suspicious to me, to you endears him!" cries Brangaene, in despair at such wilful blindness.
As before, unconscious in her perturbation that she is doing it, she voices her inmost thoughts audibly, like a somnambulist: "Unloved by him, to behold the unrivalled man ever near, how could I endure the torment?" Brangaene catches the words, and innocently supposes them applied to King Mark.
At once prepare the peace-draught, you know the one I showed you." "What draught do you mean?" Brangaene asks, not daring to understand. Isolde takes it out of the coffer once more and holds it up for Brangaene to see well, the little deadly phial. "This draught! Pour it into the golden goblet; it will contain the whole without brimming over.
Isolde thinks of her mother's spells with very different feelings; the music becomes more gloomy, and with the words, "Vengeance for treachery rest for my heart in its need," the death-motive, with its solemn trombone-chords, betrays the thought in her mind. She orders Brangaene to bring the casket. Brangaene obeys, and innocently recounts all the wonderful remedies which it contains: Br.
What was the purpose, she asks, of that provision made by her mother for their assistance in a strange land? For hurts and wounds she had given balm; for poison, antidote; for deepest woe, for utmost affliction, she had given the death-draught: thanks be rendered to her now by death! Brangaene still resisting, Isolde imperiously presses her command.
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