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Tristan's strength is unequal to the excitement of the moment. His mind becomes dazed. He hears Isolde's voice, and his wandering fancy transforms it into the torch whose extinction once summoned him to her side: "Do I hear the light?" He staggers to his feet and tears the bandages from his wound. "Ha! my blood! flow merrily now! She who opened the wound is here to heal it!"

Do you refuse to drink to our peace-making?" Brangaene has brought the cup. Tristan gazes rigidly into Isolde's eyes as she approaches him bearing it. "The voyage nears its end. In brief space we shall stand," her lip curls with irony, "before King Mark! As you lead me to him, should you not deem it an apt speech to make: My lord and uncle, look at her well!

We may take for example the verses which tell of excruciating expectation in the second act, Isolde's expectation on the night filled with desire; and, in the third act, Tristan's expectation, as he lies wounded and delirious, waiting for the vessel that brings Isolde and death or we may take the Prelude, that expression of eternal desire that is like a restless sea for ever moaning and beating itself upon the shore.

To win her love suitors were willing to vow themselves to perdition. For Isolde's sake, Otto the Otter had cast himself into the sea. Conrad the Cocoanut had hurled himself from the highest battlement of the castle head first into the mud. Hugo the Hopeless had hanged himself by the waistband to a hickory tree and had refused all efforts to dislodge him.

You find it again in Isolde's motif continually." Laura was transfixed, all but transported. Here was something better than Gounod and Verdi, something above and beyond the obvious one, two, three, one, two, three of the opera scores as she knew them and played them.

By a few simple transitions, a few devices of instrumentation, the orchestra relates all this and much more, while Isolde's flute-motive, so exquisitely graceful and tender in the preceding scene, has now become a shriek of resolution bewildered but undaunted in the supreme crisis, above the savage call of the trumpets to death.

He listened, not so much to the music itself as to its occult significance regarding Evelyn and himself. And as Isolde's grief changed from wild lament for sensual delight to a resigned and noble prayer, the figure of ecstasy broke with a sound as of wings shaking, and Ulick seemed to witness a soul's transfiguration. He watched it rising in several ascensions, like a lark's flight.

For on a day when Tristram was in the bath, attended by his squire Gouvernail, chance brought the queen and Isolde into the chamber of the knight. On the bed lay his sword, and this the queen picked up and held it out for Isolde's admiration, as the blade which had done such noble work in the tournament.

At last the opportunity came, but it is not on record that the public clamored for its repetition or ranked her Casta diva with her singing of Isolde's Liebestod. Melba, one of the most exquisite of florid sopranos, once attempted Brünnhilde in Siegfried. One performance, and her good judgment came to her rescue.

"The death draught!" exclaims Brangane, and immediately the "Yo, heave ho!" of the sailors is heard and the shout of "Land!" Throughout this scene a significant phrase is heard the symbol of death: Also the symbol of fate a downward leap of a seventh, as in the last two notes of the brief figure illustrative of the glance which had inspired Isolde's fatal love.