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Updated: May 24, 2025
Palamides, leaving him bleeding on the ground, rode in all haste to the castle. But as he approached, Isolde saw him from a window, and gave orders that the gate should be shut and the drawbridge raised.
The great French singer, Madame Viardot Garcia, was asked on one occasion in a private circle to sing the part of Isolde. She took the score and sang it a prima vista to Klindworth's accompaniment. On being told that in Germany singers could not be found to undertake the part, alleging that it was too difficult and unmelodious, she naively asked whether German singers were not musical!
"Are you inquiring, my dear lady," Brangaene asks in wonder, "of Tristan, the marvel of all nations, the man of exalted renown, the hero without equal, honour's treasure and vaunt?" Isolde catches up her tone, to continue in scornful mimicry: "Who terrified at his own achievement flies to refuge wherever he can, having won for his master a corpse to bride?... Is my saying dark to you?
Yet if we seek again to account to ourselves for this astonishing impression of modernness which we receive from Gottfried's poem, we recognize that it is due to something far more important than the mere precocious psychological interest; nay, rather, that this psychological interest is itself dependent upon the fact which makes "Tristan und Isolde," so modern to our feelings.
With these words she ran in haste from the chamber, leaving Isolde trembling with dread for her lover, for though she knew not the cause of the queen's rage, she knew well how cruel she could be in her passion. Quickly the queen returned, bringing with her the fragment of steel that had been found in Marhaus's skull, and, snatching up the sword, she fitted this into the broken place.
We first met with it in the opening bars of the Prelude, where the love-motive is so repeated. The first part of the scene is a trial of wits between Isolde and Tristan, in which the latter is helpless as a bird in the claws of a cat. The dialogue as such is a masterpiece, unrivalled in the works of any dramatic poet except Shakespeare.
Isolde would wander forth from the castle at earliest morn, with the name of Guido on her lips. She told his name to the trees. She whispered it to the flowers. She breathed it to the birds. Quite a lot of them knew it. At times she would ride her palfrey along the sands of the sea and call "Guido" to the waves!
The curtain rising shows the rich pavilion on ship-deck where Isolde hides her face from the light against the cushions of a day-bed. Her attendant, Brangaene, stands gazing over the ship-side. The voice of a young sailor is heard from the rigging out of sight.
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.
It has already been related how Wagner broke off, when midway through 'Der Ring des Nibelungen, and devoted himself to the composition of a work of more conventional dimensions. The latter was 'Tristan und Isolde. Produced as it was in 1865, four years before 'Das Rheingold, it was the first of Wagner's later works actually to see the light.
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