CHAPTER II.

"TRISTAN UND ISOLDE."

The Legend in Outline.--A Subject that has Fascinated Poets for over Six Centuries in Spite of Changes in Moral Feeling.--Wagner's Variations from the Versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Swinburne.--The Prelude.--Absence of Scenic Music.--Fundamental Musical Thought of the Drama.--Its Duality in Unity.--Longing and Suffering.--Wagner's Exposition.--Use of the Sailor's Song and the Sea Music.--Suffering and Chromatic Descent.--The Love Glance and its Symbol.--Fatality and the Interval of the Seventh.--The Heroic Phrase of Tristan.--The Death Phrase.--Music as an Expounder of Hidden Meanings.--The Horn Music.--The Signal.--The Love Duet.--Dramatic Feeling Supplied by Music.--King Marke.--Philosophy of the Drama.--Musical Mood Pictures.--A Dying Man: an Empty Sea.--Tristan's Longing and Death.--Swan Song of Isolde.--Passions Purified by Music.--Mediæval Love.--Effect of Wagner's Variations on the Morals of the Poem.--Excision of the Second Iseult.--The Philter not a Love-potion.--Wagner's Pure Humanity Freed from the Bonds of Conventionality Pages 37-71