For those who have ears, eyes and understanding Tristan and Isolda is Wagner's most perfect work, is the finest opera in the world. Unluckily there are in the world far too many persons who are not content to have a work of supreme art, but must needs read into it old, stale platitudes: when they have proved it to be an exposition of these platitudes they conceive that they have deserved the gratitude of the people for interpreting the artist and of the artist for having interpreted him, having made his meaning clear.

As I have written elsewhere of Tristan, "Wagner's consummate dramatic art, stage-craft and knowledge of stage effect have combined to make all clear as the day"; but the commentators have rushed in with their comments between the stage and the audience only to obscure everything and bamboozle people who are at least as capable as themselves of understanding the drama. The platitudes read into Tristan are of two sorts, truisms and lying commonplaces. To take one of the latter kind, some one many long years ago got off the pretty phrase, "love and death are one"; and poetasters and fiftieth-rate dramatists have ever since continued to assert as a profound and original truth that love and death are one. What on earth they understand by it, if they mean anything at all, is much more than I can guess. But I know that love and death are not one, that love is life, and death is death. We have had it pointed out a thousand times that the "moral" of Tristan is that these two opposites are one; and in the latest books and articles about Wagner the same game is kept merrily going. I can extract no such moral. Perhaps some unfortunate essays and letters of Wagner gave the commentators their cue and lead; for Wagner, when he put away his music-paper and sat down to his writing-paper, often showed himself a willing victim of catch-phrases; also many sentences of the drama can be construed as paraphrases of this particular catch-phrase-for example, "Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter Liebestod." Such utterances as these, however, have a specific and different meaning altogether, as will presently be seen. I can by no means believe even Wagner capable of writing a three-act music-drama to prove the truth of a catch-phrase or that he would have dreamed of using such a catch-phrase as the motive of his music-drama. The commonplaces drawn from Tristan and gravely set forth as the "meanings" of the operas are as numberless as sands on the sea-shore and rather less valuable. That young women should not make a practice of marrying old men, that illicit passions and intrigues may bring on disaster, that it is madness to make love to another man's wife in a garden, observable by all, that it is greater madness still to keep on when a maidservant is screaming that some one is coming-these rules of conduct are very well in their way and might commend themselves to the denizens of Clapham; but, again, I hardly think Wagner would have constructed a great music-drama to enunciate them. Nor did he construct his music-drama to expound a philosophy. For a long time the air was thick with arguments pro and con with regard to the amount of Schopenhauer he had made use of in his libretto. Now, it is true that both Tristan and Isolda indulge at times in something approximating to the Schopenhauer terminology; but of Schopenhauer's or any other philosophy I cannot find a trace. For that we must turn to Parsifal. In Tristan there are no "meanings"-none save the very plain meaning of the drama and the meaning of the music, which is plainer still.

It seems to me desirable in this way to clear off misunderstandings and to indicate with precision my point of view. When Wagner wrote Tristan he wrote a tragic opera of passion and treachery and death, and only as a tragic opera can I regard it. Every sentence in it is accounted for by the course the drama takes; no further explanation is called for; and I shall certainly not waste my readers' time by picking out a few words here and there and trying to construe them into a metaphysical exposition: there is quite enough to digest without that. Even the longing for death which Tristan expresses as the only cure for the woes of an impossible life arises from the drama; Tristan no more preaches Schopenhauer than he preaches Buddhism when he exclaims "Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod." Wagner chose the subject of Tristan not to expound anything, but for the prosaic reason that he wanted to raise money and the subject seemed the most promising for the purpose. This is put beyond a doubt by a letter to Liszt dated July 2, 1858. Everything seemed to work against him; Rienzi proved a failure when it was put on at Weimar, and nothing could be hoped for in that quarter; the pecuniary situation was desperate. He had received a commission from the Emperor Pedro I of Brazil for an opera, and thought Tristan a likely theme. As early as December of 1854 he had written to Liszt mentioning it as planned in his head; and in this letter of '58 he says, "... I saw no other way open to me but to negotiate with H?rtel, and I chose for this subject Tristan, then scarcely begun, because I had nothing else. They offered to pay me half the honorarium (two hundred louis d'or)-that is, one hundred louis d'or-on receipt of the score of the first act, and I made all the haste I could to complete it. That is why this poor work was hurried on in such a business-like manner." It seems rather comical now that the world's most magnificent, and certainly most profound, musical tragedy should have been commenced to be sung by an Italian company in such an out-of-the-way spot as Rio de Janeiro and in the hope of pleasing semi-barbarian ears; and it is rather a pity it never found its way there. One thing is certain: the press criticisms could not have been more foolish than those that greeted the opera when it was produced in Munich.

Exactly where Wagner got the idea from I cannot say. Of course, in one shape or another the legend exists in every European literature; and probably he had been familiar with it for years. Praeger's story of Wagner getting hold of Gottfried von Strassburg's interminable version in the summer of 1855 and conceiving the thing in a flash might very well be true; only, unluckily for Praeger, the letter to Liszt in the previous year shows it to be in another sense a story. By September 1857 the poem was done, and Wagner at once set to work on the music. He had sketched the first act by the end of the same year, and in the early part of '59 the whole opera was complete. We have just seen one reason for pressing forward "this poor work ... in such a business-like manner"; but even without the pecuniary inducement I fancy he would have composed quickly. Tristan is one of those works, like Carlyle's French Revolution, which one feels had either to be written rapidly or not at all. The music seems to have welled forth in a red-hot torrent, and his pen could not choose but fly over the paper. None the less we are compelled to marvel at the industry, the concentrated and continuous and patient energy of the man; for the Tristan score is as complicated as any ever written, and the mere number of notes to be set down might well have appalled him. Handel could write a Messiah in three weeks and Mozart a Don Giovanni overture in a few hours; but their scores are mere skeletons compared with Tristan, a score which neither Handel nor Mozart could copy in a much longer time than three weeks. We may hope that Wagner received his remaining hundred louis d'or, for the Brazilian scheme came to nothing, and he had to wait seven long years before Tristan got its first performance. But for the "kingly friend," mad Ludwig II, it would not have been performed at all; and afterwards other theatres found it too difficult, or the directors, with true inborn official insolence, seemed to glory in not so much as looking at the score. We will now look at it.

Out of one or another of the various versions of the legend Wagner extracted the core-the plain, direct story of the passion of a pair of tragic lovers. Tristan and Isolda love one another with a devouring love, and circumstances will not allow them to be united; they find a refuge in death from an existence intolerable without love; and this is essentially the whole story. In its older form the tale consisted mainly of what to the modern mind are excrescences-the intrigues, fights, adventures and what not so dear to the medi?val mind. Wagner sheared away this mass of overgrowth; or perhaps it would be truer to say he hewed his way to the statue within, from out of the old stuff picked out the elements that made just the drama as it had shaped itself in his brain. Here is the story. Tristan, nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, had gone a-warring in Ireland and had there slain Morold, the betrothed of Isolda; and to Isolda he sends as a present Morold's head. He is himself wounded, and by chance it is Isolda, "a skilful leech," who nurses him back to health. She has found in Morold's head a splinter of a sword-blade, and finds it was broken out of Tristan's weapon. Full of anger, she raises the sword to slay the sick man: he opens his eyes, and "the sword dropped from my fingers"-her doom is upon her: henceforth she loves the slayer of her lover. Though Tristan loves her he does not ask for her, but with many protestations of gratitude and friendship sails away to Cornwall. Next occurs one of those things at which most of us are apt to boggle: Tristan goes home, it would appear, only to suggest that his aged uncle should marry Isolda the peerless beauty; Mark consents, and sends Tristan to ask for her. Tristan afterwards confesses that ambition led him to do this; but in any case it was very close to a deed of downright treachery, unless the fact was that Tristan did not suspect Isolda's love for him, or thought his station too humble. Wagner's language is ambiguous, and probably he intended his meaning to be the same. Isolda has no two opinions about his conduct. It had been her duty to kill him in the first place, and her love, her destiny, Frau Minna-call it what you will-betrayed her; and now she is betrayed by the man whose life she saved. Had she spoken one word in her father's castle Tristan would not have returned to Cornwall: in all likelihood his head would have been sent as an acknowledgment of Morold's. Her fury knows no bounds; her grief and sense of ignominious humiliation almost defy expression; her contempt for Tristan, when she finds words for it, is scathing. All this we learn as the opera proceeds; but we should know the facts of the history before seeing the work the first time, else the first act is bewildering, for matters have arrived just at this point when the curtain rises.

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