There is thus in _Tristan_ next to no action--no more than serves to turn spiritual forces loose and helps to interpret various spiritual states. The spectator is interested, indeed, in the _doings_ of the people on the stage only in the first act. Isolda's command to Tristan to come before her, Tristan's evasions, Kurvenal's rude answer, the rough gibing bit of sailor chorus, the episode of the two chalices --the love potion and the poison--the scene between Isolda and Tristan in which he offers her his sword and tells her to take her revenge by killing him forthwith, the drinking, the wild embraces and the arrival of the ship in port amidst the clatter of triumphant trumpets--such things might have been, and were, done by Wagner in his _Tannhäuser_ days. But consider how little is done in the second act and in the third. These two portions of the music-drama are more symphonic than operatic, and it is small wonder that in the days when good folk expected to see opera when they went into an opera-house, they thought they had been diddled when they were given _Tristan_ for their money. If anything so new and unexpected were sprung upon us to-day we should raise the same cry as was raised when _Tristan_ was given nearly half a century ago. The introduction opens with a phrase (_m_) of threefold meaning. It is clearly derived from the second phrase of the first love-theme (_a_, page 274); it is a realistic representation in music of Tristan's stertorous breathing; it expresses his delirious state of mind--chiefly, however, in the upward-drifting thirds and fourths with which it ends at each occurrence. Then comes the music associated with his suffering and the "lady leech." The whole passage is then repeated, and afterwards we get the shepherd's pipe (_n_). This forms the prelude, and the music of the short scene with the shepherd is practically the same. Some new matter is brought in, for dramatic rather than sheer musical purposes, as Tristan awakens; but the next subject that I need call attention to is the noble one which comes in when Kurvenal assures him he is safe in his own castle (_o_). The whole of Tristan's subsequent ravings are made up of reminiscences, more or less distorted, of various passages out of the first and second acts, as he goes over, as in a dream, his recent life--the sight of Isolda, the scene on the ship and that in the garden. Another new theme to be noted is blazed out by the orchestra when Kurvenal tells him Isolda has been sent for. When he sinks back exhausted and no ship is in sight the shepherd's pipe keeps wandering through his brain with strange, weird, terrible effect, mixing with fragments of other themes; he gathers strength, and his despair rises to frenzy as he curses himself--"'Twas I by whom [the draught] was brewed"--to a phrase overwhelming in its intensity of expression (_p_), and again collapses.