Of course, Isolda prevails. Brangaena is sent to keep watch, and Isolda throws down the torch to the Death motive. Tristan rushes in, and the most passionate love-duet ever written begins. After the first ecstasies have subsided the lovers converse. They must talk about something--what should it be? As Wagner's thoughts were occupied with Schopenhauer at the time, he makes them talk a sort of pseudo-Schopenhauer. Light is their enemy; only in night--extinction--can perfect joy be found. It was the deceitful phantoms of daylight--worldly ambitions--that betrayed Tristan into acting so basely towards Isolda (before the drama opens); it was the light of the torch that kept him so long from her this night; and now in the darkness they find rapturous peace. This is the substance of what is said. Twice Brangaena warns them that the dawn is at hand, but they do not heed her. Her songs are exquisite enough, surely, but the lovers, steeped in their bliss, have no ears for them. Their own music is far more beautiful: [Illustration: Some bars of music] And again: [Illustration: Some bars of music] The lovers are presently awakened. At the very climax of a mad, tumultuous passage Brangaena gives a scream; Kurvenal rushes in, and then--enter Mark, Melot and the other hunters. Melot's trap has worked satisfactorily. The cold red dawn slowly breaks. The phantoms of the daylight have broken in upon the dream of night, which alone is true. It is here that many would have the act terminate. Such an ending would leave the idea of the act half expressed, and shatter the noble architectonical scheme of the whole drama. The idea of the act--that the light is the lovers' enemy, the dark their friend and refuge--has to be worked out to prepare for the last act; the idea of the drama--that the lovers must be seen gradually thrust away from life (which is light) to death (which is eternal night)--must be carried one step further. Mark, in an agony of grief, asks them why they, the two he loves best in the world, dishonour him in so frightful a fashion. He presses home to them their sin and his suffering, his affection and their indifference to it; and he ends up with the question, "Why?" Tristan cannot answer; he perceives only that Mark's love is a more terrible menace for them than any trap laid by Melot. Without their passion they cannot live, and it is not Melot and the general outside world that threaten to sunder them, but their protector and dearest friend. The passion is irresistible, and Tristan faces the inevitable. He asks Isolda if she will follow him where he is now going: she replies that she will; and he, after taunting Melot with his treachery, lets him thrust him through with his sword. The drama has moved a stage further on, and there remains now only the logical completion. Anyone who thinks all this is to read into the opera a meaning that is not there merely accuses me of being greater than