From the instant that Isolde raised herself slowly from the couch on the ship’s deck the great audience that Styr’s performances always called forth knew that some unusual influence was at work upon the impersonation. Not even in that first silent moment was there the reading of a princess whose tormented spirit had not permitted her to sleep since she had left her father’s shores. At once there was such an expression of fury, of murderous hate, in those immense pregnant eyes, such an aura of primal devastating force emanated from the strained body, the fixed features, that hardly a person in the house but stirred uncomfortably. This was no indignant princess weary with night-watches, whose wrongs would gradually set her brain on fire; here was the infuriated woman out of leash, a woman that might have been suckled by a tigress and forgotten what little she had ever known of civilization. “Brang?ne” said afterward that she was afraid to approach her; and had not the audience focussed their attention wholly upon Styr, they might have noticed that the poor little mezzo sang off the key twice.
When Isolde—who had even lifted herself and shown her face sooner than was customary, had stared for long insupportable moments while the sailors sang the careless satirical words of their song, “Oh, Irish maid! My winsome Irish maid!”—sprang to her feet, crying, “What wight dares insult me?” her great voice seemed to ring through all Munich. “Brang?ne, ho!” she shouted. “Where sail we?”
Brang?ne articulated that bluish stripes were visible in the west, that the ship fast approached the land. When Isolde bore down upon her, demanding in a still more terrible voice, “What land?” neither she nor the audience ever knew whether or not she managed to warble, “Cornwall’s verdant strand,” for Styr, barely waiting for the line to finish, towered in the centre of the stage and shrieked in tones of loosed fury and prophecy, that not even the golden quality of her voice could soften:
“Nevermore! To-day nor to-morrow!”
Then the minion, having given the necessary cue, Isolde hurled forth, in tones which seemed to express the gnashing of teeth, her wild regret for those lost arts that would have enabled her to annihilate the earth and every hated mortal on it. Discarding the cultivated gestures with which she so subtly suggested repressed power, growing passion, she tossed her arms aloft, and with eyes burning and face convulsed, declaimed in a voice that was strangely like a roar:
“Oh, subtle art of sorcery, awake in me once more power of will! Hark to my bidding, fluttering breezes! Arise and storm in boisterous strife! With furious rage and hurricane’s hurtle, awaken the sea from its calm! Rouse up the deep to its devilish deeds. Fling it the prey I gladly offer!”
The poverty of Wagner’s literary gift, apart from mere word jugglery, was never so manifest, nor his sublime faculty of imagining and delineating character in the terms of music; never had singer, not even Styr, rendered any words so unnecessary and sent the purport streaming out from her mind, her throat, with such terrific force. More than one in that spellbound audience half expected to see the roof of the opera house come down, at the very least to hear the noise of thunder above the orchestra. When she gasped: “Air! air! or my heart will choke! Open, open there wide!” the fine ladies in the balkon felt for their smelling-salts. When Brang?ne, having drawn aside the curtain, and Isolde, with a face that looked like death set in stone, commanded her to summon Tristan, that Germanic mass of flesh visibly trembled, and he asserted afterward that he had hardly dared to disobey her.
“Go! Order him! And understand it! I, Isolde, do command it!” The tones, growing rough and dark, expressed that the limits of endurance had been reached in a queen holding the power of life and death in her twitching hands, and it tried the courage of a mere actor to stand firmly at the helm.
By this time not one in the audience—outside of Italy the most musically receptive in the world, in spite of the sandwiches in their petticoat pockets and their unquenchable thirst—was sitting in a natural position.............