and kills Melot, and is himself stabbed. He receives the wound, and
feels his way to his master's side, and dies groping for his hand. Mark
and Brangaena come in. She has confessed to the mistake she made in
giving the wrong potion, and he has come to make all well. Isolda pays
no attention, but, after a beautiful phrase from Brangaena, rises and
sings the wonderful Death song. The drama is now ended; the lovers'
passion has led them whither they knew it was leading them from the
beginning. Night has come on, and Isolda falls on Tristan's body and
dies, fulfilling the promise she had made--that where he went she would
follow. And so ends the greatest music-drama ever written, and the
greatest likely to be written for centuries to come.

We must pass on now to _The Mastersingers_, an old idea of Wagner's. The
music was completed at Triebschen. Here is nothing of the tension,
burning passion, and unfathomable depth of _Tristan_, but a pretty
love-story, with some comedy and more than a little of very broad farce.
In it Wagner determined to satirize the musical pedants, and he did so
with considerable acerbity. But it is not to see his enemies roughly
handled that we go to _The Mastersingers_: it is to hear one of Wagner's
two most beautiful operas. There is no need to go through it closely, as
in the case of _Tristan_. The methods are those of _Tristan_; we have
the themes used as _leit-motifs_, and also long passages woven out of
them and new matter; we have the harmonic freedom of _Tristan_, the same
gorgeous orchestration, and even more than the same marvellous
polyphonic writing. But, broadly speaking, the drama counts for
comparatively little, and the opera consists of a series of enchanting
songs and scenes. The very title tells us that we are not simply to
follow the destinies of a hero and heroine. The person mostly in
evidence is Hans Sachs, a sort of heavy father, who has some of the most
glorious music. The young lover comes along--Walther--and tries to win