XX ISOLDE

The opera house, notwithstanding its great parquet and five tiers almost encircling the auditorium, holding some twenty-two hundred people, was always well filled; but Ordham had never seen it as crowded as to-night. There had been an official announcement that the King would honour the season’s last performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the blue lights were burning all over the house, softening its classic severity into the mysterious twilight of some vast sea grotto whose surges held captive and coloured the rays of the moon. Of course, at the last moment the King would change his royal mind; everybody felt sure of that; yet, so obstinate is hope, even society had turned out, satisfied to honour Styr, at least, before departing for the country. The boxes beside the stage, and at the back, flanking the King’s (which rose from the balkon to the last of the galleries), always reserved for royalties, their households and guests, were generally empty. To-night they were filled, and, with the front row of the fashionable balkon, gave the house a smarter appearance than usual; the good hausfrau, genuine lover of all the arts as she was, never thought of wearing anything but her street frock, consisting at this time of a skirt, overskirt, and basque—whose points stood upright, back and front. Her daughter, perchance, enlivened the useful shade of her costume by a bit of pink or blue tulle about the turned-in neck of her basque. The good man was shabby and comfortable in his business suit. Had it not been for the liberal patronage of officers, the parkett would have presented a dreary expanse, and even the fashionable women, unless the court was to be present, seldom thought the opera worthy of full dress. To-night, however, there were many bare necks and fine gowns, jewels and feathers, in the balkon and loges, and even in the front rows of the parkett, which many, Ordham among them, preferred as affording a better view of the performers. The orchestra, under its great conductor, Lévy, never fretted the most sensitive eardrum.

Few sit until the last bell has rung, and Ordham stood with the rest, his back to the stage, viewing what to him was always an interesting sight, and feeling so blithe and happy in his regained freedom, his mother’s promise, received that morning, to persuade his creditors to hold their peace until after his examinations, the flutter of anticipation which he always enjoyed when about to hear Styr sing one of her great r?les, that long after, when he sat in this opera house for the last time in his life, he recalled that night and his boyish spirits, and wondered if the world had remodelled itself meanwhile.

He saw many that he knew, and bowed in his formal way, lit now and again by his quick smile, so full of youthful brilliancy and sweetness that tired befeathered old women shook their heads and doubted if a young man of so many attractions would ever amount to anything. But when Nachmeister was favoured with that smile to-night, she nodded her head sagely and felt that she could depart for her spa in peace on the morrow. No man in love, or nearing the border-land of tumult, could smile like that. She was a guest in a box beside the King’s, the one allotted to Lola Montez during her brief reign in Bavaria, when Ludwig I was king. She too had been elevated to the Bavarian aristocracy, and no royalty won more than a passing glance when Countess Landsfeldt sat magnificently in this box, flashing her bold black eyes at the patricians that feared and snubbed her; far less clever than Styr, few doors had opened to her. Princess Nachmeister was surrounded by a bevy of young princesses, pretty with youth, but insipid, as most young royalties are. The Queen-mother sat alone in the great box, looking old and sad, not a vestige of her beauty surviving, nor even of that air which is supposed to distinguish a queen from a hausfrau. She was dowdy and unattractive, but she cared not; to-morrow she would be in her humble retreat, Elbingen-Alp, alone with her memories and the new consolation she had found in the Church of Rome. She, too, hoped for the presence of her son to-night, but she, too, knew that he would not come.

It was half-past six when word came from the palace that his Majesty, indisposed, had left for Linderhof; the last bell rang, darkness descended upon the house, the overture began. As Ordham sat with his eyes closed lest they be diverted by the fat red necks and plastered heads, which shone in the dusk, mayhap by hungry jaws munching chocolate or peppermint, his high spirits slid down into a fathomless abyss; that tide of sweet despair swirled round and over him, driving repose, content, gayety from every chamber of his soul, and filling it with unrest, vague delicious terrors, that made him move his arms restlessly until he succumbed utterly.

Never had been and never will be so full an expression of unsatisfied longing. Surge upon surge from the opening phrase, presaging a yearning that is not all bliss and a torment that is not all pain, so long as mortals may die; surge upon surge of aching passion, sweet oblivion, mortal disappointment, infinite desire, a love that only the immortals could satisfy and only death can quench. The imagination reels along with this appalling betrayal of mortal love. The curse and the boon of imagination, the indomitable pursuit of happiness, even while the mind holds its sides like a chuckling monk, the inevitable awaking, the cry for death, annihilation, Nirvana,—all and far more are in this mighty tonal dirge of the human heart to lift Wagner’s masterpiece to the apex of all the masterpieces the world has preserved.

Unsatisfied longing! Ordham never listened to this music-drama that he did not wonder its keynote should possess him irresistibly throughout the performance and desert him when it was over. Even in the foyer, during the pauses, he was the cool young modern with inherited experiences in his brain that pushed him far from the sources of nature; but when the surges beat on his spirit once more he was the immemorial lover.

On the stage Styr was always beautiful and never more so than as Isolde, with her soft golden wig, her dark eyes enlarged, their natural mobility enhanced by subtle arts which other stage women secretly studied in vain, her ivory-white luminous skin. In the first act she wore a flowing gown of an imperial blue shade, the perfect lines of her long arms enticing under floating gauze, her long throat rising bare with the plastic firmness which she might have inherited from the women that inspired the dreams of Solomon.

When Isolde raised herself slowly from the cushions of the couch in the pavilion of the ship which was bearing her to the old king of Cornwall she had consented to marry, abandoning something of her first attitude of utter despair, and lifting her head toward the joyous singing of the sailors, her eyes in one long look expressed everything. The dullest could not entertain the delusion that here was merely an unhappy young princess of “Irenland,” speeding against her will to fulfil a detestable marriage, but a woman of the maturest passions, who had already drunk deep of the cup of love, scornful of every law that might exist for princess or peasant, and who had watched and waited, and accepted the fact of betrayal.

And the audience felt itself, not in the presence merely of a woman eaten with hatred, fury, desire for vengeance, but of a primeval force, passion incarnate, such as Earth unlooses in convulsions that have annihilated millions and buried continents. No other Isolde has ever been as great as Styr, for no other has been able to suggest this ferocious approach of a devastating force, this hurricane sweeping across the mind’s invisible plain, tearing at the very foundations of life. And all this she expressed before singing a note, with her staring moving eyes, her eloquent body, still and concealed as it was, a gesture of the hand. It was a concentration of the mental faculties, such as gives weak women superhuman physical strength in moments of terror or anger; in her own case they were whipped up like a whirlwind by the released horrors in her soul, and used with a supreme exercise of art that made her the risen Isolde.

When she started up, crying out to the wind and waves to shatter the ship, the passion in her voice hardly expressed the rage consuming her in plainer terms than that first long silent moment had done.

Styr’s transitions from wildness to gloom, to bitter wildness again, then to a regal imperiousness, when she ordered Br?ngane to summon Tristan (which must have made the royal women present envy the majesty of soul that could inform poor commonplace flesh with so dread a mien), were all done with that complete abandonment to her r?le of the great artist who never for a moment addresses her audience. Then, once more, she betrayed in her strained eyes and body her outraged womanhood as Br?ngane was courteously repulsed by Tristan (alas! very fat), standing with folded arms at the helm, and taunted by Kurwenal and the sailors. Upon the tirewoman’s return, after a moment’s futile attempt at self-control, she broke forth into a furious denunciation of the false lover, mingling it with bitter reminiscences of a time so fatal to herself when he was ill and at her mercy, and she healed and loved him. The anger gradually faded from her voice, which softened into the most exquisite tenderness and sweetness. “His eyes on mine were fastened. . . . the sword dropped from my fingers!” In that brooding moment every woman in the audience recalled the unforgettable, the eyes of the young widened with terror and hope.

But that moment was brief. Her wrongs beat upon her brain again. With their recital to the trembling Br?ngane she worked herself up to that tremendous climax where, flinging her back against the drawn curtains, with arms outstretched, she screamed out her curses, invoking vengeance and death.

Never theatrical, and conveying the impression throughout the greater part of that act, in which she ran the gamut of the passions, that she let escape but the smoke of the terrible fires below, when she did give way to ungovernable fury, she gashed the hidden rivers of blood before the footlights to such a pitch that it is no wonder the Germans keep on calling for more sensation, more thrill, with an insatiety which will work the ruin of music and drama in their nation unless some genius totally different from Wagner rises and diverts them into safer channels. Beyond Wagner in his own domain there is nothing but sensationalism. Rather, he took all the gold out of the mine he discovered and left but base alloy for the misguided disciple.

Not the least impressive moment in this terrible act was when Styr, after staring at the phials in the casket while the idea of death matured in her desperate brain,—death for herself as well as for the man that betrayed her,—raised her head slowly, her body to its full height. She looked the very genius of death, a malign fate awaiting its moment to settle upon the ripest fruit, the blithest hopes. A subtle gesture of her hand seemed to deprive it of its flesh, leave it a talon which held a scythe; by the same token one saw the skeleton under the blue robe; her mouth twisted into a grin, her eyes sank. It was all over in half a minute, it was but a fleeting suggestion, but it flashed out upon every sensitive soul present a picture of the charnel house, the worm, death robbed of its poetry, stripped to the bones by the hot blasts from that caldron of hate.

When, having compelled Tristan to drink the love potion which Br?ngane, who has no taste for crime, mixed instead of the draught of death, when, from the dark abysses of suicide and murder, her soul rose slowly and dazedly, but free, to the heights of the mightiest of all the passions, Styr was so superb in her abandonment, so sweet in her surrender, she carried this act of many emotions to a climax so acute and so satisfying, that few in her audience but felt the sequel should be given on the following night.

The curtain went down as Isolde was torn from Tristan’s arms by her tirewomen and old King Mark boarded the ship. Styr appeared again and again in response to loud cries, clapping, and stamping, which lasted for nearly ten minutes. But at last the audience went forth to refresh itself at the buffet. Ordham did not rise at once. He sat next to the central rope and was undisturbed. He was holding fast to that last picture of Isolde with her dazed yet illuminated eyes in which the love allowance of Earth seemed to be concentrated, when his own eyes unwittingly fell upon the woman that occupied the seat in front of him. She had neatly turned back her overskirt and skirt, and from the capacious pocket of her petticoat was extracting two large sandwiches, a slab of chocolate, and an apple. He gave an almost audible groan and went out into the foyer to exchange “Wundersch?ns” with his friends.

The second act, greatest of all love scenes as it is, is far less of a strain on the audience than the first. When Tristan and Isolde, having expressed their joy in meeting in that succession of ecstatic love cries which makes the words feeble and superfluous, sank down upon the bench (that astigmatic couch!) and the love duet began, Ordham once more closed his eyes and listened, with his soul detached from his body, to that voice of fluid gold, melting, fainting, fiery, dreaming, despairing, expressing every phase of the phenomenon of love. Never has the ecstasy and the futility of love been expressed as here, and when Styr, her voice returning from those starry voids where Isolde’s soul had borne Tristan’s, passionately demanded death as the only relief for the insupportable tension of body and spirit, although she did not move, she conveyed the impression of a still more complete abandon. The tenor, being of immense proportions, and with his eyes seldom roving from the baton of the conductor, conveyed no such impression, or the scene might have been unbearably descriptive. But in Germany either the tenor or the soprano, by the entire respectability of their earthly mediums, can be relied upon to modify the most licentious opera ever written.

As Ordham did not like this particular tenor, he remained in the foyer until Tristan had finished his bleating and ranting in the last act—that vicious test of a tenor’s histrionic powers, as of his vocal endurance—and bribed the doorkeeper to let him enter later and stand while Styr sang the Liebestod. Sometimes she rose to her feet as if impelled upward by the intensity of her vision; but to-night she chose to exhibit the physical weakness of delirium as the soul struggled free of the relaxing flesh, the ecstasy of death. Styr always triumphed anew in that supreme effort of Wagner, and on this night when the curtain fell the audience “went quite mad.” While the house was ringing with “Styr!” “Styr!” “Styr!” Ordham conceived a sudden resolution. He had invited Princess Nachmeister, Mr. Trowbridge, and several other friends to sup with him at Maximilia; and although nothing was better known in Munich than that Styr never accepted invitations to supper after one of her performances, was never to be seen, for that matter, he determined to persuade her to join his party. It would gratify his vanity hugely to succeed where all had failed, and he craved the new experience of talking with her immediately after she had created the greatest of her illusions.

He had been behind the scenes with Kilchberg, who loved a maiden in the chorus, and he knew the location of Styr’s dressing room, although he had never caught a glimpse of her in or near it. He was determined to see her to-night; and he did!

He had made his way across the back of the stage, passed open doors of supers who were frankly disrobing, too hungry to observe the minor formalities, and was approaching the room of the prima donna, when its door was suddenly flung open, a little man was rushed out by the collar, twirled round, and hurled almost at his feet. The Styr, her own hair down, her face livid, her eyes blazing, shouted hoarsely at the object of her wrath, who took to his heels. The intendant rushed upon the scene. Styr screamed out that the minor official had dared to come to her dressing-room with a criticism upon the set of her wig, and that if ever she were spoken to again at the close of a performance by any member of the staff, from the intendant down, she would leave Munich the same night. The great functionary fled, for she threatened to box his own ears unless he took himself out of her sight, and the Styr stormed up and down, beat the scenery with her hands, stamped, hissed, her pallor deepening every second, until it was like white fire. Ordham, half fascinated, half convulsed, at this glimpse of the artistic temperament in full blast, stared at her with his mouth open. She looked like some fury of the coal-pit, flying up from the sooty galleries on the wings of her voice. Her words had been delivered with a strange broad burring accent, which Ordham found more puzzling than her tantrum.

Suddenly she caught sight of him. If possible her fury waxed.

“You! You!” she screamed. “Go! Get out of here! How dare you come near me? I hate you! I hate the whole world when I have finished an opera! They ought to give me somebody to kill! Go! I don’t care whether you ever speak to me again or not—”

Ordham, not knowing whether he should feel insulted or philosophical, beat a hasty retreat; and, remaining late at Maximilia, had no time to ponder upon the matter that night. He had barely awakened in the morning when he received the following note:

“Dear Mr. Ordham: You will recall that I told you it would be better to think of me as a stage woman only?—although at that time I did not include the greenroom among your possible experiences. If I cannot make you understand the fearful state of excitement which an opera like Isolde induces, then indeed I hope you will not forgive me, never come near me again. But I fancy that you have already forgiven me. I was a wild beast. The actress born with the power to portray Isolde has it in her to be the worst woman in the world—much simpler than to reach those heights (her heights) toward which, alas! there is little pulsion. It is all over a few hours later, after I have taken a long walk in the Englischergarten, then eaten a prosaic supper of cold ham and fowl, eggs perchance, and salad! But for an hour after those triumphs I pay! I pay!

“Do not reply to this, but come on Thursday to supper or not, as you will.

“Margarethe Styr.”