XXXVIII ISOLDA FURIOSA

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. All were strained forward; all, with what power of thought was left in them, questioning whether the Styr were giving a new and sensational rendering of Isolde’s character, or if something had occurred to excite her beyond bounds and she were venting her anger in the sympathetic r?le. If so, what was it? Could she be in love with the tenor, she, the great Styr? And had he, the good devoted husband, trifled with and flouted her? But these speculations were barely formulated until later, when they were feverishly discussing the phenomenon; all were held, thrilled, half fearing that something real and terrible was about to happen before their eyes, vaguely apprehensive that never again would a stage performance satisfy their deep and persistent craving for vicarious emotions.

When Isolde rushed to the back of the pavilion and flung herself against the curtain to shriek out her curses, she almost swept Brang?ne into the wings, and left but little enthusiasm in that now terrified artist to “throw herself upon Isolde with impetuous tenderness,” to ejaculate admiration and consolation. She, at least, knew that Styr was not deliberately giving an intensified rendering of the great r?le, but was in a mood to kill somebody. She shivered for her neck; those long working fingers looked like flexible steel.

“Curse him, the villain! Curses on his head! Vengeance! Death! Death for both of us!” Styr might have been setting free the pent-up demons in the hearts of all the women, good and bad, on the surface of the globe, and perchance those in the audience that had no such blessed means of relief gave a deep unconscious sigh of satisfaction.

When she gloated over the phial containing the death potion, Brang?ne’s apprehensions were not quelled until she had informed herself that it was really empty, for by this time she was convinced that there was a feud to the death between the hochdramatische and the tenor—tremblingly awaiting his cue without.

There was no subtle hypnotic suggestion of death to-night in Styr’s gestures. Her art was no longer under the command of her will, but she radiated death and damnation as Tristan entered, and for years after he told of his conviction that the Todesmotif in the orchestra was his own dirge, and resigned himself to die as he lifted the fatal goblet to his lips. He believed that she had rubbed poison on the rim, whose very fumes would rise and slay him even although he forbore to touch it; and his quivering nerves were untranquillized by the knowledge of his innocence: might she not have loved him long in secret and resented his virtuous indifference? Even when, the love potion working, she rushed into his arms, he said that the hate in her eyes never abated for a second and he expected her to bite or strangle him.

But at last the act, with its insupportable excitement, was over, and the audience, almost hysterical, forgot their accustomed refreshment as they stood by their seats or paced the foyer, discussing the extraordinary performance and wishing their King were present. They could arrive at no conclusion save that Styr was the greatest actress even Germany had ever seen, whether something had happened to put her into an awful temper or not.

In the second act, there being no opportunity to express either hatred or fury, it would seem that Styr was bent upon demonstrating that the artist in her could not long be submerged by any turmoil in the woman. Never had she sung her part in the love duet with a more poignant sweetness, a more perishing languor, although she would not permit the tenor to come within a foot of her. She did not rise to real greatness, however, until the third act, when, in the last lines of the Liebestod, she stood with rigid body and strained upraised face, every line in both, every round noble vibrant tone, expressing the savage exultation of that tormented spirit at the approach of death. As she sank upon Tristan, who had one eye open, King Mark and his men watched her narrowly, for everybody on the stage was uneasy, half fearing that this terrifying creature, always an alien in their midst, but awaited the final moment to wreak her vengeance. When the tenor reached his stuffy ugly little flat that night he overwhelmed his Frau with caresses, and sat until nearly morning eating and drinking, the happiest man in Munich.