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............