Act II
Relayed from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Tristan and Parsifal were both running in Wagner's mind while he was at work on the Nibelung's Ring, and in the summer of 1857 he put the big work aside, partly because he had begun to doubt whether there was any chance of its ever coming to performance. Just then he was waited on by an envoy from the Emperor of Brazil with a request that he would compose an opera specially for Rio de Janeiro. Taken somewhat by surprise, Wagner gave no definite answer, but began work nevertheless on Tristan. He has left it on record that the poem and the music were written with 'an artist's perfect abandonment in his task', and he had no doubt himself that the union of poetry and music was the most completely satisfying of any he had achieved. But some years elapsed before the opera was produced, one disappointment after another delaying the performance, and only gradually did it win its way to the position it now holds.
The story of Tristan is known to every good Briton; the germ of it is in our Sir Thomas Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur'. In Wagner's opera, the second Act is chiefly given to a long love duet between Tristan and Isolda at night in the garden of the King's Palace.
At the beginning, Brangane, Isolda's maid, is restraining her impatient mistress from signalling to Tristan until the King and his Court are safely out of reach, on a nocturnal hunt. Brangane suspects the Knight, Melot, of having arranged the hunt as a ruse, and, at the end of the act, her fears are justified. The King and his followers return to find the lovers together, and Tristan is mortally wounded by Melot's sword.