"
All at once the knowledge dawns upon them that great love cannot be
consummated in the day of the world, but that it points to a life
beyond. They have discovered the final meaning of life and the
world--the annihilation of individual life and death through
love--analogous to the last wisdom of the mystic: "To become God." "I
myself am the world." Death is the inevitable corollary of supreme love.
But as they tremblingly yearn for and await the inconceivable, earth
once more stretches out her arms to them, the dream of metaphysical
existence melts slowly away. In the orchestration _phantoms of the day,
dreams of morning_, suppress the new, the divined conception.
At the opening of the third act the motif for horns and violas gradually
ascending and dying away, expresses the unspeakable dreariness and
senselessness of material life, after its profound meaning, the
re-creation of the world by love, has been lost. This feeling of
absolute senselessness dominates the awakening sleeper; Tristan,
interpreting it in the sense of Schopenhauer as the universal
aimlessness of the world and of life, is merely expressing the doom of
his own longing for the supreme: he has divined and has lost the
loftiest value.
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