Wagner intuitively perceives that sin is a component
part of the supreme sublimation of love and personality; Tristan must
curse himself and the beloved woman because love, as the last
consequence of sin, demands the love-death, which can never find
completion; "The terrible draught myself I have brewed it! A curse on
thee, terrible draught! A curse on him who brewed it!"
In the music at the end of the third act, which is known by the (not
quite relevant) title of "Isolde's Love-death," Wagner, after previously
expressing by Tristan's last words, "Do I near light?" the inadequacy of
the physical senses--attempts to describe the metaphysical condition of
the unity of love, which to our consciousness can only have the negative
characteristics of the unthinkable and intangible--the unconscious. This
he tried to accomplish artistically by making use of the senses, by
trying to convey in terms of sound, light, scent, what he understood by
this complete immersion in the swirling totality of cosmic life--"_in
des Weltatem's wehendem All_.
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