But that moment was brief. Her wrongs beat upon her brain again. With their recital to the trembling Brängane she worked herself up to that tremendous climax where, flinging her back against the drawn curtains, with arms outstretched, she screamed out her curses, invoking vengeance and death.
Never theatrical, and conveying the impression throughout the greater part of that act, in which she ran the gamut of the passions, that she let escape but the smoke of the terrible fires below, when she did give way to ungovernable fury, she gashed the hidden rivers of blood before the footlights to such a pitch that it is no wonder the Germans keep on calling for more sensation, more thrill, with an insatiety which will work the ruin of music and drama in their nation unless some genius totally different from Wagner rises and diverts them into safer channels. Beyond Wagner in his own domain there is nothing but sensationalism. Rather, he took all the gold out of the mine he discovered and left but base alloy for the misguided disciple.
Not the least impressive moment in this terrible act was when Styr, after staring at the phials in the casket while the idea of death matured in her desperate brain,—death for herself as well as for the man that betrayed her,—raised her head slowly, her body to its full height. She looked the very genius of death, a malign fate awaiting its moment to settle upon the ripest fruit, the blithest hopes. A subtle gesture of her hand seemed to deprive it of its flesh, leave it a talon which held a scythe; by the same token one saw the skeleton under the blue robe; her mouth twisted into a grin, her eyes sank. It was all over in half a minute, it was but a fleeting suggestion, but it flashed out upon every sensitive soul present a picture of the charnel house, the worm, death robbed of its poetry, stripped to the bones by the hot blasts from that caldron of hate.
When, having compelled Tristan to drink the love potion which Brängane, who has no taste for crime, mixed instead of the draught of death, when, from the dark abysses of suicide and murder, her soul rose slowly and dazedly, but free, to the heights of the mightiest of all the passions, Styr was so superb in her abandonment, so sweet in her surrender, she carried this act of many emotions to a climax so acute and so satisfying, that few in her audience but felt the sequel should be given on the following night.