The last words of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, sung by Isolde, are "hochste Lust" - highest bliss. It is typical of of Tristan and Isolde that this is a paradox. Corpses surround her. Her adulterous lover, Tristan, his loyal servant, Kurwenal, and the man who loved but betrayed Tristan, Melot, all are dead.
Her righrful husband, king Marke, stands, literally impotent. Her loving servant Brangane is forgotten. They have all been left far behind. and that's the point. Life as we know it and supposdedly crave it has been left far behind. Tristan isn't dead, but lives more truly than any of those breathing around Isolde --- than any of us. Nor does she die; she joins tristan in the life most of us can only aspire to death.

Sometimes Isolde's last outpouring is called it " a transfiguration." Tristan and Isolde are reborn through the would made by love; they burn through this too solid flesh into a state of being that is engulfing, oceanic. This is the realm of day : values, good and evil, duty, loyalty; that is a state of merely mechanical being. Night is where the heart beats and the blood course through the body and evey sense is heightened. Those ideas are the center of their lover duet in Act Two. Melot who loves Tristan and longs for Isolde interrupts the duet. He has sprung a trap and brings in the King, who loves both. Typcial of this most loved are delivered up to die. Those who are owed the most - as Tristan owes his great King fealty, as Isolde owes her good husband fidelity - are betrayed. But Tristan and Isolde are both betrayers and betrayed. In fact when they drink the supposed poison in Act One - it's a love potion - Isolde's first words to Tristan after she has drunk are : "Treuloser Holder!" Untranslatable, but essentially "Faithless most True One".

But the way of thinking is day thinking, to be banished through the terrible suffering of Tristan, dying slowly of Melot's wound in Act three, and through the despair of Isolde, arriving too late to repair the wound. In her final cry, Isolde links music with the sea. A sublime beauty, heard only by those who go where no one dares go, engulfs her. "In dem wogenden Schwall, in dem tonenden Schall, in des Welt-Atems All" --- "in the surging surf, in the singing waves in the vast breath of the whole world" -- there will she sink., joined forever with Tristan, alive in etrnal night, toghther, brilliant as the stars.

Tristan und isolde is the most shocking opera ever written. It was meant to be. The implications of Wagner's text and the indescribable music he invented to articulate it are unique. A good performance should leave an audience in the same contradictory state as the characters in the drama - despairingly elated, exhaustedly exuberant. We whould be senseless with the sense of an enkless beauty just beyond, and well worth dying for. and if we're sane, we should be uncertain if we should run from the opera house and take a cold shower or linger transfixed and sweaty until the next performance.