Emily invited Eliot to join her party, along with her friend Margaret Farrand, for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Boston Opera House on 1 December 1913. This third memorable event (following the charade and stunt show) was independent of the Hinkley connection and momentous enough to provide the earliest scenes for The Waste Land.
The sailors’ chorus on board ship in Act I, as the pair fall in love, was to remain with Eliot and introduce his memory of Emily Hale as ‘the hyacinth girl’. Her effect on him is blind and lasting love. In Act III of the opera, Tristan, bleeding and fatally wounded, needs ‘the healing Lady’; after a delay, Isolde appears but too late to save him. She has come to die with him, and her voice calls him back: ‘his heart swells and, brave and full, pulses in his breast’. This strain too will stay with the poet. The finale of The Waste Land will recall that pulse in the breast as though his own. He would spell out for Emily what followed: ‘After that night at the opera I was completely conscious of it [love], and quite shaken to pieces.’
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