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"That," considers Kothner, without a gleam, "comes under the head of secular subject. And now, Master Beckmesser, pray shut yourself in!" With a thin pose of reluctance, Beckmesser takes his way toward the curtained cabinet. "A sour office and to-day especially. The chalk, I surmise, will be troublesomely in requisition. Know, Sir Knight, Sixtus Beckmesser is the Marker.
The poet, Walther von der Vogelweid, he it is who has been my master!" Sachs has listened with a surprised, charmed sympathy. He nods beamingly: "A good master!" "But long dead!" snaps Beckmesser; "How could he learn the canons from him?" Kothner proceeds without comment to the next question: "In what school did you learn to sing?"
Kothner orders Walther at the close of his reading. "Here, in this chair?" It is the tall carved chair in which he had cast himself earlier. "As is the custom of the school!" Even so much of restraint as the obligation to sing on a given spot is repugnant to the spirit of the highborn youth, who yet is undertaking to satisfy the most law-ridden assemblage he could have met with.
"Sachs is here! What more is necessary?" sneers Beckmesser. Fritz Kothner, the baker, in the capacity of speaker, calls the roll.
"It is my opinion that you had better give it up." "Give it up?... Well, hardly! I can easily beat all the others, if only you will not sing. I am certain that no one will understand the song, but I am building upon your popularity." Sachs abandons him to his fate, and declares the song-contest open. Kothner summons the contestants, "And let the oldest," he calls, "come first.
"That is what will presently be seen," Sachs interposes warmly; "If his art is of the right sort, and he duly proves it, of what consequence is it from whom he learned it?" Whereupon Kothner proceeds, addressing Walther: "Are you prepared, now, at once, to attempt an original master-song, new in conception, original both in text and tune?"
He has climbed upon the platform; he sharply draws the curtains. Two apprentices take down from the wall and bring forward the Leges Tabulaturoe. With pomp and flourish Kothner reads them off to Walther. The "tabulature" gives the straight and narrow laws upon which a song must be constructed, to earn its singer the dignity of mastership. "Now take your seat in the singing-chair!"
The generous Sachs, feeling the something grudging in the attitude of the masters, reminds them that it had long been one of the rules made by themselves that an applicant being a lord or a peasant should have no significance, that inquiry concerning art alone should be made of one desiring to become a master-singer. Kothner passes thereupon to the question: "Of what master are you a disciple?"
When this baritone was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company his paraphernalia for preparing his favourite food went everywhere with him on tour. John Brenon. Campanari was to appear as Kothner in Die Meistersinger, a character with no singing to do after the first act, although he appears in the procession in the third act.
Beckmesser jeers; "Your song no doubt smacks of its teachers!" "What do you think, masters," inquires Kothner, upon this hopeless revelation, "shall I proceed with the questions? It strikes me his lordship's answers are altogether wide of the mark."
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