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Katherine, at Nuremberg, with the singing of a chorale to organ accompaniment. During the chorale and its interludes a quiet love-scene is being enacted between Eva, daughter of the wealthy goldsmith Veit Pogner, and Walter von Stolzing, a noble young knight. The attraction is mutual. Eva is ready to become his bride, but it is necessary that her husband should be a mastersinger.
To thoroughly comprehend the story, it is necessary to understand the conditions one had to fulfil before he could be a mastersinger. First of all he must master the "Tabulatur," which included the rules and prohibitions. Then he must have the requisite acquaintance with the various methods of rhyming verse, and with the manner of fitting appropriate music to it.
It is significant that the very title he gave his work is a peremptory warning to us of what to expect: it is not Hans Sachs, nor Walther von Stolzing, nor even the Mastersinger, etc., but in the plural form, the Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
In the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, incorporated with the Municipal Library of Nuremberg, there are several volumes of mastersingers' songs purchased from an old mastersinger some 135 years ago, and from these the students may learn the structure and spirit of the mastersongs of the period of the opera as well as earlier and later periods, though he will find all the instruction he needs in any dozen or twenty of the 4275 mastersongs written by Hans Sachs.
Thereupon the pride of the suffering mastersinger reasserted itself; for while his wife painfully assisted him to mount the stairs, he harshly denied her right to sit in judgment upon his vocal gifts, and sternly ordered her to be silent. But even now this wonderful night-adventure was by no means over. The entire swarm moved once more in the direction of the inn.
From it he got the rules which governed the meeting of the mastersingers, like that which follows the religious service in the church of St. Catherine in the first act, and the singular names of the melodies to which, according to David, the candidates for mastersingers' honors were in the habit of improvising their songs. In one instance he made a draft on an authentic mastersinger melody.
Walther von Stolzing, a young Franconian knight, loves Eva, the daughter of Pogner the goldsmith; but Pogner has made up his mind that Eva shall marry none but a Mastersinger, that is to say, a member of the guild devoted to the cultivation of music and poetry, for which the town was famous.
One who had partially mastered the Tabulatur was termed a "scholar;" the one who had thoroughly learned it, a "schoolman;" the one who could improvise verses, a "poet;" and the one who could set music to his verses, a "mastersinger."
I HEARD, once again for the first time, Richard Wagner's overture to the Mastersinger: it is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous, heavy, latter-day art, which has the pride to presuppose two centuries of music as still living, in order that it may be understood: it is an honour to Germans that such a pride did not miscalculate!
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