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In other chapters I will point to passages, especially in the Ring, where quite obviously the voice part has been laboriously worked in with instrumental music already conceived in its final form; but that was in Wagner's later years, when the free inspiration, enthusiasm and energy of his Tristan and Lohengrin and Mastersingers days had for ever departed.
Sachs, at the request of the presiding officer of the guild, also offers him the medal as the insignia of membership in the guild of mastersingers.
Wind screaming through the pines, the plash of rain, the driving of thunder-clouds these are the pictorial inspiration of the Ring as surely as old Nuremberg is the pictorial inspiration of the Mastersingers. These Scandinavian gods are the divinities of river and wood and mountain, and Wagner made full use of them.
In the Germanic Museum I found a wooden tablet dating back to 1581, painted by one Franz Hein. It preserves portraits of four distinguished members of the mastersingers' guild. There is a middle panel occupied by two pictures, the upper showing King David, the patron saint of the guild, so forgetful of chronology as to be praying before a crucifix, the lower a meeting of the mastersingers.
The list of technicalities which David rattles off fills Walther with dismay, and he makes up his mind to trust to his native inspiration. The Mastersingers now assemble, and Pogner announces that Eva's hand is to be the prize of the singing contest next day. Walther now steps forward as a candidate for admission to the guild.
He knew the tale in Heine's form of it, and had thought of adapting it; but it was the sea gave the idea birth in his imagination: without the sea the Dutchman is inconceivable. The Dutchman, the whole of the Ring and the Mastersingers of Nuremberg are all operas in which the scenic environment is the inspiration.
Technically there is no advance or change in Lohengrin: the counterpoint and interweaving of themes of Tristan and the Mastersingers were to come a few years later. Indeed, there is less of Wagner the contrapuntal virtuoso in Lohengrin than in Tannhäuser. In the music, as in the drama, the second act presents a total contrast to the first. The music of the first is throughout full of sunlight.
The food for its satire, too, is most admirably chosen, for no feature of the social life of that place and period is more amiably absurd than the efforts of the handicraftsmen and tradespeople, with their prosaic surroundings, to keep alive by dint of pedantic formularies the spirit of minstrelsy, which had a natural stimulus in the chivalric life of the troubadours and minnesingers of whom the mastersingers thought themselves the direct and legitimate successors.
It is perfectly clear that fate meant him to write the Mastersingers and Tristan, and at times she was cruel to him only to be kind to humanity. It is true she seems to have made a mistake when she allowed him to complete Parsifal but that matter lies as yet many chapters ahead.
Catherine in the afternoon, and Walther, knowing nothing of the rules of the mastersingers, some of which have hurriedly been outlined to him by David, a youngster who is an apprentice at shoemaking and also songmaking, fails, though Hans Sachs, a master in both crafts, recognizes evidences of genius in the knight's song, and espouses his cause as against Beckmesser, the town clerk, who aims at acquiring Pogner's fortune by winning his daughter.
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