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It is not difficult to read in the story of Walther's struggles against the prejudice and pedantry of the Mastersingers a suggestion of Wagner's own life-history, and if Beckmesser represents the narrow malice of critics who are themselves composers and these were always Wagner's bitterest enemies Sachs may stand for the enlightened public, which was the first to appreciate the nobility of the composer's aim.

He administers chastisement with a smile and chooses for its subject only things which are temporary aberrations from the good. What is strong, and true, and pure, and wholesome in the art of the mastersingers he permits to pass through his satirical fires unscathed.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, letters, so long monopolized by the clergy, passed from their hands to those of the princes and nobles; and in the next century the songs of the minnesingers gave way to the pedantic craft of the mastersingers. A great intellectual regeneration followed the Reformation, but it was of brief duration.

I have already spoken of the perfect fusion of vocal and orchestral parts which we find in Tristan and the Mastersingers. To that perfection Wagner had not attained when he began the Ring; and much of this first speech of Wotan consists of notes written simply to fit in with the Valhalla theme.

But it is not to see his enemies roughly handled that we go to The Mastersingers: it is to hear one of Wagner's two most beautiful operas. There is no need to go through it closely, as in the case of Tristan.

But the old saying, easy reading means hard writing, is true in the case of the Mastersingers. We have only to glance at Wagner's letters to see the labour all his later works cost him, and his incessant complaints about the state of his nerves are significant. The writing of the Mastersingers was spread over six years.

He studied diligently the ancient poetic lore of Germany, from Frankish Legends of Saint George, and Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, down through Nibelungen Lieds, and Helden-Buchs, and Songs of the Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reinecke Foxes, and Death-Dancesand Lamentations of Damned Souls, into the bright, sunny land of harvests, where, amid the golden grain and the blue corn-flowers, walk the modern bards, and sing.

The overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint by the standard of Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can realize how atrocious it used to sound to musicians of the old school.

which opens the prelude, it is a strong, simple melody, made on the intervals of the diatonic scale, square-cut in rhythm, firm and dignified, and, like the mastersingers, complacent and a trifle pompous in stride.

I meet with so little that is encouraging, that it would really be of untold import to me if, at least in Dresden, things should go according to my wish!" These excerpts afford some notion of the struggles and disappointments of this time struggles that were to be repeated when, more than twenty years later, Tristan and the Mastersingers were produced in Munich.