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Updated: June 14, 2025
Most readers are aware that in Germany it was the custom for the organist to play short interludes between the lines of hymn-tunes a preposterous trick, but one which Bach put to a splendid use; and here Wagner transfers these interludes to the orchestra and makes them serve as a voice for Walther's feelings on seeing Eva for a second time: on the first occasion, the day before, they had fallen in love with each other.
Her wistful longing is expressed in two perfect melodies, one new, the other shaped from a fragment of Walther's first song; these two are gone over again and again, always varied and growing more intense in expressiveness, until Eva's secret is no secret from the audience, though Sachs himself is supposed not to be at first quite sure about it.
Walther's trial song, with its gorgeous instrumentation, and the rush of the winds of March through budding woods, is even finer than the first; and it contains passages which are employed with exquisite effect in the next Act. It stands first for Sachs' honest longing for the new; and afterwards it is made to express the longing in his soul for other things.
The urge, the climbing effect of the song, are owing, it is plain enough, to Walther's being really inside of it, to his having cast his whole self into it, with his straining after a goal, his desperate necessity to win. In this case, verily the style is the man. "Begin!" runs the sense of that perfect song, "Thus shouted Spring in the woods, till they rang again!
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.
Sachs leans back and listens again to the echo in his memory of Walther's song. "I feel it," he meditates, lending ear to the persistent voice in his brain, "and cannot understand it. I cannot retain it nor yet can forget it! And if for a moment I grasp it, to measure it is beyond me. But how should I hope to grasp that which struck me as illimitable?
Walther's unprecedented leaping to his feet in the heat of inspiration has given offence to this one; the other terms his singing "empty battering at the ear-drums." They are about to subscribe unanimously to Beckmesser's verdict that he has lost his case, when Sachs's voice breaks in upon the confusion. He has listened to Walther in complete self-forgetful absorption.
With its contrapuntal weaving it leads to the final chorus, and also it puts Sachs back again into the position from which the importance of Walther's song has thrust him: it is a last reminder that the opera is a glorification of song, and that the masters have a sacred trust to guard song pedantry and commercialism.
Appropriated, lastly, and refashioned by the hand of an original genius, the pastourelle gave to German poetry the crowning jewel of its Minnesang in Walther's 'Under der linden, with its irrepressibly roguish refrain: Kuster mich? wol tûsentstunt: tandaradei, seht wie rôt mir ist der munt!
The song-trial is over. The apprentices in merry tumult take apart the Marker's closet, hurry off benches and seats, rapidly clearing the church of all signs of the meeting. The masters leave, except Sachs. He stands gazing abstractedly at the singing-chair, while a snatch of Walther's song sings itself over in his memory.
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