eistersingers, in the hope that by this more
intelligible work the public would finally turn to him, and that
then the great German people would assist in the erection of a
festival-building for a national art-work and thus realize his grand
ideal. We know to-day that he succeeded in uniting them in this great
work.

The next important step in that direction was the representation of
the "Meistersinger" in Munich in 1868. In the course of time Wagner
dominated the stage in a manner which had not been witnessed since
"Lohengrin."

It has been truthfully said that there was something more surprising
than the highly poetic "Tristan," namely, the artist himself, who so
shortly after could create a picture of such manifold coloring as the
"Meistersinger." But with equal truth the same observer of Wagner says
that whoever is astounded at this achievement has but little
understood the one essential point in the nature and life of all
really great Germans. "He does not know on what soil alone that
many-sided humor displayed by Luther, Beethoven, and Wagner can grow,
which other nations do not at all comprehend, and which even the
Germans of to-day seem to have lost; that mixture, pure as gold, of
simplicity, deep, loving insight, mental reflection and rollicking
humor which Wagner has poured out like a delightful draught for all
those who have keenly suffered in life, and who turn to him, as it
were, with the smile of the convalescent." Another German, Sebastian
Bach, might have been named whom Wagner resembles most in that
universal dominating quality of mind which is even visible in the
half-ironical, laughing eye of the simple Thuringian chorister, and
brings home to us the truth of Faust's words, "creating delights
for the gods to enjoy." He played at that time many of Bach's
compositions, such as the "Well Tempered Clavicord," with his young
assistant, Hans Richter, who had been recommended to him from Vienna
as a copyist. What cared he for all this wild whirl of silly fancies
and boorish conceit, so long as he, a genuine Prometheus, could create
something new after the grandest models! In speaking of "Tannhaeuser"
he tells us how supremely happy he was when occupied with the
delightful work of real creation. "Before I undertake to write a verse
or sketch a scene, I am already filled with the musical spirit of my
creation," he writes in the year 1864. "All the characteristic motives
are in my brain, so that when the tex