s is here! What more is necessary?"
sneers Beckmesser.

Fritz Kothner, the baker, in the capacity of speaker, calls the
roll. As the meeting is about to pass to the business of the day,
Pogner asks for the floor, and unfolds before the assembled guild
his romantic scheme: The following is Saint John's day, when it
is customary for the master-singers to hold a song-contest out
in the open, among the people, the victorious singer receiving a
prize. "Now I, by God's grace, am a rich man, and every one should
give according to his means. I cast about therefore for a gift
to give not unworthy of me. Hear what I determined upon. In my
extensive travels over Germany, I have often been chagrined to
find that the burgher is held cheap, is thought close-fisted and
mean-minded. Among high and low alike, I heard the bitter reproach,
till I was soul-sick of it,--that the burgher has no aim or object
above commerce and the getting of money. That we alone in the whole
kingdom of Germany are the guardians and preservers of art, they
take into no account. To what point we place our honour in that,
with what a lofty spirit we cherish the good and beautiful, how
highly we prize art and its influence, I wished therefore to show
the world. So hear, Masters, the gift which I have appointed for
prize: To the singer who in the song-contest shall before all the
people win the prize on Saint John's day, let him be who he may,
I give, devotee of art that I am, Veit Pogner of Nuremberg, with
my whole inheritance, even as it stands, Eva, my only child, in
marriage!"

Loud applause. "There is a man for you!... There is talk of the
right sort!... There one sees what a Nuremberger is capable of!...
Who would not wish to be a bachelor?..." "I dare say that some,"
suggests Sachs, "would not mind giving away their wives!"

But there is a postscript to Pogner's address which qualifies the
aspect of the whole: The maiden shall have the right to reject
the masters' choice. That is what has from the first bothered
Beckmesser, in Pogner's counsel before this making public of his
idea. The general mood is changed by this revelation. "Does it
strike you as judicious?" Beckmesser privately consults Kothner;
"Dangerous I call it!"--"Do I understand aright," asks Kothner;
"that we are placed in the hands of the young lady? If the
master-singers' verdict then does not agree with hers, how is it
to operate?"--"Let the young lady choose at once according to the