the
rules of correct minstrelsy is one of the exceptions, and the
night-watchman's crying of the hour is another; but these, as Lamb
said of Coleridge's philosophic preaching, are "only his fun." The
melodies are often quite Weberesque in contour; the harmonies are
either plain work-a-day ones or modern--so modern that no one had used
them before. Nor it is by the sadness of the music alone that he gains
his end: some of the merriest scenes belong, by reason of the music,
to mediaeval times. By his art, the intensity of his feeling for those
times, and the fidelity with which he could express every shade of
feeling, he conjures up this vision out of the dead and dusty past,
makes the dead and dusty past live again, takes us clean into it and
keeps us there a whole evening without for a moment letting the spell
be broken. It is significant that the very title he gave his work is a
peremptory warning to us of what to expect: it is not _Hans Sachs_,
nor _Walther von Stolzing_, nor even the _Mastersinger_, etc., but in
the plural form, the _Mastersingers of Nuremberg_. This is not to cast
doubt on Wagner's sincerity when he declared that he only got the
creative impulse to go on with his work when he had conceived Sachs as
Sachs now stands: it is only to say that his extraordinary sense of
colour, atmosphere, and his historical sense, led him to do much more
than he thought he was doing and perhaps realized he had done.

The overture as plainly as the title of the opera proclaims the
composer's purpose: it sums up the solid and pompous old burghers, the
impudent apprentices, the love of Walther and Eva, and says nothing
about Sachs. As an afterthought, in fact, Sachs is left for the
prelude to the third act. As a piece of music, detachable from the
opera, and by no means an integral part of it as is the case with the
_Tristan_ prelude, the overture transcends every other work of
Wagner's. As a contrapuntal feat it remains, with some of Bach's organ
fugues and Bach's and Handel's choruses, a veritable miracle of
musical art--not of ingenuity alone, for each separate fibre in the
musical web has character and combines with the other fibres to
produce an ensemble of overwhelming strength and beauty. The energy of
the thing is almost superabundant; the gorgeous colouring is dazzling;
and every minutest fibre of it lives. The first theme is another
landmark in musical history. The harmonisation is extraordinary, not
only for it