h below. Then the melody of Beckmesser's grotesque is
brought in and treated contrapuntally, with what theorists call free
imitation in the accompaniment. Fugue, real or tonal, there is none.

V

This midsummer night's orgy over, we next have midsummer day. The
curtain rises; the early morning sun shines through the windows of
Sachs' house; Sachs sits there, a book on his knees, but dreaming, not
reading. But before the rising of the curtain there is a prelude to
tell us of his musings. When we know the opera this piece is easy
enough to follow. He thinks over the events of the past night, and
passes through thought into dream, getting clean away from earth into
a serener air--and coming slowly back to earth again. Structurally
this piece is on the same plan as others of the preludes--that of the
third act of _Tannhaeuser_, for example. It is nonsense to say the
piece is meaningless because it cannot be fully grasped at a first
hearing: I have already spoken of the fallacy involved in that
contention--the fallacy that a work of art should be completely
comprehensible at a first hearing. It is equally nonsensical to decry
the "literary" method of composition: that method was the method of at
least two others of the great composers, Haydn and Beethoven, who
"worked to a story." In fact, all these unreasonable reasoners who
tell us these fine incontrovertible pieces of absurdity place
themselves on the same level as the pundits who pointed out that
because Wagner used the piano when composing, therefore he could not
compose--forgetting Haydn's explicit statement that he always composed
at the piano; forgetting how Mozart spent hours and days at the piano
in doing the creative work of a new opera; forgetting that Beethoven
used the piano even when he could no longer hear it (see Schindler's
or Ries' account of the composition of the "Appassionata" sonata). As
a mere piece of music, a succession of tones and combinations of
tones, the rare quality of this prelude cannot but be felt; and though
we may not at once grasp its full significance, no one can miss the
sequence of the emotions expressed--the grave reflection of the
opening, the hymn-like succeeding passage, the gradual mounting of the
music into a beauteous, calm morning air, some realm of ecstatic peace
far above the clouds, the gradual return to the mood of the opening.
When we do know what it is all about the expression of the different
stages of feeling is fe