poetry and tragedy of love been set to music of such resistless beauty.
But love, though the guiding theme of the work, is not the only passion
that reigns in its pages. The haughty splendour of Isolde's injured
pride in the first act, the beautiful devotion of the faithful Kurwenal,
and the blank despair of the dying Tristan, in the third, are depicted
with a magical touch.

Some years ago it was the fashion, among the more uncompromising
adherents of Wagner, to speak of 'Tristan und Isolde' as the completest
exposition of their master's theories, because the chorus took
practically no share in the development of the drama. Many musicians,
on the other hand, have felt Wagner's wilful avoidance of the
possibilities of choral effect to detract seriously from the musical
interest of the opera, and for that reason have found 'Tristan und
Isolde' less satisfying as a work of art than 'Parsifal' or 'Die
Meistersinger,' in which the chorus takes its proper place. It is
scarcely necessary to point out that, opera being in the first instance
founded upon pure convention, there is nothing more illogical in the
judicious employment of the chorus than in the substitution of song for
speech, which is the essence of the art-form.

Wagner's one comic opera was born under a lucky star. Most of his operas
had to wait many years for production, but the kindly care of Ludwig of
Bavaria secured the performance of 'Die Meistersinger' a few months
after the last note had been written. Unlike many of his other
masterpieces, too, 'Die Meistersinger' (1868) was a success from the
first. There were critics, it is true, who thought the opera 'a
monstrous caterwauling,' but it had not to wait long for general
appreciation, and performances in Berlin, Vienna, and Dresden soon
followed the initial one at Munich.

The scene of 'Die Meistersinger' is laid in sixteenth-century Nuremberg.
Walther von Stolzing, a young Franconian knight, loves Eva, the daughter
of Pogner the goldsmith; but Pogner has made up his mind that Eva shall
marry none but a Mastersinger, that is to say, a member of the guild
devoted to the cultivation of music and poetry, for which the town was
famous. Eva, on the contrary, is determined to marry no one but Walther,
and tells him so in a stolen interview after service in St Catherine's
Church. It remains therefore for Walther to qualify as a master, and
David, the apprentice of Hans Sachs the cobbler, the most popular man in