existence was unendurable; things were as bad as bad could be.  So he sat down and wrote his only comedy.  It was not a simple case of “tasks in hours of insight willed can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.”  The Mastersingers had been sketched, as we know, in 1845; but the new work was a change, in that he created the character of Hans Sachs afresh, and the opera became an entirely different thing.  He himself gave an account of the joy with which he worked at it, incidentally proving the truth of his assertion that he was a “wholly [creative] artist.”  He was not built to be happy in the outer world, but in his world of art he was content; in the outer world he might have an hour of felicity and months of misery, but given a chance of settling down for a while to his operas he at once became and remained cheerful.  Fate did not will that in the case of the Mastersingers his contentment should endure any length of time.  No sooner was his text written than he had to set out on his travels again, hunting his daily food from land to land.  It was not until 1862 that he began the music; not until 1867 did he get it finished, and in the interval many things tragic and other, had occurred.  These, I say, will occupy us presently.

In the sixteenth century there flourished in Nuremberg, as in many another city, a guild of minstrels—­at once poets and musicians.  The name of Hans Sachs is familiar to us all, but not his verse; and as for his music, it has gone down the winds.  After composing Tannhaeuser, Wagner thought of doing what Germans call a comic pendant to that tragedy; though what there is in the Mastersingers that hangs from Tannhaeuser I beg the reader not to ask me.  There is this similarity:  the central scene of each is a minstrel-contest; there is this dissimilarity:  one opera is tragic in spirit and the other comic in spirit.  Beyond this there is no connection, whether of resemblance or of contrast, between the two.  The plan was not developed in 1845, the obvious real reason being that Wagner felt the want of a great central figure, Sachs being originally not more than a benevolent heavy father.  When he had created a soul for this Sachs he went ahead and wrote the poem.

All that it is necessary to know of the plot may be briefly told in a skeleton form.  One of the mastersingers, Pogner, dissatisfied with the prizes usually given at the competitions, has decided to grant his daughter Eva in marriage to the winner of the next.  There are cases on record where such an offer has had the effect of reducing the number of entries—­as when in a later age Matheson and Handel would not compete for the position of organist because one of the conditions was that the successful man must marry the retiring organist’s daughter.  There is no cup of joy without its drop of bitterness, but Handel and Matheson evidently thought the bitter outdid the sweet.  In the Mastersingers, however,