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 its gigantic strength, but for the free employment of chromatics that do not weaken it:  in fact, chromatic harmony is so employed throughout the Mastersingers that it sounds diatonic.  Throughout Tristan and in the Venusberg music of Tannhaeuser chromatic harmony is put into the service of passion; but here we have music that is as solid, equable, serene as a Handel eight-part chorus.  With consummate skill the stream of music is, so to say, led on to the theme that always accompanies the mastersingers, as distinguished from the citizens, of Nuremberg; next Walther’s song is extemporised upon (no other phrase serves) for a couple of minutes—­the most passionate page in the opera—­and after that come the apprentices.  We shall presently observe that Wagner in this opera made light-hearted fun of the pundits, and as if to show them that he had a right to do so he played with the devices that to them were a very serious business indeed.  What to them was an end—­I mean all the tricks of counterpoint—­was to him a means to expression:  more expressive music was never dreamed of in a musician’s imagination, and at the same time he accomplished with ease part-writing that the most skilful contrapuntists could only perform by labouring long at expressionless, stale old themes first contrived before the Flood to “work well,” as the phrase goes.  The apprentices’ music, then, is an instance:  Wagner takes the solid burghers’ theme and writes it in notes one-quarter the length, so that it sounds four times as fast.