The effect is unexpectedly droll, the music skips about in the most irresponsible way, and (when one knows what it is meant for) depicts the gambols of the herd of young rascals who come on the scene in the first act.  This contrivance, called “diminution,” is resorted to again presently when the mastersingers’ theme, in notes of half the length, is used as an accompaniment to a combination of Walther’s song and the burghers’ music.  There is a good deal of tour de force about this, but the result justifies the means:  the superb melody swings over the ponderous bass, both melody and bass singing out clear and strong amidst an animated, bustling and whirling sea of merry tunes.

Composers generally left the composition of the overture till last—­as it were doing the thing only because an overture had to be written—­but Wagner knew the importance of his work and must have composed this one very early; for in 1862, five years earlier than the completion of the opera and six before the first representation, he directed a performance of it in the Gewandhaus at Leipzig.  He never was a favourite in that stodgy city, the headquarters of musical Judea, and the audience is said to have been scanty.  In fact, he himself said that, although he gave concerts only to gain money, he never made any profits until he went to Russia.  The audience, if small, was enthusiastic.  But, without entertaining any delusions about persecution and the deliberate ignoring of his work, it is easy to see that such music as this could not possibly be understood at once.  Though this overture is clarity itself to our ears, it is terribly complicated, and the style was absolutely new.  I doubt whether the players quite knew, as our players know now, what they were doing; for here was something quite alien from the patchwork of four-bar measures which constituted the ordinary symphonic novelty at that time.  There was no “form”—­no statement of first and second subject, no working-out section measured off with compass and ruler, no recapitulation and coda; and mid-nineteenth century ears and brains were utterly baffled.  The thematic luxuriance, the richness of the part-weaving, the blazing brilliance of the colouring—­these were a mere vexation; and the volcanic energy was quickly found exhausting.  Worst of all, even in those days there were Wagnerites.  Chief amongst them was Wagner.  A Wagnerite is a person who devotes his days and his nights to raising a stone wall of misunderstanding between the composer’s music and the ears of the audience; and at this game Wagner was an adept.  The generation rising up to-day finds it hard to see what an earlier generation found to carp at in Wagner’s music; in fifty years’ time the war between Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites will be inexplicable, and the story of it may not improbably be regarded as grossly exaggerated, if not a pure myth.  Men of my generation know very well it was an ugly and stupid reality; we know also