and her maidservant Magdalena; then we have the apprentices, amongst them Magdalena’s sweetheart David, to some rollicking choruses and to their own music—­the burghers’ music played four times as fast; and next David instructs Walther in the rules to be observed if he wishes to compose a master-song and to be admitted to the guild.  Here Wagner indulges in positively uproarious satire of the pseudo-classicism and the school harmony, counterpoint and “composition” of the nineteenth century; and the music is not less ludicrous than the words.  It is a parody of the very kind of music Wagner wrote in his Rienzi days, with sneers at the Jewish composers of psalms.  Walther, in wrath, disgust and despair, cries out that he wants to learn how to sing, not to cobble boots.

The entry of the masters is a scene that only Wagner could have executed.  A stream of Mozartian melody ripples on as the men shake hands and go through the conventional business of the gathering of people on the stage:  what in the operas of the day—­a dozen instances might be mentioned—­is wearisome stodge is here turned into a thing of surpassing beauty.  These shifting shadows of the old world become for the moment alive; yet we see them as though across the centuries through the magical web of music.  The steady swaying motion of the accompaniment—­and, of course, the whole charm lies in the accompaniment—­has a curious resemblance to the duet of the Don and Zerlina in the first act of Don Giovanni, though Mozart’s score is simplicity itself compared with this.  This use of a kind of rocking figure led many younger musicians astray; and I make a comparison between their use of it and Wagner’s with no intention of being odious to any one, but to show exactly where Wagner’s superiority lay.  Take a composer of very fine genius, Anton Dvorak, and look at a beautiful number (beautiful in a primitive, almost savage way) in his Stabat Mater, the Eia, mater.  The theme of this (a, page 318) is a descendant, with several of Wagner’s subjects, and three or four at least of Sir Edward Elgar’s, of the opening of Handel’s “Ev’ry valley.”  Dvorak’s form of it is quite original, but he never gets any further:  he cannot develop his subject.  He adds an echoing, antiphonal phrase; but even with this help he gets no further.  At a first hearing of this really very sincere and for moments entrancing work one hopes for the best at the end of the first dozen bars; but better is not to be.  The theme becomes an accompanying figure to some not very engaging choral passages:  in the invention of the theme the whole force seems to have gone out of the man:  he has no power of achieving a climax save by the addition of instruments:  a growing climax to him means nothing more than growing noise, and the grand climax is only the noisiest passage of all.  The one figure is repeated over and over again, always with more instruments, until at last the complete battery of the modern orchestra is hard