at it, and Dvorak’s resources are at an end.  Now look at our mighty Wagner.  He takes the simplest of figures (b), plays with it, with seeming carelessness, for a while, then adds what is, technically, a counterpoint to it; he develops that counterpoint, adds melody on melody—­always keeping his figure going, that the thing may be held together—­until, after a rich and ever broadening and deepening tide of music, he gets his climax at the predetermined dramatic moment; and the climax does not consist of noise, but is in the stuff of the music.  Development, real development, is not mere juggling with musical subjects, but continuous invention of melodies, and the driving-force behind it is the ceaseless craving of the spirit to express itself fully.

Even more striking than this instance is the treatment of a figure heard first when Pogner announces to the assembled mastersingers his intention of giving his daughter Eva as the prize in next day’s contest.  “To-morrow is Midsummer Day,” he sings, and this figure (c) sounds from the orchestra.  It is made up of two distinct sections.  That formed by the first two bars is used largely as an accompaniment, but it continually comes round to the third and fourth bars, and counterpoints are added until at last we are far away from the beginning, though, as in the example discussed above, the figure welds all together into a coherent whole for the intellect to grasp apart from the appeal the music makes to “the feeling.”  This “feeling” of Wagner’s was absolutely right, it was infallible; and in consequence we find a curious state of affairs is promptly established.  The rich, joyous strain of music, lull of the feeling of summer, immediately becomes what was, so to say, at the back of Wagner’s mind—­the sense of a spring not known to ordinary mortals, the everlasting spring of Montsalvat, a spring full of promise and just as full of regrets, the spring Tennyson sings of—­

    Is it regret for buried time
    That keenlier in sweet April wakes?

The enchanting flood of music wells up from the orchestra, and the vocal writing for Pogner is in Wagner’s most lordly manner:  there is not a hint of the mechanical “faking” which characterises similar passages in the Ring.  If it was necessary to think that one part was written before another one would be apt to say the voice part was done first; yet when one pays attention to the orchestral part, with its intricate contrapuntal weaving and interweaving of themes, that seems impossible, and one realizes that the two must have been conceived simultaneously.  The interweaving becomes ever more marvellous as the speech proceeds, the burgher theme in a varied form being added, until at last, with the acclamations of the masters, it culminates in a passage at once dramatically true, supremely beautiful and as elaborate in its texture as any Bach fugue.  We used to hear much of the necessity for ambitious young composers to devote years to the