goes on, into fresh forms of the rarest beauty and splendour.  We cannot lay our finger on a superfluous bar, not one that can be cut without badly injuring the whole work.  This criticism applies to the other two acts.  As new material is introduced it is all singable; though harmonious effects are freely used they are all there to enforce the melody.  The swan, or river, phrase in Lohengrin is, of course, purely an effect of harmony; but in this glorification of song Wagner seemed determined to trust entirely to song and use his harmonic resources and devices—­which were inexhaustible—­another day.  Only once does he resort to them:  in the third act when Walther tells Sachs he has had a lovely dream, by a single unexpected chord he gets the dream atmosphere he wanted.  At the same time the harmonies throughout are freer, more daring, than they are even in Tristan.  They are managed with consummate mastery, the sharp collisions of the many winding voices of the orchestra occurring infallibly in precisely the right place.  As I have said, not Bach himself managed a score of many parts with finer mastery, nor gives one a more satisfying sense of complete security; not Bach, nor Handel, nor Mozart was a greater contrapuntist; instructively, instinctively, he knew the way his stream of music was going, and so mighty a craftsman had he grown that to achieve new harmonies and harmonic progressions by the interweaving of many melodies, each individual and expressive, seems almost like child’s-play to him.  But the old saying, easy reading means hard writing, is true in the case of the Mastersingers.  We have only to glance at Wagner’s letters to see the labour all his later works cost him, and his incessant complaints about the state of his nerves are significant.  The writing of the Mastersingers was spread over six years.  It does not matter whether it was written easily or with difficulty—­the marvel is that it was written at all.

IV

The first act is the song of spring, the second one of a beauteous summer night.  The night slowly falls, and lights are seen at the windows of the gabled houses.  The apprentices put up the shutters of the shops and bar the doors.  We have old Nuremberg before our eyes; by Sachs’ door is the inevitable elder-tree, by Pogner’s the just as inevitable lime; and as surely as Schumann caught the scent of flowers from a piece of Chopin’s, do we catch the fragrance of those trees in Wagner’s music.  The ’prentices, hard at work, merrily chant “Midsummer’s Eve” ("Johannestag”—­not a precise translation), and banter David concerning that very serious matter, his courtship of Magdalena, the accompaniment being spun largely from the midsummer theme of the first act.  The atmosphere, sweet, clear, redolent of the old world, and seeming to sparkle with excitement about the coming joys of the morrow, is first created by a prelude scarce thirty bars long.