Through more than half of this section we get shakes and arpeggios on one (technical) discord (e), with snatches of the midsummer theme, and the exhilaration of the eve of a holiday given to us in this very simplest of ways shows the miracle worker in his happiest mood.  Like the opening of the Rhinegold, this brief prelude is an exemplification of Wagner’s advice to young composers—­never travel out of the key you are in if you can say in it what you have to say.  The instrumentation is delicate, almost ethereal—­in fact, the whole thing would be ethereal, or, at least, fairy-like, but for the note of gaiety, jollity, struck in the apprentices’ tunes.  But presently played-out fugue subjects are heard, and we know it is Beckmesser or no one.  Dramatically the scene is of the lightest, but Wagner seizes the opportunity to paint a musical picture of Nuremberg as Pogner holds forth on the festivities arranged for the morrow; never did he give us anything more delightful than this picture of a mediaeval city, anything more beautifully or more fully charged with the sense of the past.  They go in, and shortly Sachs comes out; he tells David to arrange his tools and get away to bed, and sits down, intending to work outside.  The hammering motive (f) sounds out vigorously for a couple of minutes; but Sachs is already dreaming of Walther’s song, and presently we get a phrase of it in a shape of superb beauty—­the fifty times distilled essence of spring is in it—­then another bit of it is taken and used as an accompaniment with most enchanting effect:  one feels the cool night breeze touching Sachs’ cheek, and, as in the introduction, one scents the aroma of lime and elder—­

    “The elder scent floats round me; so mild, so rich it falls,
    Its sweetness weighs upon me; words from my heart it calls....”

With its gently rocking motion and the tremolando in the bass it is as beautiful in its way as the opening scene, already discussed, of the second Act of Tristan—­the picture of the brook running through the darkness from the fountain in King Mark’s castle garden.  Sachs abruptly ceases, and sets to work; and the hammering phrase is heard again, now combined with the beginning of another subject, liker than ever to Siegfried’s great song—­the very harmonies as well as the general rhythm are the same—­and this subject is developed before long into the Cobbler’s song.  But “and still that strain I hear”; and he stops and dreams again over Walther’s song.  “Springtime’s behest, within his breast, on heart and voice there was laid,” he sings; and to music compact of sheer loveliness he praises the song, terminating with a passage which I take to be nine bars of vocal writing as fine as can be found in the whole of music—­“The bird who sang this morn.”