likes with it—and revealing the fact that,
despite all his boasting, in his heart he knows the
cobbler to be immeasurably his superior. In music
hardly to be matched for sensuous beauty Eva’s
trembling perturbation and hopes and fears are exquisitely
suggested; then with the arrival of Walther, and also
of Magdalena and David, we get a little more fooling,
followed by one of Wagner’s loveliest and most
amazing feats, the quintet. If only for one reason
it is amazing. Only a few years before the notes
were set down, and certainly only a year or two before
the thing was planned in the libretto, he had vehemently
declared, in essays and letters, that never again
would he compose anything in the operatic style:
he was for ever done with opera; henceforth music-drama
alone would occupy him. And lo! here, at the very
first opportunity, we find him not merely writing
a grand opera finale to his first act—which
he could justify; a rough-and-tumble finale to his
second act—which he could justify; but a
set concerto piece in the middle of his third act—which
according to his own theories at any rate, he could
not justify! He might well avow that when he came
to compose
Tristan he discovered he had gone
far beyond his theories. The justification for
the quintet is its beauty and the fact that it finds
expression for the feeling of the moment. All
the same, I have heard it encored more than once;
and an encore in the middle of the act of a Wagner
music-drama, or even music-comedy, is almost inconceivable.
VI
The two pairs, Walther and Eva, and David and Magdalena,
having been joined together, and David having been
freed from his ’prentice servitude by a hearty
box on the ear, the quintet having been sung and (as
just remarked) sometimes encored, Wagner gathers himself
together for a gigantic scene as characteristic of
his genius as anything he conceived: no one,
indeed, but Wagner could have done or would have thought
of attempting such a scene. He has shown us the
masters of Nuremberg in conclave, the apprentices
romping and joking, the crowd in the street losing
its head; and how he gives us a picture of the town
on a fete-day, with the trade-guilds marching to the
singing-contest. The tailors, the shoemakers,
the bakers and the butchers all file past, chanting
the merits of their various callings, finally gathering
on the meadow outside the town to await the arrival
of the chief burghers. It is a picture, not a
dramatic scene, and to judge only from the text might
suggest the Rienzi way of planning things.
It is not, however, a spectacle in the sense in which
we apply that word to some of the Rienzi scenes;
there is nothing pompous about it, no recourse is
made to gorgeous costumes. The artisans march
past in their holiday clothes, each guild bearing its
banner; the banners wave in the bright sunlight, and
there is plenty of colour as well as of bustle and