gift, that Wagner held up to derision in Beckmesser’s song.  The tittering swells into a roar, and at last Beckmesser, cursing Sachs for a deceiver and false friend, flies.  With that, fooling ends.  To music of a rare sweet gravity Sachs invites the “volk” to hearken to the song when given by the man who composed it.  Walther steps up and sings; as he goes on the people again make themselves heard, but to praise, not to deride; towards the finish their voices form a choral accompaniment, and we have the counterpart to the finale of the first act.  Walther wins the day and Eva; and, slightly against his will, he is made a Master.  There is an address from Sachs, in which he exhorts Walther and all present not to despise art, but to honour it as being (for this is what his speech amounts to) the heart’s blood of national life.  Preachments are not usually stimulating, but this one is mercifully brief, and is accompanied by fine, melodious strains.  With its contrapuntal weaving it leads to the final chorus, and also it puts Sachs back again into the position from which the importance of Walther’s song has thrust him:  it is a last reminder that the opera is a glorification of song, and that the masters have a sacred trust—­to guard song pedantry and commercialism.  The work closes with a grand chorus made up of familiar music, a glorious blaze and riot of orchestral and choral colour.

VII

The second section of this chapter contains what I have to say by way of summing up.  Let me repeat that the Mastersingers is notable for the endless flow of beautiful melodies, neither broken and scrappy nor, on the other hand, approaching monotony:  there is infinite variety combined with magnificent breadth; for the nobility hidden under homeliness—­a characteristic most marked in Sachs’ music; for miraculous colouring now pitched in a low and tender key, now blazing as in the last finale; for the picture of Nuremberg in the old time, and for the vigour and fun with which the old life is depicted.  It is Wagner’s one cheerful opera, and from some points of view, perhaps, his most perfect; nowhere else did he try to keep on a high and even level of pure song for so long; it does not strain our nerves, and will bear hearing perhaps more frequently than anything else he wrote.

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CHAPTER XIII

KING LUDWIG

In resuming Wagner’s biography we may conveniently take it up after the completion of Tristan in August, 1859.  I summarised the events leading up to his beginning on the Mastersingers; but it is necessary to go over some of the ground in a little more detail to show in what a terrible plight Wagner had been landed when King Ludwig II of Bavaria sent for him.  He was bankrupt financially, in health and in hope.  Like the nose of his boyish hero, everything turned to dust the moment he touched