Veit Pogner, a rich silversmith, desiring to honor the craft of the mastersingers, to whose guild he belongs, offers his daughter Eva in marriage to the successful competitor at the annual meeting of the mastersingers on the feast of St. John.  Eva is in love (she declares it in the impetuous manner peculiar to Wagner’s heroines) with Walther von Stolzing, a young Franconian knight; and the knight with her.  After a flirtation in church during divine service, Walther meets her before she leaves the building, and asks if she be betrothed.  She answers in the affirmative, but it is to the unknown victor at the contest of singing on the morrow.  He resolves to enter the guild so as to be qualified for the competition.  A trial of candidates takes place in the church of St. Catherine in the afternoon, and Walther, knowing nothing of the rules of the mastersingers, some of which have hurriedly been outlined to him by David, a youngster who is an apprentice at shoemaking and also songmaking, fails, though Hans Sachs, a master in both crafts, recognizes evidences of genius in the knight’s song, and espouses his cause as against Beckmesser, the town clerk, who aims at acquiring Pogner’s fortune by winning his daughter.  The young people, in despair at Walther’s failure, are about to elope when they are prevented by the arrival on the scene of Beckmesser.  It is night, and he wishes to serenade Eva; Sachs sits cobbling at his bench, while Eva’s nurse, Magdalena, disguised, sits at a window to hear the serenade in her mistress’s stead.  Sachs interrupts the serenader, who is an ill-natured clown, by lustily shouting a song in which he seeks also to give warning of knowledge of her intentions to Eva, whose departure with the knight had been interrupted by the cobbler when he came out of his shop to work in the cool of the evening; but he finally agrees to listen to Beckmesser on condition that he be permitted to mark each error in the composition by striking his lap-stone.  The humorous consequences can be imagined.  Beckmesser becomes enraged at Sachs, sings more and more falsely, until Sachs is occupied in beating a veritable tattoo on his lap-stone.  To add to Beckmesser’s discomfiture, David, Sachs’s apprentice and Magdalena’s sweetheart, thinking the serenade intended for his love, begins to belabor the singer with a chub; neighbors join in the brawl, which proceeds right merrily until interrupted by the horn of a night watchman.  The dignity and vigor of Wagner’s poetical fancy are attested by the marvellous chose of the act.  The tremendous hubbub of the street brawl is at its height and the business of the act is at an end.  The coming of the Watchman, who has evidently been aroused by the noise, is foretold by his horn.  The crowd is seized with a panic.  All the brawlers disappear behind doors.  The sleepy Watchman stares about him in amazement, rubs his eyes, sings the monotonous chant which publishes the hour of the night, continues on his round, and the moon shines on a quiet street in Nuremberg as the curtain falls.