Walther in St. Catherine’s church.  Wagner has adhered to the record. {2} The most interesting of Sixtus Beckmesser’s compositions is “A New Year’s Song,” preserved in the handwriting of Sachs in the Royal Library at Berlin.  This I have translated in order to show the form of the old mastersongs as described by the apprentice, David, in Wagner’s comedy, and also to prove (so far as a somewhat free translation can) that the veritable Beckmesser was not the stupid dunce that Wagner, for purposes of his own, and tempted, doubtless, by the humor which he found in the name, represented him to be.  In fact, I am strongly tempted to believe that with the exception of Sachs himself, Beckmesser was the best of the mastersingers of the Nuremberg school:—­

    A new year’s song
    By Sixtus Beckmesser

    (First “Stoll”)
      Joy
      Christian thoughts employ
  This day
  Doth say
      The Book of old
      That we should hold
      The faith foretold;
  For naught doth doubt afford. 
  The patriarchs with one accord
  Lived hoping that the Lord
  Would rout the wicked horde. 
      Thus saith the word
      To all believers given.

    (Second “Stoll”)
      God
  Council held, triune,
  When soon
  The boon
      The son foresaw: 
      Fulfilled the law
      That we might draw
  Salvation’s prize.  God then
  An angel sent cross moor and fen,
  (’Twas Gabriel, heaven’s denizen,)
  To Mary, purest maid ’mongst men. 
      He greeted her
      With blessings sent from heaven.

    (The “Abgesang”)
  Thus spake the angel graciously: 
      “The Lord with thee,
      Thou blessed she;
  The Lord’s voice saith,
  Which breathes thy breath,
  That men have earned eternal death. 
      Faith
      Saves alone from sin’s subjection;
      For while weak Eve God’s anger waked,
  ’Twas, Ave, thine the blest election
  To give the world peace and protection,
      Most blessed gift
      To mortals ever given!”

In Nuremberg the veritable Hans Sachs wrote plays on Tannhauser, Tristan, and Siegfried between three and four hundred years before the poet-composer who put the old cobbler-poet into his comedy.  Very naive and very archaic indeed are Hans Sachs’s dramas compared with Wagner’s; but it is, perhaps, not an exaggeration to say that Sachs was as influential a factor in the dramatic life of his time as Wagner in ours.  He was among the earliest of the German poets who took up the miracle plays and mysteries after they had been abandoned by the church and developed them on the lines which ran out into the classic German drama.  His immediate predecessors were the writers of the so-called “Fastnacht” (Mardi-gras) plays, who flourished in Nuremberg in the fifteenth century.  Out of these plays German comedy arose, and among those who rocked its cradle was another of the mastersingers who plays a part in Wagner’s opera,—­Hans Folz.  It was doubtless largely due to the influence of Hans Sachs that the guild of mastersingers built the first German theatre in Nuremberg in 1550.  Before then plays with religious subjects were performed in St. Catherine’s church, as we have seen, the meeting place of the guild.  Secular plays were represented in private houses.