study of text-book counterpoint—­indeed, the failure of many youthful gentlemen to achieve anything on the grand scale has often been attributed to their lack of diligence, their want of patience with professorial instruction:  yet here we have music which, from the scientific point of view, is as perfect as any in the world, composed by a daring soul who had no more than six months’ teaching.  It may be remarked in passing that Spohr, in his naive way a good enough fugue-writer, never received any instruction at all:  in point of effectiveness his fugues beat anything coming from the Jadassohn and Hauptmann pupils.

With the re-entry of Walther and his proposal as a member of the guild by Pogner, we get another of these great phrases, half-theme, half-accompanying figure, and then Walther’s spring song.  He describes how, sitting by the hearth in winter, he first learnt the art of minstrelsy from reading “das alte Buch” of the greatest of minstrels, Walther von der Vogelweide; then when the winter had passed he heard the birds in the green trees singing the selfsame song.  Thematically this is much richer than the spring-song in, for instance, the Valkyrie, and for the best of reasons—­that in the Valkyrie is incidental, part of a long duet woven from quite other material, while that in the Mastersingers is itself the material of a large portion of the opera.  The tune of the first stanza in the Valkyrie is only referred to once again throughout the work; and by far the most expressive part is made out of a love-theme previously heard.  In the Mastersingers song there is subject-matter enough to make a whole opera.  From this point it is impossible to quote themes—­they are far too long.  In this respect a writer on music is at a disadvantage with a writer on literature; the latter can cite long passages to establish a case or illustrate his meaning; the unfortunate musical writer must refer his readers to scores, and it is inconvenient to sit amidst a pile of these—­and Wagner’s are the longest and weightiest in existence—­and dive now here, now there, to follow the author without danger of mistaking him.  The most important passage in Walther’s song begins at bar 13 (counting from the beginning of the nine-eight measure); and it is developed in as masterly a fashion as any of the earlier subjects, only now the style is symphonic, in the Viennese way, as the others were contrapuntal.  The whole thing is full of the yearning spirit of spring; and, not at all strangely, bears a marked family likeness to Siegfried’s song about his mother in the Ring.  Throughout the deliberations of the masters the music remains at a high level:  there are no longueurs; dry recitative and barren attempts to treat prose poetically alike are absent.  Kothner’s delivery of the rules of the art are good-natured fun; Wagner, with his parody of eighteenth-century mannerisms, laughing at the wiseacres who wished to