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