atmosphere he wanted. At the same time the harmonies throughout are freer, more daring, than they are even in _Tristan_. They are managed with consummate mastery, the sharp collisions of the many winding voices of the orchestra occurring infallibly in precisely the right place. As I have said, not Bach himself managed a score of many parts with finer mastery, nor gives one a more satisfying sense of complete security; not Bach, nor Handel, nor Mozart was a greater contrapuntist; instructively, instinctively, he knew the way his stream of music was going, and so mighty a craftsman had he grown that to achieve new harmonies and harmonic progressions by the interweaving of many melodies, each individual and expressive, seems almost like child's-play to him. But the old saying, easy reading means hard writing, is true in the case of the _Mastersingers_. We have only to glance at Wagner's letters to see the labour all his later works cost him, and his incessant complaints about the state of his nerves are significant. The writing of the _Mastersingers_ was spread over six years. It does not matter whether it was written easily or with difficulty--the marvel is that it was written at all. IV The first act is the song of spring, the second one of a beauteous summer night. The night slowly falls, and lights are seen at the windows of the gabled houses. The apprentices put up the shutters of the shops and bar the doors. We have old Nuremberg before our eyes; by Sachs' door is the inevitable elder-tree, by Pogner's the just as inevitable lime; and as surely as Schumann caught the scent of flowers from a piece of Chopin's, do we catch the fragrance of those trees in Wagner's music. The 'prentices, hard at work, merrily chant "Midsummer's Eve" ("Johannestag"--not a precise translation), and banter David concerning that very serious matter, his courtship of Magdalena, the accompaniment being spun largely from the midsummer theme of the first act. The atmosphere, sweet, clear, redolent of the old world, and seeming to sparkle with excitement about the coming joys of the morrow, is first created by a prelude scarce thirty bars long. Through more than half of this section we get shakes and arpeggios on one (technical) discord (_e_), with snatches of the midsummer theme, and the exhilaration of the eve of a holiday given to us in this very simplest of ways shows the miracle worker in his happiest mood. Like the opening of the _Rhinegold_, this brief prelude is an exemplification of Wagner's advice to young composers--never travel out of the key you are in if you can say in it what you have to say. The instrumentation is delicate, almost ethereal--in fact, the whole thing would be ethereal, or, at least, fairy-like, but for the note of gaiety, jollity, struck in the apprentices' tunes. But presently played-out fugue subjects are heard, and we know it is Beckmesser or no one. Dramatically the scene is of the lightest, but