e save Sachs and David knows how it started;
no one knows why it ends. It is--allowing for the lapse of four
centuries--rather like a cab accident in London or any other great
city: ladies in night attire look out of windows, and, seeing their
husbands engaged in deadly warfare, in the very spirit of Miss Miggs
begin to empty pails of cold water over the combatants
indiscriminately. Apparently this cools the ardour of everybody. One
by one the crowd makes for shelter; the watchman's horn is heard a few
streets away; and when he arrives with his lantern and stick a few
minutes later the alley and platz are deserted. The moon shines out on
the lovely scene; the old man chants his call--it is eleven of the
night; all the world should be in bed; all the lights and fires should
be out; he goes off, leaving us the wondrous picture of old Nuremberg
sleeping in the heart of old Germany; and the curtain slowly falls. A
very ineffective "curtain" it was in the eyes of most opera-goers in
the 'sixties, and is in the eyes of the ordinary play-goer of to-day;
but, for all that, one of the most superb to be found in the whole of
the dramatic works of the world.

It is, I have just said, difficult to analyse the music of such a
scene as this, and only one or two points may be noted now. I have
referred again to the consummate mastery of technique manifested
throughout the opera, and here there is no falling off from this
mastery. Throughout we have that atmosphere of bygone generations, and
also a combination, curious when looked into, of homeliness with
nobility. Sachs' song is merrily trolled out, but underneath its
joviality we feel the greatness of the man--a man so great in
character that no suits of shining armour, no heralds and no waving
banners are needed to make him impressive: he remains, even while he
works at his last and sings a sort of club-dinner song, the simple
cobbler-poet, great by reason of his sincerity and his artist-soul.
The street scrimmage is the most realistic thing of the sort ever
attempted, not to say achieved. It is customary to describe the music
as a fugue, and, if that is so, no more unfugue-like fugue was ever
penned. It begins with a parody of a fugue, the answer being announced
before the subject--that is, what purports to be the answer occurs a
fifth instead of a fourth below; then what purports to be the subject
is re-announced one tone above its first statement, and answered, as
before, a fift