about the wonderful German art of singing. It is also about the fact that composers should be able to write music which is beautiful without having to obey rules that were made up long ago and have become old-fashioned. Wagner was trying to bring lots of changes to opera, making the drama the most important thing. Some people found his new ideas quite difficult to follow, and this may be why he chose, for once, to write a comic opera instead of a serious one based on mythology. The character of Beckmesser is a caricature of Eduard Hanslick, a famous music critic who did not like the music of Wagner and Bruckner but preferred the more traditional music of Brahms and Antonín Dvořák.