This masterpiece is going to function quite differently from the others simply because it is a comedy. Wagner got his ideas of comedy from, in particular, Shakespeare, whom he read avidly, and from Goldoni, whose plays he attended in Venice in 1859 and which, he tells us in My Life, he greatly enjoyed. That is, Wagner is not likely to think of a comedy as merely, or even essentially, a story with a happy end. After all, in Wagnerian terms The Flying Dutchman has a happy end, but it is not very funny. Rather, the sort of comedy Wagner had in mind was complex, throwing together servants and masters in situations in which one group is trying to trick the other, in which lovers who belong together are initially parted by misfortune, or by convention, or by the prejudices of parents. Invariably there is a real danger that if something isn't done about it, the spirited and attractive young lass at the centre of the intrigues will be parcelled off to a laughably old unsuitable suitor. But something is done about it. There is a deus ex machina. A daring lover perhaps, or a conspiracy of witty and shrewd women, or a benign Mister Fix-It will devise the stratagems that put everything to rights. In the end justice will be fairly but generously apportioned courtesy of the dramatist's stage circus master(s). And this is what, superficially, Wagner is about in The Mastersingers. Therefore it is not in the least surprising that he had high opinion of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (28 May 1870). Perhaps a little more surprising, but entirely apposite in the context of comic opera, is his late enthusiasm for Rossini, who should by rights have been brushed aside as a decadent Italian. Well, in fact he was contemptuously dismissed in Opera and Drama (‘lolling in that rankest lap of luxury’ and with him ‘died the Opera’ [II: 46]), but Wagner paid him a visit in Paris and was charmed. And while he continued to deride Rossini's opera seria (Semiramide is a ‘bore’) he enjoyed the orchestral effects of the light overtures and he clearly learned something from the comic operas themselves.