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Wagner retaliated with calculated insult. At a party, with Hanslick present, Wagner read aloud the libretto of his Die Meistersinger. In Wagner's reading, the doddering fool now known in the opera as Beckmesser was called "Hanslich." The two men never spoke again. But the insult left Hanslick's judgment unruffled when it came time to review Die Meistersinger. He found some things worth praising and praised them. In his story of "these artisans of Nuremberg, with their simple philistine adventures and plain doggerel verses," Wagner had "returned from his abstruse submarine and superterranean legends to the real theater."
