A song for the ages — the bourgeois nobility of Wagner's Meistersinger
Staging Wagner's only 'nationalist' opera
Hear the name ‘Nuremberg’, and one might think of three things. One is the Nuremberg rallies — grand political events showcasing the power and unity of the Nazi Party and Germany as a whole. The second is the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited marriage between them and Germans. The third is the Nuremberg trials, a series of military tribunals held after the War which found high-ranking Nazis guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide — new legal concepts.
One important reason the Nazis held their rallies in Nuremberg was, very practically, because it was in the middle of Germany and easy for all to get to. The Nuremberg Laws themselves take their name from a Reichstag session held at the time of the 1935 rally.
Nuremberg was thoroughly destroyed by Allied bombing. Relatively unscathed, however, was the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, a judicial complex which also happened to house a substantial prison. This was well suited to a military tribunal judging high-ranking Nazis. Both the Allied bombing, and the subsequent trials, chose the city for its symbolic association with National Socialism.
All of these events drew on the idea of Nuremberg as being a particularly German city. It is Bavarian only by technicality, after the region of Franconia was affixed to Bavaria by Napoleon. Historically Protestant, by the early twentieth century it had a sizeable minority of Catholics. This meant that Nuremberg’s demographics mirrored the confessional composition of the nation as a whole.
Most interesting, however, is the city’s own tradition of ‘Meistersinger’. These were guilds of amateur master singers which played a significant role in the cultural and social life of late medieval and early modern German cities. Their competitions, held in public squares and halls, were both displays of musical and poetic talent and celebrations of civic pride and communal identity. The content of their songs often reflected the values of hard work, piety, and moral integrity of an emergent urban, bourgeois society. Nuremberg’s Meistersinger were the most esteemed in Germany.
By Richard Wagner’s time, the tradition of urban guilds of Meistersinger was itself nearly — but not quite — dead. With the passing of this tradition, giving way to the professional choir and opera, Wagner chose to write Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as a testament and a celebration.
I am going to assume that the average Pimlico Journal reader has little to no knowledge of Richard Wagner’s work. That said, most will have at least a nodding acquaintance to the fact that much of it is fantastical. The Ring cycle has gods, demi-gods, dragons, giants, dwarves, along with magical helmets, spears, and rings. His other works, such as Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Tannhäuser, while less fantastical, are nonetheless inseparable from the supernatural, and have godly miracles as critical elements of their plots.
Meistersinger is nothing like this. There are no elves or fairies, no apocalypse, no divine intervention. There isn’t even a single death. It is set in the same sixteenth century Nuremberg which undeniably existed in our universe, and is centred around figures and institutions which we know to have been real. Like other works by Wagner, it is a story about how we make peace with our roving and irrational wills; unlike his other works, it is an explicit meta-commentary on the meaning and purpose of art, on the reconciliation of innovation and tradition.
Despite the opera’s four-and-a-half-hour runtime, the plot of Meistersinger is rather straightforward. It centres on a song contest in which Eva, the daughter of one of Nuremberg’s master-singers, is offered as bride to the winner. Walther, a young knight with no formal training, is determined to win her. The town clerk, the old pedant Sixtus Beckmesser, is his master-singer antagonist and the man who wishes to win Eva for himself. Hans Sachs, the cobbler, an older widower and another accomplished master who knows the guild’s exacting guidelines inside-out, renounces his own desires for Eva in order to train up Walther, allowing him to win.
The opening overture of the opera is of the highest romance and one of the finest pieces of music ever written. Solti’s version will do just fine. I don’t expect my dear reader to go now and listen to the whole opera. This overture, however, introduces some of the main leitmotifs in the work.
The overture opens with a bold, majestic fanfare representing the master-singers themselves played by the brass section. Following the initial fanfare, Wagner introduces a series of contrasting themes, including the tender, lyrical motif associated with Walther’s Prize Song. This theme, often carried by the strings, contrasts with the more formal Meistersinger motif, reflecting the tension between innovation and tradition that is central to the opera’s plot.
Meistersinger is described as ‘Wagner’s only comedy’. I rather dislike like this. It is not a comic opera that strings together slapstick scenes. It is not Gilbert and Sullivan. It isn’t even The Magic Flute. It is an essentially contemplative and serious work. What it isn’t — and I repeat myself — is a work of high fantasy, and nor is it a work of deepest tragedy like Tristan und Isolde, which leaves audiences in speechless sorrow.
In fact, the one part that I can think of that is undeniably humorous is the antagonist Beckmesser’s garbled failure at the song contest in Act Three. Here the audience has to laugh for the scene to work, but the audience on stage laughs at him too. Theodor Adorno identified this scene as evidence of Wagner’s cruelty, and alleged that Beckmesser is a Jew (though there is no textual evidence that he is). While much comedy is in fact cruel, contemporary stagings often see Beckmesser and Sachs shaking hands at the end to emphasis good sportsmanship (with which there should no issue, as this reconciliation is in keeping with the opera’s spirit).
What we have, ultimately, is a guild of earnest and serious master-singers who see themselves as the spiritual successors of the Minnesänger, the lyric poets and singers of Germany’s high medieval courts, the German equivalent of Troubadours. The Minnesänger include the likes of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg, who had furnished Wagner with material for Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.
The master-singers, however, were consciously — and indeed, self-consciously — bourgeois, drawing upon respectable townsfolk like goldsmiths and cobblers. In one monologue, Veit Pogner declares that he is vexed by how society reproaches the burgher for being driven by greed and usury.
Most striking in this respect is the rhetorical question posed by the wise man Sachs in his final monologue about German art. Explicitly linking the Minnesänger and Meistersinger traditions together, he asks rhetorically:
Did our art not stay noble, like the time
when court and prince blessed it?
Our young hero Walther, then, embodies a productive contrast. He is a knight. He comes from an estate, and his line is aristocratic. Yet despite this, he is the upstart in a now-bourgeois tradition. He is young. He comes from outside of the city, full of fire and unversed in the prescriptions set out in the guild’s much-discussed Tabulatur, or rulebook.
His inspiration, instead, is another Walther of a bygone era, the Minnesänger Walther von der Vogelweide, whose works he read by the fireplace, and whose melodies were repeated by the forest birds at home. Walther is not just new blood, he is new old blood, reinvigorating the guild and connecting it with its deeper tradition. Despite Walther’s lineage, Sachs makes clear to him that it was his poetry that won him his prize, not his worthy forebears. Nobility is brought into the marketplace of ideas, competes, and wins. Aristocracy and meritocracy are reconciled.
Standing in distinction to Walther is Hans Sachs. Sachs is an elder master-singer, a widower. When Walther is first introduced to the masters, Sachs defends Walther’s passionate intensity when others doubt him. Sachs wants the younger Eva, but he renounces this desire in order to help Walther, the next generation, whose passion for Eva is reciprocated by her.
Sachs’s acceptance of the unrequited nature of his love also parallels the medieval Minnesänger’s own renunciation of the love of the target of their affection; chivalric love was espoused by the troubadour, not consummated by him.
A turning-point in the opera is the famous Wahn (delusion, folly, madness) monologue. Here, Sachs meditates on the madness of a fight over a woman he saw the night before. He sees such delusion — the irrational will — as being an intrinsic part of the human condition, a force to be tamed and channelled to the best ends we can.
He resolves to move forward, telling himself:
Now let's see how Hans Sachs manages
to finely steer this Wahn,
to perform a noble work:
for Wahn does not let us rest,
even here in Nuremberg.
It is Sachs’s own act of renunciation, and sublimation of his desire into a higher art, that marks true nobility. He is at peace with the world.
Walther’s prize-song which leads him to triumph is revealed to him in the depths of a dream (see Peter Hoffman for a strong recording). Sachs helps Walther to refine the work, bringing discipline to the passion, form to the substance, reason to the unreason. ‘So it might not be a dream, but poetry?’, asks Walther. Sachs replies, ‘The two are friends, gladly standing by one another’. By the end of the opera, Sachs finds his reward: the townsfolk hail him, and he usurps young Walther as the true hero of the story: ‘Nuremberg’s dear Sachs’.
Nuremberg’s dear Sachs is, of course, Germany’s dear Sachs. Meistersinger is Wagner’s only work which might be described as nationalistic. It is a celebration, at times subtle and at other times less so, of German tradition and German genius. All the more so, it is a celebration written by a man who hated Jews. Quite aside from the fact that Judaism plays zero role in Meistersinger — Adorno’s search for anti-Semitic tropes notwithstanding — the implications for contemporary dramaturgy and artistic criticism are obvious.
It is Sachs’s exhortation to Walther — and by extension, the assembled crowd both on-stage and off — that rouses the most feeling. The Met Opera’s production from Otto Schenk — a highly traditional staging and as such, very atypical — is worth watching for context (though Bailey as Sachs in the Solti audio recording is stronger).
The concluding passage reads as follows:
Beware! Evil tricks threaten us:
if the German people and kingdom should one day decay,
under a false, foreign rule
soon no prince would understand his people;
and foreign mists with foreign vanities
they would plant in our German land;
what is German and true none would know,
if it did not live in the honour of German Masters.Therefore I say to you:
honour your German Masters,
then you will conjure up good spirits!And if you favour their deeds,
even if the Holy Roman Empire
should dissolve in mist,
there would yet remain
holy German Art!
The Meistersinger after Wagner
In 1933, Joseph Goebbels called Meistersinger ‘the incarnation of our national identity’. Drawing the opposite conclusion from the same facts of the matter, the Metropolitan Opera in New York banned the performance of the opera from 1940 until the end of the war. The message contained in the passage you have just read explains all of this.
There is quite a striking February 1942 performance of the Meistersinger overture, conducted by Furtwängler at a Berlin factory to raise morale among workers, which neatly captures the link between Wagner and National Socialism. This was one month after the end of the Battle of Moscow and the failure of Operation Barbarossa, a critical point in the war in which the Reich’s war machine was stopped in its tracks by the Soviets.
The film of the performance focuses a great deal on the audience. Women, men too old or young for service, and the war-wounded, all listen in. They look worried. There are even hints of bad news, like a woman with her arm over the shoulders of a friend. The series from about 06:40 is most haunting, as the melody rings out of Sachs’s promise that holy German art would outlive the fall of the empire.
With this message in our minds, it is worth noting that in 1943 and 1944, it was the only opera to be performed at the Bayreuth Festspiel, the festival first established by Richard Wagner and considered by all to be the proper home of his works. By 1945, the town of Bayreuth, itself some 60 miles from Nuremberg, was a bombed-out wreck.
The nationalism of Meistersinger presents a problem for Wagnerians today. Even many Anglo-Saxon Wagnerians, who are more forgiving of anything Germanic than present-day Germans have been conditioned to be, tend to express a vague unease about its concluding message. This is quite aside from the fact that the ‘German masters’ Sachs refers to are the likes of Bach and Mozart, rather than a Wehrbauer in Crimea.
A key postwar attempt to manage this question was the 1956 staging of Meistersinger in Bayreuth by Richard Wagner’s grandson, Wieland Wagner. Here, Nuremberg was to be undone. The city having been destroyed, its name disgraced, and the site of the trials a decade earlier, Wieland instead stripped back the stage so that many of the details of Nuremberg were lost: streets were flattened, trees removed and turned into a suspended ball of leaves, familiar locations highly stylised and costumes turned simple and uniform.
The redesign caused an outrage and saw the production booed — a first in Bayreuth’s history. Critics dubbed the production The Meistersinger without Nuremberg. While there is much to be said for respectful minimalist stagings, this one was obviously conceived in a shadow of shame. And with Meistersinger being situated in a very particular time and place, of all Wagner productions it should really be the most conservative.
A contemporary Meistersinger at Bayreuth must, with regret, expect even harsher treatment. Barrie Kosky’s Meistersinger at Bayreuth, aside from being mockingly overacted, literally ends with the stage transforming into the Nuremberg court, with Sachs on trial. Beckmesser is presented in a giant hook-nosed head. Indeed.
Anyone wishing to experience Meistersinger should go online and watch the Metropolitan Opera’s ultra-traditional staging from Otto Schenk (and ideally, see it live while it’s still running, as it will inevitably be replaced soon). Alternatively, there is Glyndebourne’s similar production from David McVicar (a praiseworthy enough king of the manlets in a world of dramaturgical pygmies). This can also be viewed online. Neither are perfect — the Walther in the Met is too fat, and at Glyndebourne his voice too weak — but both serve as baseline visual introductions. In terms of audio, as with all things Wagner, listen to Solti’s recording in the first instance.
The average contemporary Meistersinger production tries to engage in all kinds of mental gymnastics to justify its existence. One notion often put forward by those staging them is that, somehow, the opera is about art in the universal, and that there’s really very little about Germany to it (or at least, that there shouldn’t be). It’s this spirit which led the conductor Christian Thielemann to declare that the opera is about ‘integration’ and the ‘incorporation of the outsider’.
To the same effect, Keith Warner’s recent production in Vienna ends with members of the chorus holding up books in foreign languages about foreign cultures in an insipid message of universality. Upon seeing one book held aloft which simply said ‘MAYA’, I almost burst out laughing. Perhaps the work has finally found its true comedy.