At last, the Real Meistersinger
OperaRichard Wagner’s only comic opera had a long gestation. Summer 1845: drawing on the History of German Literature as well as the biography of poet and shoemaker Hans Sachs, the composer sketches out ideas for a satirical counterpart to Tannhäuser. Autumn 1861: Wagner writes to his publisher that he intends to cheer himself up with ‘something lighter’ and begins composing Die Meistersinger, which he would not complete until six years later. With a sense of self-derision with which he is not usually associated, Wagner brings together an exercise in style and an aesthetic manifesto in praise of the ‘noble and holy German art!’. Here is an opera that speaks volumes about the composer’s own preoccupations: the widening divide between high art and popular culture, and the fracturing of tradition by the radically new. Wise and audacious, the characters of Sachs and Walther can be seen as a double self-portrait of their creator.
Slippedisc, courtesy of OperaVision, shares live Teatro Real’s new production (the first in Madrid for 22 years) which is conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado and staged by a director with some gift for comedy, Laurent Pelly.
The Plot: Midsummer’s eve in Nuremberg and the real-life cobbler-poet Hans Sachs and the guild of mastersingers are pursuing their craft of poetry and music according to traditions and rules. A goldsmith’s daughter, Eva, and a knight, Walther von Stolzing, fall in love, but Eva’s father has promised her to the winner in the forthcoming song contest. Under the wise tuition of Sachs, can Walther learn the mastersinger’s art in time to win Eva’s hand and see off a challenge from the foolish town clerk Beckmesser?
Sung in German. subtitles in English, German, Spanish, French
Available on Saturday 18th May 1800 CET / 1700 London / 1200 NY
Is Meistersinger seriously meant as ‘light’? Or is it one big mocking of Wagner himself? I.e. is the whole thing satire? This question has popped-up now & then in musicological circles, but needless to say, never in a German mind, as the usual tempo of the ouverture amply bears witness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JUqTtzovbw
The opening sentence should surely be: Wagner’s only MATURE comic opera.
There is the early and not very widely performed or recorded Das Liebesverbot based on Measure for Measure.
The praise for “the noble german art” was instigated by Cosima, i do no think it was present in the first draft
I think that is correct. Wagner thought such hammering would not be necessary after all those hours of noble German art, but his wife was not so sure. She wanted to be more Wagnerian than Wagner himself, as she was also more antisemitic than Wagner himself, and has been responsible for the public image of Wagner after his death as the Great Strict Humourless Genius of Pure German Stock.
But the text of that final peroration about noble German art has often been interpreted wrongly as a nationalist expression of chestbeating superiority, but in fact it implies great insecurity about the viability of the art of Germany. Surely if Wagner could have a look into German modern Klangkunst, he would have felt justified in his anxiety.
In the mentioned peroration, the background is the ‘threat’ of France, the culture of which was – in the 19th century – more modern / advanced than Germany’s which was a mainly rural nation and backward in comparison. And the Napoleonic wars were still fresh in the population’s memory.
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!
They all laughed when Wagner said he was going to write a comic opera. Well, they’re not laughing now.
attending this long LONG ‘comic’ opera is no laughing matter
I once had to attend a performance and had a good laugh beforehand, hearing about a comic opera by this guy, but when I left the theatre I was deeply depressed.
Sally
oh, very good!
Such a perfectly aposite comment that I decided against posting my own inferior version.
Vague recollection that the original was from Bob Monkhouse, but I’m open to correction.
It is, in my view, the most anti-Semitic of Wagner’s works, much has I love it and enjoy hearing it
No, that is the Ring, with all its Jewish gods, dragons, heroes, dwarfs, swimming femals.
The Rhinemaidens were Jewish? Is that why the spurned Alberich?
Jerry Seinfeld once noted, “All men think they are funny.”
Calling Meistersinger a comic opera is honestly a bit of a stretch. If you want to hear real comic operas from Germany, try Lortzing (almost everything he wrote), Flotow (Martha) or Nicolai (Lustige Weiber von Windsor).