If too pretty doesn’t work, there’s always too ugly, which is what Götz Friedrich tried in his recent Deutsche Oper production in Berlin. The time of the story was moved up to the mid-nineteenth century, Wagner’s time. The burghers and peasants of Nuremberg were all recognizable, but there was no attempt to prettify them. In fact, everyone on stage looked a bit raunchy, sporting an abundance of eye patches, crutches, and bandages. The message, presumably, was that there was corruption in this society beneath the pretty veneer. We are grateful to Herr Friedrich for pointing this out—as if it weren’t apparent enough in the libretto! One problem with that production’s line of thought (besides the obvious problem that you had to look at ugly people for over five hours) is its implication that a well-scrubbed, well-dressed population is not corrupt. This notion fits in well with the aesthetic values of the Nazis themselves, who were always presentable no matter what atrocities they were committing.
This is always the problem in director-driven theater with a political agenda: the more the directors try to distance themselves from fascism, the more they reveal their own fascist-friendly thought processes. Still, Friedrich must be given credit for trying to do something with this cultural albatross. It’s very fortunate that, in contemporary Germany, he hardly had any other choice.
Until some genius finds another, more convincing way to produce Meistersinger, it looks like we’re stuck with “ye gables of olde Nuremberg,” and must rely on ourselves (an option critics and directors rarely take seriously) to sort out the many contradictions of this problematic opera.
PERFORMANCE HISTORY AND ESSENTIAL LORE OF MEISTERSINGER
Work in progress (1860s) Wagner’s idea of a fun evening with friends consisted of him reading aloud from his dramas while they sat in rapt attention. As thunderously dull as this may sound to us, everybody who has left a memoir of such evenings attests that he was absolutely fascinating as a reader/armchair actor. It seems clear that Wagner could have had a successful career as a dramatic actor, and we should remember the theatrical home life of his formative years.
While Tristan made no sense when read without music, and the Ring simply took too long to be comprehensible in a single reading, Meistersinger wowed people in this fashion. We are told that Wagner’s ability to recite lines was so good that he didn’t have to say the name of the speaker before saying the line, modulating his voice to let his hearers know who was speaking. Considering the size of the Meistersinger cast, his range must have been incredible.
Yet another faux pas in Munich (1868) Although Wagner was persona non grata in Munich by 1868, Ludwig decided to show him great favor the night of the premiere of Meistersinger, and invited Wagner to sit with him in the royal box. With the audience cheering wildly after each act, Wagner had the unheard-of effrontery to take a bow from the royal box itself, as if he were a sovereign acknowledging his subjects. Trivial as this may sound to us, this act offended the etiquette-conscious Bavarians as much as anything else Wagner pulled while in Munich.
The definitively German opera overseas (1880s) No one had much hope for Meistersinger outside of Germany, but it proved successful in London (1882) and New York (1886). (The French and the Italians have never had any particular stomach for it.) One of the reasons for its popularity in the English-speaking opera centers is that it worked surprisingly well in English translations.
If we today think Meistersinger heavy in tone and proportion for a comic opera, apparently it wasn’t thought so in the 1880s. No less an authority than Arthur Sullivan, whose frothiest tunes continue to delight people, publicly said Meistersinger was the best comic opera ever written. Perhaps we should remember that Meistersinger was invariably given with hefty cuts well into the 1970s everywhere but Bayreuth.
The wartime opera (1943) Wieland Wagner’s famous, if not notorious, 1956 production of Meistersinger was not his first in Bayreuth. He rarely spoke of his first production of the opera, which was in 1943. It’s not hard to see why. First of all, the production itself was entirely literal and representational, even though Wieland had already begun experimenting in pared-down productions at smaller opera houses. Second, the 1943 Meistersinger was an exercise in wartime propaganda. It was the only opera given at the 1943 and 1944 festivals, because Winifred Wagner and Hitler had decided the Ring might be too much for wounded soldiers (!) and Meistersinger would renew their sense of the holiness of German culture. The musical standards remained high, even though the large chorus had to be filled in with members of the SS on leave. A performance from 1943 is currently available on recording, but many, including Wagner enthusiasts, find the whole thing impossible to listen to.
Making prime time (1980s) And now for something completely different … Meistersinger earned a fleeting but amusing reference on the hit TV series Cheers. When Waldo, the “brainiest” of Carla’s many children, wants to attend a performance of Meistersinger, he attempts a rough outline of the plot to Sam, the affable but not over-cultured bartender. After Waldo explains the conventions of the Song Contest, Sam exclaims, “I get it! Like Star Search!” The suddenly world-weary kid sighs, “Sort of!”
LOBBY TALK FOR MEISTERSINGER: NUREMBERG AS CITY AND CONCEPT
If we had to choose a single theme underlying Meistersinger, it would be the combination of old and new in art, or, stated another way, looking at the best of art as coming from the intersection of free artistic creativity and disciplined methodology. Nietzsche wrote about these two approaches to the creative process in The Birth of Tragedy, where he contrasted the Dionysian and the Apollonian urges in people. That book concludes with an extravagant hymn of praise to Richard Wagner as the culmination of all artistic spirit, praise Nietzsche would spend the rest of his life choking back. Nevertheless, the Wagner who was writing the Ring inspired something in the young philosopher. It is now clear that the supposed classical models Nietzsche wrote about had very little to do with ancient Greece and a great deal to do with Richard Wagner. Meistersinger, even more than the Ring, addresses the issue of the Dionysian spirit (free artistic creativity and anarchic destruction) and the Apollonian spirit (disciplined methodology) in art, and manages it much more pleasantly and convincingly than Nietzsche did.
Nuremberg is not a random choice for the setting of a story looking at these issues, much less a merely quaint choice offering pretty settings. It is a city whose history and ethos are soaking in the same conflicts as this drama, in the area of aesthetics and in much else besides.
Nuremberg rose to prominence in the Middle Ages, largely on the prosperity created by its guild system. The guilds were part trade union, part fraternity, and part school. By the fifteenth century, the craftsmen and guilds of Nuremberg were famous throughout Europe and beyond for their excellence and ingenuity. The scientific arts, cartography, and metalwork particularly flourished. Timepieces of great accuracy were produced there, attesting to the technological knowledge in this city, which was, in a sense, the Silicon Valley of the late fifteenth century. The guilds that ran these and all industries in the city ensured excellent standards. The Mastersingers we meet in the opera, who identify themselves as furriers, soap-makers, and so on, were probably, in real life, heads of those guilds rather than actual workers. It may not be going too far to compare the idea of the sixty-six-year-old Hans Sachs making a pair of shoes to the picture of Jimmy Hoffa driving a truck.
The guilds also competed with the churches in matters of social welfare, instituting rudimentary plans for pensions, unemployment, and other matters of daily concern. Nuremberg boasted an evolved sense of social conscience. A “retirement home” was opened in the fourteenth century and is still functioning today.
Even mundane tasks reflected the values of the old Nurembergers. The famous doll houses of Nuremberg, built up to seven feet high, are prized by museums throughout the world. “Doll house” is misleading, since they were much more than mere toys. The doll houses were extraordinarily detailed models of the large abodes of the time, including all the various sup
plies and objects to be found in them. They were used for training young women who expected to become mistresses of their own houses in the future. A single glance at one of these doll houses shows us that the houses of the Nurembergers were much more than domestic dwellings. The ground floor was a warehouse, animal pen, and, often, a storefront, perhaps like Sachs’s workshop. The rest of the house contained offices, nurseries, infirmaries, pantries, and kitchens as well as bedrooms and common areas. A housewife of Nuremberg was an office and warehouse manager, cook, teacher, seamstress, doctor, and nurse as well as wife and mother.
All the training and instruction for such a life could have been accomplished just as well with paper diagrams or, at most, plain boxes, without the fine detail and adornment typical of these models, but that was not the Nuremberg way. To be of real value to the Nurembergers, they had to be beautiful as well. The doll houses are perfect examples of the old Nuremberg ethic, wherein enterprise, craftsmanship, utility, and beauty were all valued as one and the same.
While the Holy Roman Empire did not have any single capital city, Nuremberg always held a special place of honor among the cities of the realm. It was known as the Treasure Chest of the Empire, and the crown jewels were kept there from 1424 to 1800. Beginning in 1356 and continuing for many centuries, the emperor traditionally convened the first Reichtag (as it was then spelled), or Imperial Parliament, in Nuremberg. For the symbolically minded, this implied that the wealth and glory of the Empire was based, in a sense, on the solid middle-class values of Nuremberg.
This special relationship between the city and the Empire even survived the Reformation for a while. Nuremberg, with its hardworking, no-nonsense aura, was prime ground for the Reformation and the self-sufficient industrial ethic that came to be associated with it. The city went Lutheran in a big way. The Catholic Emperor Charles V, famous in history and a figure not unknown on the operatic stage, could not afford to alienate the Protestants of Nuremberg. It remained a favored imperial city despite the religious breach. We can judge the Nurembergers’ appreciation of the emperor by the fact that they sent 80,000 troops to fight with him against the Turkish invaders at the siege of Vienna in 1529 when the imperial requirement was only half that number.
Even the great upheaval of the Reformation itself was sustained by Nuremberg on its own terms. While the other Lutheran cities engaged in wholesale destruction of church art as a protest against the perceived idolatry of the Roman faith, Nuremberg was almost unique in preserving its priceless treasures. The local regard for beauty and craft was greater than the destructive passions of the moment. Like the Mastersingers at the end of the opera, the Nurembergers culled from the entire spectrum of possibilities, from traditional to progressive, without either becoming slaves to any one dogma or rejecting dogma altogether.
Eventually, Nuremberg declined, and by 1600 much of the leadership in technology had passed to the Lowlands and other places. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which wiped out so much of Germany, also debilitated Nuremberg’s industry, since much of its market was gone. Politically, the peace treaty of 1648 recognized three hundred virtually independent small states and free cities in Germany, and the Empire gravitated toward Vienna and Austria. The city was a quiet place by 1700, already something of a museum piece and tourist destination. In 1806, the Holy Roman Emperor relinquished his title and became emperor of Austria in name as well as in fact, finally surrendering the pretense of having anything to do with Germany. Nuremberg’s imperial days were over.
By the time of Wagner’s visits in the 1830s, much of history had passed over Nuremberg. This, of course, made the old town the focus of much attention from the Romantics, who were addicted to looking into the past, real or imagined, to find their ideals for the future. The legends of the Reformation held a particular resonance for the Germans of the 1860s, looking for answers to the endless questions of national identity. Paradoxically, yet not without reason, Nuremberg represented links to the glories of both the Holy Roman Empire and the Reformation in the popular sensibility. In retrospect, it stood for everything “good” in Germany.
This is why Meistersinger, with its indirect but obvious praises of Luther and the Reformation, could be such a great success even in arch-Catholic Munich in 1868. Its symbols had lost their original referents and had become sentiments, easily manipulated by a master of theater. Unfortunately, Wagner was not the last master of theater to manipulate such sentiments.
Adolf Hitler knew what he was doing when he chose Nuremberg as the official city of Nazi Party rallies. He needed a centrally located German city that was not too rigorously associated in the public mind with any single one of the many factions of German history in order to subsume the powerful imagery of previous greatness and incorporate it into his Reich. A park outside of town was suddenly transformed into a sort of physical manifestation of Hitler’s ideal—grounds and stadiums where hundreds of thousands of the German Volk could parade to receive the Will of the Führer. Architect Albert Speer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl were among the many who contributed brilliantly to this imagery, assuring that minds still reel, so many years later, at the mention of the word Nuremberg.
Nor was Richard Wagner forgotten in the Nazi Kulturkampf. Everything that made Nuremberg ripe for Wagner worked no less for Hitler. Endless performances of Meistersinger were part and parcel of the Nuremberg party rally experience. Even the fetishization of the words Reich and Volk has roots in the libretto of Meistersinger.
There is considerable evidence that the citizens of Nuremberg itself were less than enthusiastic about the honor Hitler had bestowed on them by choosing their city as the showplace of National Socialism. The City Council was controlled by Communists and Social Democrats until those parties were suppressed, and even after the fateful 1933 election of Hitler as chancellor of Germany, seventy thousand Nurembergers rallied in the streets against National Socialism. Many Nurembergers today are extremely resentful of the stigma they carry in the worldwide imagination as “hosts” of the Nazi gatherings. They quite rightly point out that other cities, most notably Stuttgart, actively lobbied Hitler to be chosen for the party rallies.
Nuremberg, however, was no oasis of sanity against the National Socialist onslaught. The Nazi agenda had been propagated there by the notorious Julius Streicher, one of the party’s most virulent attack dogs. In 1923, before most people had ever heard of Adolf Hitler, Streicher began publishing Der Stürmer, a violently anti-Semitic weekly whose banner bore the headline “The Jews are our Problem!” on every issue. Streicher had support among the Nuremberg police force, and the Nazi Party held semiclandestine rallies in the city as early as 1927.
Nor had the Jews of Nuremberg enjoyed centuries of peace before Streicher. While some Catholics continued to live in the Protestant city, Jews did not always enjoy the same relative tolerance, and apparently never had. The Imperial Chapel on Nuremberg’s main square, where the emperor worshiped when in residence, was built on the site of a synagogue that had been destroyed in a fourteenth-century pogrom. The plaque on the outside wall makes no mention of this. In 1938, a full month before Kristallnacht (the infamous night of November 9, when Jewish businesses and homes were destroyed throughout Germany), the main synagogue of Nuremberg was torn down by a state-supported mob. The synagogue was located on Hans Sachs Platz. (Wagner had complained of the “arrogance” of the flagrantly “Oriental” synagogue in the heart of Nuremberg.)
The party rally of 1935 proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and basically legalized violence against them, further associating the city with Nazism. The Allies joined in the propaganda war by convening the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi crimes against humanity in November 1945. The tribunal met in a city that had been bombed out of existence in the last days of the war. With that sad logic of warfare, the beautiful old city was wiped out, while Speer’s harrowing rally grounds were spared. Much of the old city has been painstakingly and beautifully reconstructed and continues to
be. Saint Sebold’s Church, the main repository of priceless church art, was only reopened in 1995.
However much we may wish all this history away, it is absurd to think we can approach the city of Nuremberg in the opera in question merely as a mythological space, independent of the actual place. The opera is too great to be consigned to the garbage heaps of history. It isn’t going away. Even focusing exclusively on the positive human aspects it presents will not whitewash the facts; after all, the Nazis prized Meistersinger for those same innocent virtues. There must have been those who got teary-eyed at the Wahn monologue, bemoaning man’s inhumanity to man, and who then left the theater and participated in murder. It makes one wonder if art has any redeeming power at all.
Nuremberg has seen the best and absolute worst of human capabilities. It is a mirror in which we might take a hard look at ourselves.
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN
THE NAME
It means “The Ring of the Nibelung.” A Nibelung is a dwarf in the mythic world of this saga, and the particular dwarf in question is named Alberich, a character in this work. Today, one usually just says “the Ring,” and people know what you mean. You can attempt it in German—it’s basically pronounced as written. Whatever you do, don’t call it “The Ring of the Nibelungen,” as so many people do. The -en ending of Nibelungen here is the possessive case in German.
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