by Martin Geck
Sachs, too, appears in a new light at the end. The shoemaker-poet initially played a particularly base trick on his adversary Beckmesser and even precipitated the nighttime riot that left the town clerk badly beaten by his fellow Nurembergers. Moreover, in his Cobbling Song he had vented his frustration at the drudgery of his work as a shoemaker, and in his “Wahn” Monologue he had expressed his doubts about the power of reason in general. But in the final scene of the opera he is able to cast aside the features of an outsider that have been discernible in him until this point in the work. Fully at peace with himself, he will henceforth be an ideal champion of a traditional, self-confident “German art” and at the same time a worthy representative of Nuremberg as an “intellectual and spiritual form of life,” to quote the phrase coined by Thomas Mann in the context of his own birthplace of Lübeck. But in the final version of the libretto, with its concession to contemporary political developments, Sachs also and above all appears as a propagandist promoting a sense of national resentment, causing the nationalist element that in the earlier version of the libretto had been relatively harmless to become “profoundly problematical.”19 Is this Sachs, too, a suitable advocate for Nuremberg’s artistic scene?
In more general terms, is Sachs really such a “wonderful figure” and “truly a democratic personality,” as the German director Harry Kupfer sees him?20 On closer inspection, Sachs’s character turns out to be decidedly ambivalent. Indeed, the semantic change undergone by individual elements in the plot takes place with a speed more appropriate to a comedy than a philosophical work. As the opera’s librettist, Wagner inevitably found himself in what for him was an unusual situation, for in his previous works, which had been geared to myth and legend, the motivation of the individual stages in the action, while not unimportant, was nonetheless secondary inasmuch as in myth and legend essential matters evolve in the way they do because this is precisely how they are fated to unfold, while the characters, far from controlling their fates, tend, rather, to be driven by destiny. But a “realistic” subject also requires a logical approach to every single detail. Wagner does his best here and presents us with a plot within which many examples of “Wahn” (folly and illusion) are purged of their irrational element. And yet this approach works only on a superficial level, for in the background questions are raised similar to those that Lydia Goehr poses in the article mentioned earlier. Can a composer who in the rest of the work wrestles endlessly with the problem of “Wahn” really identify with the positive ending of Die Meistersinger?
Joachim Herz is only one of many writers to point out that Die Meistersinger discusses “art” above all else.21 In advancing this argument, he can of course appeal to Wagner himself, for, as we have already observed, the composer singled out the reconciliation between pedantry and poetry as integral to the work’s happy ending. But can we—as Lydia Goehr rightly asks—regard Walther’s Prize Song and Sachs’s demand that we “honor” our “German masters” as the be-all and end-all of the work’s underlying message? Does this appeal to such mastery not seem distinctly innocuous against the background of Wagner’s other works, every single one of which—Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, and, later, Parsifal—reveals a mythic depth conspicuously absent here?
German literary scholars have sought to see this alleged “innocuousness” in a rather more relative light. Walter Jens, for example, praises “Sachs’s poetological reflections as a valid and exemplary pointer to a synthesis of ‘art’ and ‘nature’ in the spirit of those timeless rhetorical traditions dating back to a classical writer like Horace.”22 Conversely, Hans Mayer emphasizes the contradictory elements in the makeup of the shoemaker-poet and points out that if we ignore the affirmative ending, Sachs is far from resolving the conflict between craft and art but leads a “romantic double life” in the manner of E. T. A. Hoffmann, with “on the one hand the crude materialism of the empirical and on the other the idealism of the surreal.”23 Peter Wapnewski sees Hans Sachs as a “skeptical Schopenhauerian sage” and even speaks of him in the same breath as Baudelaire and Stefan George.24 Dieter Borchmeyer, on the other hand, argues that the “splendour of the final scene is doubtless overshadowed by a sense of resignation. Utopianism and pessimism, always intermeshed in Wagner’s view of the world, overlap on this occasion, too.”25 A glance at Sachs’s antithesis, Beckmesser, even calls to mind the German absurdist poet Christian Morgenstern: Ernst Bloch hails the linguistic temerities of Beckmesser’s garbled Prize Song as “an early example of Dadaism.”26 Many stage directors have followed Bloch’s lead and treated the Nuremberg town clerk as an avant-garde artist. And yet it is clear from the history of comedy as a genre that such interpretations need to be seen within a wider picture, for even in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom the weaver garbles his text when playing the part of Pyramus.27
To sum up: literary scholars may have shed light on a number of original aspects of the opera, but their endeavors also resemble a Dance around the Golden Calf aimed at exploring Wagner’s genius from every conceivable angle. Instead, it might make more sense to concentrate on essentials in the form of Wagner’s genius as a man of the theater, for with the exception of the longueurs in act 1 Wagner demonstrates an exceptional feel for a plot whose construction would be to the credit of an experienced writer of comedies. Avoiding all shallowness, he shows great skill in balancing the conflicting aims of poetry and situation comedy, pathos and persiflage. Hugo von Hofmannsthal is only one of many writers to admire the inspired decision to treat the “genuine, complete world” of Nuremberg as the decisive element in the plot—a decisiveness comparable to that of the Vienna of Maria Theresa in Der Rosenkavalier.28 Scarcely less inspired is the idea of concentrating the action on the St. John’s Day celebrations and drawing on the fund of ecclesiastical rituals and secular customs associated with that particular festival.
Of course, we can argue over the extent to which Wagner’s Nuremberg is “authentic,” or merely a “utopian setting” for his imaginary view of a municipal community.29 What mattered for Wagner as a theater practitioner, however, was the repositioning of the work’s horizon, the vast expanse of myth, which is crucial in the case of his other stage works, being restricted in time and place to a particular historical moment that does not represent an interchangeable allegory for certain social ideals but speaks, as it were, for itself. According to Hofmannsthal, “even a picturesque detail like the Beckmesser-Hanslick equation is only possible, after all, because the institution of the ‘marker’ was already inherent in the given old setting.”30
This particular strength is also offset, of course, by a specific weakness—if we choose to regard it as such: in terms of the work’s interpretation and staging, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is not as elastic as the Ring or Tristan und Isolde. Rather, there are really only two interpretive approaches that are possible here, the first of which involves treating the work as an example of the “real idealism” outlined above. This does not necessarily mean stressing its nationalist features but it requires us to accept the opera as Wagner’s profession of faith in a life-affirming art meaningfully embedded in real-life society. This is a legitimate approach as it respects the work’s obvious intentions and also the ideals that Wagner developed in 1849 in his two essays Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future.
In order to explore the second possibility, we need to examine the wider picture. By nature, Wagner was no Gottfried Keller, whose “real idealism” was admirably suited to the age in which he lived. Although the original version of Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich ends on a note of pessimism, his short story Hadlaub takes as its theme a youthfully impetuous Minnesänger who as if of his own accord matures into a master of his art before renouncing that art in favor of marriage and a belief in shared middle-class values and public-spiritedness. It is clear from this that Wagner’s true picture of the world means that he constantly undercuts his own optimistic conception of Die
Meistersinger; with the exception of his rebellious revolutionary period he always doubted that life and art could be balanced. And Sachs’s technical understanding of musical form and of a congruent social order has little to do with his own artistic output.
That Alfred Lorenz filled several volumes analyzing Wagner’s scores in an attempt to demonstrate how the “secret of Wagner’s form” could be found in the formal structures of the “quintessentially German” bar does not mean that this form—which Sachs commends to his “pupil” Walther as the first and last word in composition—will bring us any closer to Wagner’s own understanding of form, with its manifold multiple perspectives. Even the merger of old and new, which Wagner raises to the level of an aesthetic principle in Die Meistersinger, may add a number of original elements and provide some stirring music, notably in the overture. But it would be presumptuous to claim that such a maxim can be applied to the whole of the opera, still less to the rest of Wagner’s oeuvre by analogy with similar interpretations of Brahms, Max Reger, and Schoenberg.
What, ultimately, are we to make of Nuremberg as a “utopian place with which Wagner hoped to show how a new community might arise through an art tied to the people and emerging naturally from it, an art, moreover, that has no need of politics”?31 We may choose to follow Udo Bermbach’s lead and interpret Die Meistersinger in this way, but at the same time we are bound to question whether the opera can provide a “concrete model” for this blueprint.32 It would also be good to know if Wagner felt that a “state free from politics,”33 as he imagined Nuremberg to have been in the sixteenth century, was possible or even desirable in Ludwig II’s day. For today’s audiences, at least, Wagner’s Nuremberg proves on closer inspection to be altogether unpalatable: Hans Rudolf Vaget may be guilty of exaggeration, but he is certainly not wrong when he describes Wagner’s Nuremberg as a “repressive community ever ready to exclude unwanted elements,” a comment made above all with reference to Beckmesser.34 Warren Darcy suggests that such contradictions are inherent in the clinically pure but ultimately unadventurous C major in the final act of the opera, a claim that is likewise not altogether groundless: this key is said to express “the repression of the individual will for the good of society and the expulsion from that purified society of all undesirable elements.”35 It is no wonder, then, that Wagner’s Nuremberg, painted in the colors of the “real idealism” of the middle of the nineteenth century, was obliged to exclude all the real power structures and social conflicts of the sixteenth century, to say nothing of its obsession with the power of money.
As soon as we seek to fathom the underlying message of the opera, rather than glossing it over, we shall stumble upon inconsistencies. Such inconsistencies are not comparable to those built into the Ring and Tristan und Isolde, for example, where they are grounded in the unfathomability of myth, but rest on the fact that in writing Die Meistersinger Wagner was eager not only to play-act but also to hold forth on the subject of public life. And a glance at the work’s genesis indicates that his thinking was not always consistent. As we have already observed, he jotted down the first prose draft in 1845 as a “satyr play” designed as a pendant to Tannhäuser but at that date did not elaborate the draft because what he called the “unnaturalness of public life” meant that “irony” was the only effective form of comedy. But he was unwilling to commit himself to this irony lest he lost the “power” of his “comedic instinct.”36 That he turned instead to the “myth of the people” and entered the world of Lohengrin and its hero’s longing to aspire to “the highest sphere”37 hardly suggests that Wagner was thinking in terms of realpolitik at this time.
When Wagner returned to the subject of Die Meistersinger in 1861, it was—as he repeatedly announced—in the hope not least of finding the sort of quick success that was eluding him with Tristan und Isolde, already dismissed as “unperformable.” His claim that the decision to take up the work again was inspired by Titian’s Assunta in Venice cannot be supported by what we know about the opera’s genesis but is evidently another of his conscious attempts to surround it with an aura of mystery. As Bernhard Schubert has observed, the claim is nonetheless revealing: Wagner’s “Assunta experience represents the fruits of his reading; it is like a legend, a new theatrical role for the great actor and, as such, no different from the theatrical costumes that he wore at this time, including his beret and artist’s jacket.”38
In this particular case, such an act of self-mystification was particularly necessary as Wagner had no wish to give the impression that he had abandoned his whole mythological baggage simply out of opportunism. And we should not be treading on the composer’s toes or offending his amour propre by noting that he planned to complete the score of Die Meistersinger as quickly as he could. According to the German musicologist Jörg Linnenbrügger, the sketches for the first act reveal “that not every recourse to existing motivic and thematic material relating to individual characters or specific elements in the plot can be explained by reference to the rules of Wagner’s ‘leitmotif technique,’” but they reflect the fact that the composer was trying to be as economical as possible.39 At all events, he abandoned the approach that he had adopted with Tristan und Isolde and instead used “compositional building blocks” notated on individual pages and correspondingly easy to find and assemble.
Only during the final stage of the work’s genesis did Wagner’s relations with Ludwig II acquire any real significance. Nothing would have made the king happier than to live in an artists’ colony with Wagner, as a single detail may illustrate:
According to his diary Ludwig should have spent May 22 [1866] opening the new session of parliament, but instead he slipped away from Johann von Lutz, a member of the supreme court who was looking after him at Schloss Berg, and rode via Polling and Peißenberg to Peiting, where he caught the mail coach to Biessenhofen, then took the scheduled train to Lindau, crossing Lake Constance by steamboat and disembarking at Romanshorn, from where he traveled to Zurich and thence by special train to Lucerne, where, dressed as Walther von Stolzing in a blue Byronic cape and a large hat with ostrich feathers, he arrived in the early afternoon and, to Wagner’s infinite surprise, congratulated the “God-sent” composer on his birthday.40
Wagner could do nothing with a king who was tired of ruling and afraid of conflict, and so he kept reminding Ludwig of his responsibility to the world of pan-German politics, advising him first to side with Prussia, then with Austria, concerned, as he was, to keep his king’s hands from slipping from the reins of state. It was against this background—and not least in response to Cosima’s nagging—that Wagner incorporated into Sachs’s closing speech the monitory lines that we quoted earlier: “Beware! Evil tricks threaten us: if the German people and empire should one day fall apart under false Romance rule, soon no prince will understand his people any longer.” When seen against the background of Nuremberg’s position in the sixteenth century, such a warning to beware of succumbing to Romance influences may well have made sense, but it is unclear what a ruler like Ludwig II was supposed to make of this advice, not least because Wagner, following the lead of a writer like Friedrich Schiller, has his Sachs hail “holy German art” as the one thing that might survive as an example of German greatness.
By the end of a long latent period when Wagner’s views on Die Meistersinger kept changing, only one thing remains clear from an ideological standpoint, namely, that he himself wanted to be acclaimed as a “German artist” and as the guardian of “holy German art.” This ultimately seems a trifle unjust toward a work that is about far more than crude nationalism but contains a degree of culture of which many of the opera’s detractors, versed in ideological criticism, can only dream. But a glance at the tributes that Wagner received at the end of the first performance, which he watched from the royal box in Munich’s National Theater, and an examination of the caricatures that appeared in the local and national press at this time suggest that at least in June 1868 it was Wagner himself as an artist who created fa
r more of a sensation than any vague national or nationalist message that the work may be deemed to have contained.
In short, there is not exactly an abundance of alternatives to staging Die Meistersinger as a “real idealistic” fairy tale, leaving it hard for directors to find an overriding idea that could bring together all the conflicting and contradictory strands in the plot.41 It seems more sensible, therefore, to examine the character of the individual scenes and present them as an open-ended sequence in the hope that the ingenuity of the action and the genius of the music will sustain the piece and its audiences over a period of five and a half hours. The guiding principle might be an ironic view of the work that avoids satire and slapstick but emphasizes the human limitations and limited humanity of all the characters in the spirit of a good comedy and at the same time makes clear the distance that exists—or should exist—between us and Wagner’s vague concept of a community.
This would effectively be a play within a play. In 1845 Wagner was still unable to accept irony as a specific form of comedy, and it was not until twenty years later that he was prepared to take this step, a risk he was willing to undertake not least because with Tristan und Isolde he had just written a work that could hardly be less ironic and less concerned with the whole idea of distance. Instead, he approached Die Meistersinger with very different eyes, as “sentiment” became “resentment” in the sense of “feeling something again afterward.” As he himself put it, he had “pushed himself to the limit” in Tristan und Isolde and was no longer interested in exploring a world of total obsession, preferring to examine the varied and shifting emotional states of his various characters. And by presenting his beloved Sachs as a man in all his contradictions, he was able to maintain a greater sense of distance than had been the case in Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde.