by Martin Geck
Wagner was still in his fifties when he worked on the score of Die Meistersinger, so it is difficult to describe this as a late piece. At the same time, however, there is a clear tendency to abandon the worm’s-eye view of subjective experience and replace it with the bird’s-eye view that allows the observer to see the whole picture. This trend was continued in Götterdämmerung and Parsifal, in each case in a very specific way: the final evening of the Ring is marked by the attempt to keep control of a semantic structure that had by now grown overcomplicated until the coup de grâce was inevitable, while in Parsifal Wagner’s principal concern was the renunciation of individual instinct in favor of a higher wisdom, hence Wagner’s comment to Cosima that in the case of Parsifal it had “not been possible to avoid a certain restriction of feeling; this does not mean that it is churchlike in tone, he says, indeed there is even a divine wildness in it, but such affecting emotions as in Tristan or even the Nibelungen would be entirely out of place.” And he concluded by informing his wife: “You will see—diminished sevenths were just not possible!”42
According to traditional theories on musical rhetoric, the diminished seventh was used, by preference, for states of emotional effusiveness, as in the first two notes of Marke’s line “Sieh’ ihn dort, den Treu’sten aller Treuen” (See him there, the truest of the true). Wagner’s reference to this interval positively invites us to examine all of his works in terms of their specific musical semantics. In the case of Die Meistersinger, this aim cannot be achieved by making the musicological point that the advanced chromatic writing of Tristan und Isolde has been subverted in favor of pseudoarchaic diatonic writing in keeping with the historical subject matter. Rather, Wagner writes “music about music” on a grand scale, and this also involves juggling with various styles, not with a copy of those styles.
“Music about music” existed long before Die Meistersinger. On the very highest level we may be reminded of Beethoven’s late string quartets, works much admired by Wagner in which the older composer offers a nostalgic but defiant summation of his own “heroic” phase. On a more concrete level, there are the many scenes that emerge naturally from the action of the work and that have always been typical of opera. Among such scenes, which are responsible for creating a sense of local color and involve songs and music making in general, are the serenades in Mozart’s operas, the trumpet fanfare at Don Fernando’s arrival in Fidelio and the Huntsmen’s Chorus and Bridesmaids’ Chorus in Der Freischütz, to name only works drawn from Wagner’s favorite repertory. He himself continued to work in this same tradition, most notably with Senta’s Ballad, Wolfram’s Ode to the Evening Star, the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, Siegfried’s Forging Songs, and the song of the Young Sailor and the “traurige Weise” in Tristan und Isolde.
But all of this now acquires a new quality, for whereas the foregoing examples—with the exception of Senta’s Ballad—play little part in driving the action forward, Die Meistersinger may be regarded from start to finish as an opera about music. That it features an ongoing discussion about the ideological element of “German art” tends to obscure that it is German music that is, as it were, the work’s invisible leading lady. The number of occasions when music is presented onstage speaks for itself, beginning with the congregation singing a chorale in St. Katharine’s Church (“Da zu dir der Heiland kam”), followed later in the act by the Apprentices’ round (“Das Blumenkränzlein aus Seiden fein”) and culminating at the end of the act with Walther’s Trial Song (“Fanget an”). Indeed, the action of the first act as a whole is largely laid out along the lines of a discussion about music and, more especially, the rules and customs of the mastersingers’ guild in Nuremberg.
The second act is no different: the Apprentices begin by singing their song about St. John’s Day. Later, Sachs performs his Cobbling Song (“Als Eva aus dem Paradies”) and Beckmesser sings his serenade (“Den Tag seh’ ich erscheinen”), while the Night Watchman blows his horn three times in the course of the act. The final act includes not only a trial run of Walther’s Prize Song (“Morgenlich leuchtend”) but also a final tableau that resembles a music festival matinee, starting with the entrance of the guilds, continuing with the “Wach’ auf” chorus, and ending with the two songs with which Beckmesser and Walther seek to win Eva’s hand in marriage (“Morgen ich leuchte” and “Morgenlich leuchtend”). It scarcely needs adding that the action in general revolves about music and its social function. In short, around a third of the opera is taken up with scenes in which the plot requires singing in the true sense of the term (rather than simply as a setting of a prescribed text). A further third is reserved for aspects of the plot that bear some relation to the subject of music. And only the remaining third is a setting of words that are not primarily concerned with music.
I am uncertain whether Wagner was already aware, while writing out the libretto, that the preponderant role of music in the story would have such far-reaching consequences for the score, as such an approach required him to demonstrate entirely new qualities as a composer. Normally a composer is required to find the right “tone” for particular elements in the plot and for specific atmospheric situations. Here the composer relies on his feeling for what those situations express. But if he has to find the right tone for what is effectively pre-existent music, then his range of expression is limited, for the tone is a function of the message that the existing music is intended to convey.
The song contest in act 2 of Tannhäuser already gives us a foretaste of this problem, but no more than that, for this scene is not designed to characterize the art of the Minnesänger but only to present us with different views of love. And for this, Wagner uses a modern musical language, the only exception being the harp accompaniment indicative of each of the contributions to the contest. The situation is very different in the case of Die Meistersinger, for although Walther’s Trial Song and Prize Song are both about love, the main focus of interest is the actual technique of songwriting—not the what, but the how. Against this background Wagner could not avoid engaging with the mastersingers’ traditional type of singing not just on the level of plot and text but also through the medium of music. To be specific: what should the music of the Nuremberg mastersingers sound like? As we have already observed, Wagner initially intended to write the opera as a satyr play that would have provided a counterpart to Tannhäuser but then shied away from this idea on account of the degree of irony that would have been necessary. Presumably his original concept involved a certain mockery of mastersinging.
But instead of indulging in idle speculations on this point, we would do better to see what Wagner actually achieved after 1862—namely, irony of a superior kind that includes the odd sideswipe at some of the quirks of mastersong but which is generally at pains to reconcile the old and the new. In short, irony is only rarely synonymous with mockery. One such occasion is the scene in which David instructs Walther in the rules and “tones” of mastersinging using musical gestures of exceptional vividness or when Kothner declaims the Leges Tabulaturae, ending each of its clauses with a grotesquely old-fashioned coloratura flourish. In general, however, irony means simply rising above the matter in hand and writing music about music.
At this point it must have become clear to Wagner that it was not enough to play off the old against the new or craftsmanship against genius. To have done so would not only have contradicted his view of history, according to which “masters” or “artists” occupied an important position, it would also have overtaxed him as a composer because it would have meant always working with negations, resulting in an opera which, at least when seen against the aesthetic background of the nineteenth century, was neither logical nor coherent. From a musical point of view, his idea of reconciling the old and the new and of creating a harmonious balance between pedantry and poetry in Die Meistersinger was a necessary precondition for his ability to write music about music.
Wagner’s brilliance as a composer lay in his ability to take his decisions on two different l
evels at once: that of a comedy and that of a drama of ideas. On the level of the comedy, the local color of mastersong offered him a chance to poke fun at its eccentricities in a particularly vivid and even graphic way, while at the same time exposing the failing of uncreative pomposity in the figure of the town clerk. And on the level of the play of ideas, Wagner chose as his starting point a type of “early” music that he regarded as above criticism on account of its timeless, masterly character and that he believed was particularly well suited to reconciling the old and the new: Bachian counterpoint.
The composer Peter Cornelius highlighted these parallels at the time of the first performance of Die Meistersinger:
Just as the theme or themes of a fugue by Bach contain within them the seed of the whole, so here, too, the introduction, exposition, and the whole of the musical picture are no more than a constant unfolding of the wealth contained within them, while the ever more intense return of the main motifs goes hand in hand with the manner in which the main poetic idea builds to a triumphant climax.43
During his Bayreuth period, Wagner too repeatedly forged a link between the music of Bach and his score of Die Meistersinger. At one of the family’s regular soirées in December 1878, for example, Josef Rubinstein played the Prelude in F-sharp Minor from part 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a piece not notable for any great harmonic subtleties. It reminded the Wagners of Die Meistersinger and prompted the composer to refer to the assembly of the mastersingers as a “continuation of Bach.”44 Only a few days later Wagner explained fugue technique to his children using the example of The Well-Tempered Clavier, then turned to the overture to Die Meistersinger as an instance of “applied Bach.”45 And in June 1882 he worked through Cantata 18, Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt, with Hermann Levi, the work striking him as “rather mastersingerish, clumsy.”46 Presumably he was referring to the unison introduction and falsobordone quotations from the Lutheran liturgy.47 It is also possible that Wagner knew the Second Brandenburg Concerto, the first subject of which recalls a motif in Die Meistersinger often referred to by German writers on music as the “Motif of burgher mastery” (music example 26).48
26. The opening bars of the first movement of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto, transposed from the original F major to C major, and, beneath them, the opening bars of the overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
It is not enough, however, to draw attention to such details, which are in any case merely atmospheric. Nor shall we come any closer to understanding the work by agreeing with Cornelius’s pointedly worded claim that the “musical form” of the work is a “fugue that has become an opera.”49 Rather, Bach and counterpoint symbolize Wagner’s aim of investing the work with a very specific deep structure. This aim is not new in Wagner’s output but springs from his desire to create a musical drama that does more than merely juxtapose individual moments designed to please the listener in that it constantly allows a hidden world of meaning to be glimpsed beneath the surface: the hidden world of myth. Rudimentary examples of this may be read into Wagner’s three romantic operas, but it is only in the Ring and in Tristan und Isolde than the aim emerges with any real clarity. In the Ring, alliterative verse, leitmotif technique, and orchestral melody—to name only the principal elements—ensure that all its events are bathed in an aura that makes them seem as if they have always been there, whereas in Tristan und Isolde it is above all Wagner’s “endless melody” and the motivic density of the quasi-symphonic writing that promote the idea of a fabric of altogether impenetrable mythic complexity. Here the actual plot seeks nothing more nor less than to decode this archetypal text. (The “traurige Weise” is the best example of this, impinging on the present as if from an age long past.)
In short, the problem that we are discussing is not unique to Die Meistersinger. But it appears here in a different guise, the tragic events of the earlier works having become something essentially comic, while archaic myth has been replaced by the myth of the German nation, German art, and, specifically, German music. This demands a specific deep structure characterized by “counterpoint”—in this case the term has a philosophical as well as a technical dimension to it. During the second half of the nineteenth century it came to be used in Germany as a shorthand way of referring to virtues believed to be typically German, including “a sense of community in the face of individualism and subjectivism,” “tradition in contradistinction to the merely fashionable,” “the spiritual as opposed to the purely material,” “a profound impression rather than a superficial impact,” “transcendence instead of metaphysical decline,” and “persistence and strength of will rather than quick solutions.”50 In Opera and Drama Wagner had adopted a highly critical view of counterpoint and dismissed medieval vocal polyphony as an aberration for rejecting the original naïveté of Christian hymnology, but his view of history had changed with his increasing admiration of Bach, with the result that by the 1860s counterpoint and Bach were synonymous with the ostensible German virtues sketched out above—at least to the extent that these virtues were to be distinguished from “Romance dross.”
This, then, was the background against which Nietzsche, in a passage headed “Peoples and Fatherlands,” could write so perceptively about the contrapuntal procedures used by Wagner in his overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg:
It is magnificent, overcharged, heavy, late art that has the pride of presupposing two centuries of music as still living, if it is to be understood: it is to the credit of the Germans that such pride did not miscalculate. What flavors and forces, what seasons and climes are not mixed here! It strikes us now as archaic, now as strange, tart, and too young, it is just as capricious as it is pompous-traditional, it is not infrequently saucy, still more often coarse and rude—it has fire and courage and at the same time the loose dun skin of fruit that ripens too late. [. . .] Altogether, no beauty, no south, nothing of southern and subtle brightness of the sky, nothing of gracefulness, no dance, scarcely any will to logic; even a certain clumsiness that is actually stressed, as if the artist wished to say to us, “that is part of my intention”; [. . .] something German in the best and worst senses of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible in a German way; a certain German powerfulness and overfulness of the soul.51
It is entirely possible to describe the overture to Die Meistersinger in terms other than these, but it is surely not possible to write any better than this, for Nietzsche has observed a dialectic that Wagner enthusiasts are barely able to see. Wagner does not write “beautiful” music in the spirit of traditional aesthetics, but nor does he transfigure the older style. Rather, his art consists in placing the old in an affectionately ironic light. The music appears to be telling us that although it may no longer be possible to write like this, there is no need to look down on the contrapuntal strength and assurance of the older composers or on their naïve way of throwing together heterogeneous themes in the manner of a popular quodlibet. It is significant in this context that Heinrich Schenker, whose commitment to solid “German” counterpoint had a self-confessed ethical component, described the combination of themes at the end of the overture as “nonsense,”52 indicating that he was unable to appreciate Wagner’s use of irony and delectable sleight of hand.
But it is very much these elements that constitute Wagner’s modernity, a modernity that increased music’s linguistic power in a very different way from the one found in Tristan und Isolde. Now the provocation lies not in the breakdown of the usual musical forms or the undermining of traditional harmony but in the introduction of what we might call doubletalk: music looks over its own shoulder, commenting on itself and reflecting on its own particular design. It is inconceivable that Wagner would have added a programmatic explanation to one of his earlier works similar to the one he provided for Die Meistersinger: “The love song is heard at the same time as the mastersongs: pedantry and poetry are reconciled.” This is the first time that listeners had been confronted by a technical element th
at they previously did not need to know about since they were concentrating entirely on the myth. Indeed, they were not even supposed to know about it at all. True, we are still dealing with a myth, but on this occasion it is the myth of German art that can be approached only through the medium of artistic understanding. Although it is not yet the case with Wagner that the technique is the message, it is undoubtedly true that in writing Die Meistersinger he had struck out in a direction that was to lead directly to the twentieth century: to Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and far beyond.
In a piano scherzo dating from 1902, the young Stravinsky reflected explicitly on the “characteristic harmony” of the overture to Die Meistersinger,53 metaphorically pointing the way to the aesthetics of the opera, a work that plays constantly with all manner of styles and types of writing. This aspect of the opera has nothing to do with historicism or eclecticism but is a direct result of its subject matter. In Die Meistersinger, Wagner aimed to depict the musical life of the nation in as many facets as possible and in that way draw a distinction between a genuinely German art of the theater and the hothouse blooms of French and Italian opera, which he regarded as the epitome of a corrupt society. In consequence, the chorale sung by the congregation in St. Katharine’s Church, the assembly of the mastersingers in the same building, the stylistically authentic appearance of the Night Watchman and the “Wach’ auf” chorus inspired by a poem by the historical figure of Hans Sachs are anything but picturesque set pieces but instead are historically significant examples of the life of the German people. The songs that drive the action forward and that include Walther’s Trial Song and Prize Song and Sachs’s Cobbling Song likewise reflect the richness of German song as sung by the people—in this case, Walther, too, can be regarded as a man of the people because he is no product of an aristocratic education but a naturally talented artist who has learned his songs “from finches and titmice” and who ultimately succeeds in reconciling his art with the rules of middle-class mastersong. This does not mean, however, that in writing Die Meistersinger, Wagner concentrated on a “middle style,” by which I mean an account of middle-class normality. Instead, the score strikes out in a number of different directions. The riot scene at the end of act 2, for example, not only functions as a dramaturgically skillfully constructed finale in which masters, journeymen, and apprentices come to blows in Nuremberg’s nighttime alleyways but also recalls the turba scenes in Bach’s Passions, scenes which, familiar to Wagner, feature a rabble-rousing crowd. In Die Meistersinger, too, the good people of Nuremberg, provoked by a relatively trivial incident, steadily become an aggressive mob. (This analogy remains true even though the writing in the riot scene is entirely untypical of Bach.)
