The following guidance notes are for use both with the just-posted first audio part of my digressive commentary on Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’ and for the second part, which will move on to deal with that Third Act of this music-drama from which Nietzsche actually quotes and with the broader religious and aesthetic-philosophical themes that it articulates.
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Like Der Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger is a Christian theological work – but also like Der Ring, its Christian theology is extremely unorthodox, largely an improvisation of Wagner’s own on certain quasi-heretical dogmatic bases.
The opening chorale, in an overtly church setting, already sets this theme.
Its text seems prima facie to be orthodoxly Christ-centred. But in fact, in its concrete execution, it draws the figure of John the Baptist, “the Precursor” into the foreground.
Edler Täufer!
Christs Vorläufer!
Nimm uns gnädig an,
dort am Fluss Jordan!
This prefigures the basic structure of the opera. The roles of “Christ” and “John the Baptist” are easily assigned.
The former is Walther von Stolzing, who “saves” the guild of the Meistersinger by introducing into it new, strong blood.
The former is (Jo)Hannes Sachs.
Yet in the course of the drama the really decisive characteristics of the Heiland pass over onto the side of Hans Sachs.
What is said in the opening chorale of the “Saviour”
weihte sich dem Opfertod
turns out to apply really to Sachs and not at all to Walther.
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An interesting sidelight on this is thrown by a small detail in this opening church scene, in which Wagner displays as he does nowhere else his melodic gifts and his talents as a composer of comic opera.
“David”, needless to say, is also a key figure in the tradition leading to “the Christ”
Die Meistersinger contains a whole spectrum of “David”s.
One major supporting character, indeed, Hans Sachs’s apprentice
But in this early sequence two others
MAGDALENE
Ach! meinst du den König mit der Harfen
und langem Bart in der Meister Schild?
EVA
Nein! der, des Kiesel den Goliath warfen,
das Schwert im Gurt, die Schleuder zur Hand,
das Haupt von lichten Locken umstrahlt,
wie ihn uns Meister Dürer gemalt!
We could spend the entire talk going through what is happening here.
Magdalene – after a first moment’s shock when she thinks Eva is focusing on the same sort of male object of attraction as her – identifies as the figure linked to the name “David” a figure that is considerably distanced from the “powerless, subordinate shepherd boy” of the Bible story.
This David has grown older, grown a beard, become a king – and is the symbol of the staid, settled, propertied and self-confident world of the Meistersinger guild.
Eva switches register: she associates the name with a boy: unbearded and lighter of build but of warrior spirit, portrayed not just by some journeyman artist for the guild’s coat of arms but rather by the great “master” of the city, Duerer himself.
Here already the complexities we are dealing with emerge:
Both Magdalena’s and Eva’s “David”s are “David”s that have been hybridized and have thereby moved away from the initial figure of the Book of Samuel, whose Hauptmotiv is powerlessness.
At first, it seems that Magdalena’s version moves much farther away from the “powerless” Biblical origin than does Eva’s.
But really we have to do with hybridization with two different forms of “empowerment”.
Magdalena – the menopausal, desexualized character – hybridizes him with the staid, stolid power of property and social authority
Eva – the young nubile - hybridizes “David” with a wilder, rawer power of youth and beauty
Things are complicated still farther by the fact that – whereas Magdalena’s vision seems historically confirmable (most likely the musician’s guild of Nuremburg did indeed have an image of the “old musician King”, the author of the Psalms, in their coat of arms) – the Duerer image evoked by Eva does not exist.
The best-known representation of David by Duerer that we have is the 1510 “King David Penitent” in which the “messiah” figure is portrayed in terms that lean toward the Isenheim Altarpiece produced by Gruenewald two years later.
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The church scene segues into the scene showing the preparation for the Meistersingers’ examination for admission to their guild.
This scene introduces a factor which is absent from the problem that Nietzsche adduces the Meistersinger passage to clarify in the first chapter of Geburt.
Namely, the problem of the massive apparatus of traditionally established rules that tend to lie between the “dream” of the Apollonian artist and its actual final artistic expression.
The duet of Walther and David establishes the prima facie absurd and deadening nature of these rules.
And this remains the central structuring idea of the drama.
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Worth noting is the beauty of Veit Pogner’s long solo in this First Act.
It is a token of Wagner’s all-embracing genius that we find an indication, in the line
Nun schuf mich Gott zum reichen Mann
Of Wagner’s comprehension and appreciation of the complex, counter-intuitive theology of the Beruf that Max Weber devoted a long and subtle monograph to some fifty years later.
The long solo passage generally strikes, for the first time in European culture perhaps, themes which made up a large part of the substance of philosophical and social-philosophical debate for the following hundred years:
The defence and critique of the bourgeoisie as at once defenders and destroyers of art and intellect.
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An interesting illustration of the conflictual dialectic between formal rule and inspiration that runs through the whole music-drama is to be seen in Walther’s bold move of taking the long-established, litanistic formula which begins the examination – fanget an! – and refilling it with life by refunctioning it as the first line of his own original creation.
Watching the Meistersinger from a distance of a century and a half, this move becomes especially pregnant with meaning in that there springs to mind, watching and hearing it, the stroke of genius carried off by Keith Jarrett at the start of his Koeln-Konzert in the 1970s, i.e. the taking of the three notes played over the concert hall’s tannoy system to announce that the performance was about to begin and making of them the actual beginning of his improvisation.
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The real substance of Die Meistersinger is contained in the glorious Third Act.
The keynote of resigned, resolute, melancholy but manly struggle is struck in the magnificent Overture.
Then it is verbalized in Hans Sachs’s solo in the scene immediately before his interview with Walther from which Nietzsche quotes.
Once again, the dramatic / philosophical configuration here is one to whose complexity the model of artistic experience and practice proposed in The Birth of Tragedy is at least at risk of failing to do justice.
Hans Sachs is portrayed as having a certain affinity with the world of Wahn – “madness” – partaking of both the worlds – Traum and Rausch – evoked in Nietzsche’s account of the artist.
He certainly has a far greater affinity with it than any of the other Meistersinger, who are terrified of it and therefore subject to it.
But this long and famous solo beginning
Wahn, Wahn, ueberall Wahn
clearly situates Sachs in the position of the man of the Enlightenment, or the position of Freud vis-à-vis his own discoveries.
This position is articulated in the highly graphic and very stirring transition:
Der Flieder war’s: Johannisnacht!
Nun aber kam Johannistag!
The dialectic of dream and reason, inspiration and observance of rules, is restated in the final lines
Jetzt schaun wir, wie Hans Sachs es macht,
dass er den Wahn fein lenken mag,
ein edler Werk zu tun:
denn lässt er uns nicht ruh’n,
selbst hier in Nürenberg,
so sei’s um solche Werk’,
die selten vor gemeinen Dingen
und nie ohn’ ein’gen Wahn gelingen
§
The following scene, which Nietzsche cites from, has to be seen in this context.
The element of vision and inspiration – “divine madness” – that is central to Nietzsche’s account both of Apollonian and Dionysian artistic experience and practice is present here, indeed – but always only in symbiosis with a system of rational, unemotional, rule-based procedures.
The existential correlate of this is Hans Sachs’s position as a man in whom age has destroyed the immediate, intuitive capacity for both Traum and Rausch.
The beautifully humble passage, once again with almost Christ-like echoes
Das waren hoch bedürft’ge Meister,
von Lebensmüh’ bedrängte Geister:
in ihrer Nöten Wildnis
sie schufen sich ein Bildnis,
dass ihnen bliebe
der Jugendliebe
ein Angedenken, klar und fest,
d’ran sich der Lenz erkennen lässt.
§
The scene, in fact, contains in nuce much of the next century in the history of Western music.
WALTHER
Wie fang’ ich nach der Regel an?
SACHS
Ihr stellt sie selbst und folgt ihr dann.
The moment captured here is, we may say, the moment of the Second Vienna School’s turn to dodecaphony around 1920.
Schoenberg and his pupils had experimented for a time with complete rulelessness, complete renunciation of all tonality.
Bumping up against the limits of this, yet unable to return to a classical tonality that they felt to be discredited, they opted for the pure positum of the rule that “none of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale can recur in a composition until the whole scale of twelve has first been run through”.
§
Perhaps it is a forced over-interpretation but I would suggest that one quaint and somehow especially memorable sung exchange in this scene is an even succincter summing-up of “the dilemma of 1920”.
On Walther’s first demand for a legitimation of the rules that Sachs is urging him to adopt:
SACHS
Das war ein “Stollen”; nun achtet wohl,
dass ganz ein gleicher ihm folgen soll.
WALTHER
Warum ganz gleich?
Sachs offers no real answer or legitimation but only a childish play on words
SACHS
Damit man seh’,
ihr wähltet euch gleich ein Weib zur Eh’.
The regression to senseless childish wordplay is the reiteration, under another form, of the high Schoenbergian theory of
Ihr stellt sie selbst und folgt ihr dann.
Both dicta express the idea: the rule is necessarily groundless, and yet must be observed.
§
Yet immediately after this reassertion of this imperative of rule-governedness, Sachs immediately tenderly restates the need for dream-like inspiration, ruleless intuition:
Gedenkt des schönen Traums am Morgen:
fürs andre lasst Hans Sachs nur sorgen.
Inconvenient as it is for the reading I would personally prefer, the repeated characterization in this scene of Walther’s dream as a Morgentraum does indeed confirm the standard teaching in both Wagner and Schopenhauer studies that Wagner was drawing here on the Essay on Spirit Seeing section of Parerga and Paralipomena.
§
Nevertheless, this importing into the plot of Die Meistersinger of an element of Schopenhauer ontology and psychology is secondary to the principal, non-Schopenhauerian Christian-soteriological framework of the drama.
In this crucial third-act scene the form of expression adopted by this soteriological problematic is, in large part, the masochistic cuckold scenario, as in Sacher-Masoch’s interesting treatment of the iteration par excellence of the Judaeo-Christian dialectic of messianism, the story of Sabtai Zwi.
Hans Sachs, in this scene, very decidedly and resolutely places himself in the position of the “cuckold”, recalling – in his pursuit of his Handwerk while the love of his life sinks into sexual ecstasy with another – the classical “cuckold” Hephaestus.
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