V.
The third act of the comedy is preceded by a prelude which, rightly understood, reflects the cobbler-poet whom I have chosen to think the real hero of the play, in the light in which he appears in the history of German civilization and culture. Twice before, in the comedy, a glimpse of him in that character had been given—in the summer evening, after the meeting, when he could not work because he was haunted by the memory of Walther's song, and again when, having found the solution of the problem raised by that song, he drove away all the phantoms of melancholy by his lusty cobbling song. Apparently that song is all carelessness and contentment, but in reality it tells of the lofty thinker and his melancholy, bred of his contemplation of the vanities of the things with which he finds himself surrounded.
This is the last stanza:
"O Eve, my sore complaints attend,
My needs and dire distresses,
For underfoot mankind the cobbler's work of art oppresses.
If I'd no angel knew
What 'tis to make a shoe,
I'd leave this cobbling in a trice.
But when I go to his retreat,
I leave the world beneath my feet,
Myself I view, Hans Sachs a shoemaker and song-master too!"
In the accompaniment to this stanza a phrase appears in the orchestra (it is not in the simplified pianoforte scores) in which, as Wagner himself puts it, there is "the bitter cry of resignation of the man who shows to the world a cheerful and energetic mien." It is the solemn phrase which gives character and color to Sachs' monologue in the third act, when he contemplates the follies and petty passions of humanity (Wahn! Wahn! überall Wahn!). It symbolizes for us Sachs, the philosopher. To appreciate the full significance of the Nuremberg cobbler as poet and thinker, a glance must be thrown upon a highly important phase in the history of German culture. A new melody had been put into that voice by the Reformation. Luther lived to be hailed by it as "the Nightingale of Wittenberg" in a poem whose opening lines Wagner ingeniously uses as a tribute to Sachs in the third act of the comedy. It is the chorale, Wach auf! Es nahet gen dem Tag.
The Reformation had revived interest in the old art of master-song which had sunk into decadence under the edict of the Romish Church prohibiting the reading of the Bible by the common people. The greatest of the Nuremberg school of master-singers was inspired by the new dawn, and Luther and Melanchthon looked up from the pages of Homer, Virgil, and Horace to listen to the strange new melody which felt and sang with and for the people. This character of Sachs, in all the details that I have pointed out, is delineated in the prelude to the third act, whose melodic contents are thus summarized: First, the contemplative phrase, Wahn! Wahn! next the Lutheran chorale, Wach auf! a portion of the cobbling song ("as if the man had turned his gaze from his handiwork heavenwards, and was lost in tender musing," says Wagner); then the chorale again, with increased sonority, and eventually the opening phrase attuned to cheerfulness and resignation.