Studies in the Wagnerian Drama

by Henry Edward Krehbiel

VI.

Wagner's "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" is a comedy, and by that token is more difficult of understanding and appreciation by persons unfamiliar with the German tongue, history, and social customs than any of his tragedies. In considering the latter, it is only the elements of expression that need give us pause. In their essence, being true tragedies, they are as much the property of one race as another. This is not the case with comedies. They do not deal with the great fundamental passions of humanity, but with the petty foibles and follies and vices of a people. Being such, they vary with peoples and with times, and their representation compels the use of historical backgrounds, the application of local color. "Die Meistersinger" is a capital illustration of this principle of dramatic poetry. As a picture of the social life of a German city three hundred years ago its vividness and truthfulness are beyond praise; it has no equal in operatic literature, and few peers in the literature of the spoken drama. It is absolutely photographic in its accuracy. To appreciate this fact fully one must have visited Nuremberg, gone through its museum, and turned over the records. With such assistance it is easy to call up in fancy such a vision of its social life in the middle of the sixteenth century as will form a most harmonious setting for the series of pictures which Wagner created. It is still the quaintest city in Germany, and full of relics of its old glory. Of these relics, however, fewer belong to the time of the master-singers than an investigator would be likely to imagine. In the Germanic Museum may be found remains of many of the old guilds of the town, but none of the Master-singers' Guild, except a tablet which once hung on the walls of St. Catherine's Church and has been removed to the museum for safe-keeping. The church, indeed, is still in existence, but its use by the master-singers never brought it fame until after Wagner's comic opera had been written, and now I doubt whether a hundred residents of Nuremberg, aside from those who live in the immediate vicinity, could even tell a visitor where to find it. For more than a century it has been put to secular uses, and nothing of the interior remains to indicate what it looked like in the time of Hans Sachs except the walls. All the furniture and decorations were long ago removed, for it has been a painters' academy, drawing-school, military hospital, warehouse, public hall, and perhaps a dozen other things since it ceased to be a place of public worship. Just now it is the paint-shop of the Municipal Theatre. It is a small, unpretentious building, absolutely innocent of architectural beauty, hidden away in the middle of a block of lowly buildings used as dwellings, carpenter-shops, and the like. I got the keys from a sort of police supervisor of the district and inspected the interior in 1886. The janitor knew nothing about its history beyond his own memory, and that compassed only a portion of its career as a sort of municipal lumber-room. It was built in the last half-decade of the thirteenth century, and on its water-stained walls can be seen faint bits of the frescos which once adorned it and were painted in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; but they are ruined beyond recognition or hope of restoration. I went to the director of the Germanic Museum to learn what had become of the old church furniture. He did not know.

"Have you seen the tablet of the master-singers which we have up-stairs?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Well, that is all that we have in the way of master-singer relics. If you have seen that and the church, you have seen all, and will have to compose the rest of the picture—draw on your imagination, or hire an artist to do it for you."

The tablet is really a more interesting relic than the church. It is a small affair of wood, with two doors, and was painted by a Franz Hein in 1581. On the doors are portraits of four distinguished members of the guild. Two pictures occupy the middle panel, the upper, with a charmingly naïve disregard of chronology, showing King David praying before a crucifix; the lower, a meeting of master-singers with a singer perched in a box-like pulpit. Over the heads of the assemblage is a representation of the chain and medallion with which the victor in a singing contest used to be decorated. Sachs gave one of these ornaments to the guild, and it was used for a hundred years. By that time, however, it had become so worn that Johann Christoph Wagenseil, a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Altdorf (to whose book, entitled De Sacri Rom. Imperii Libera Civitate Noribergensi Commentatio, printed in 1697, we owe the greater part of our knowledge of the art and customs of the Meistersinger), replaced it with another. The tablet might offer suggestions to the theatrical costumer touching the dress of the master-singers, and also the picture of David and his harp which ornamented their banner; but old Nuremberg costumes are familiar enough, and can be studied to better purpose elsewhere. Only one feature suggests itself as worthy of special notice. On the tablet the master-singers all appear wearing the immense neck-ruff of the Elizabethan period. As for the architectural settings of the stage in the first act (which plays in the Church of St. Catherine), so far as I know no attempt at correctness has been made by scene-painters; nor would it be possible to reproduce a picture of the church and still follow Wagner's stage directions. Evidently the poet-composer never took the trouble to visit the Church of St. Catherine.

WOODEN TABLET OF THE MASTERSINGERS OF NUREMBERG.

I have said that, barring the church and tablet, there are no relics of the old guild to be found in the Nuremberg of to-day. Until lately it was supposed that the Municipal Library contained a number of autographic manuscripts by Hans Sachs, but when I asked for them, they were produced with the statement that they were no longer looked upon as genuine. It did not require much investigation to convince me that the claim long maintained that they were autographs of the cobbler-poet rested wholly on presumption. Sachs autographs are extremely scarce. The Royal Library at Berlin possesses a volume of master-songs known to be in the handwriting of Sachs (among them is one by Beckmesser), but when I was in the Prussian capital this treasure was in Dresden, whither it had been sent to enable a literary student to utilize it in the preparation of a book on Sachs. A Berlin scholar, whom I found at work in the Nuremberg Library gathering material for a new biography of Sachs, informed me that the greatest number of Sachs autographs, and they not many, had been found in Zwickau, whither they had been brought by some member of the Sachs family many years ago. There are, then, no manuscript relics of him who was the chief glory of the Nuremberg guild in the old town. You may drink a glass of wine at the street-corner where tradition says the old poet cobbled and composed, but the house is a modern one. Of his companions in the guild I found no manuscripts in the library, and not one of them left his mark in any way on the town. But I did find a number of old manuscript volumes dating back two hundred years or more, which served to vitalize in a peculiarly interesting manner the record which the learned old Wagenseil left behind him, and some of the personages of Wagner's comedy. Those who have taken the trouble to investigate the source to which Wagner went for the people and customs introduced in his "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (Wagenseil's book) know that the names of the master-singers who figure in the comedy once belonged to veritable members of the Nuremberg guild. Wagenseil mentions them as singers whose memories were cherished in his day, and some of them were also mentioned by an older author, whose book, devoted chiefly to the Strassburg guild, which at one time was even more famous than that of Nuremberg, is referred to by Wagenseil. The book of the Strassburg writer, singularly enough, was known to Wagenseil only as a manuscript, and such it remained until two or three decades ago, when it was printed by a literary society at Stuttgart. In Wagenseil's day it was valued so highly that it was kept wrapped in silk, like the sacred scrolls of the Jews, a circumstance that enabled the pedantic Orientalist to air his learning on the subject for many pages in his wofully discursive but extremely interesting book. But if Wagenseil had not given his testimony, I could now bear witness to the fact that Conrad Nachtigal, Hans Schwartz, Conrad Vogelgesang, Sixtus Beckmesser, Hans Folz, Fritz Kothner, Balthasar Zorn, and Veit Pogner once lived as well as Hans Sachs. I have read some of their poems and copied some of the melodies invented by them and utilized by their successors in the guild. The volumes containing these curiosities of literature have been in the Municipal Library over one hundred years. In the catalogue of the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, printed one hundred and sixteen years ago, they are mentioned as having been purchased from an old master-singer. Five of them are small oblong books of music paper, upon which some old masters or apprentices in the art of master-song have copied melodies which were much used at the meetings in St. Catherine's Church. It was the custom of the members of the guild to compose poems to fit these melodies. In the second scene of his opera Wagner mentions a great many of the singular titles by which these melodies or modes were designated. He got them from Wagenseil. Besides these books, there are two immense manuscript volumes, in which some industrious old lover of the poetical art transcribed songs which he evidently thought admirable. They are each almost as large as Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and must represent months, if not years, of labor. One is devoted wholly to German paraphrases of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," set to a great variety of melodies. The author is M. Ambrosius Metzger, who was one of the few members of the guild who were scholars. He wrote the poems in 1625. The other volume contains songs by a great number of master-singers, though Hans Sachs is the principal contributor. The plan of the volume indicates that it was a collection of admired poems. It begins with paraphrases from the Pentateuch. Some early pages are missing, the first poem preserved dealing with the sixth chapter of Genesis. Chronological order is maintained up to chapter twenty-eight of the same book. Then follow songs dealing with the Gospels and Epistles. The Book of Job is not forgotten. Finally, there are a number of secular poems, many recounting Æsop's fables and anecdotes drawn from old writers. Songs of this character were composed by the master-singers for diversion at their informal gatherings. At the meetings in the Church of St. Catherine only sacred subjects were allowed. It is for this reason that Wagner's Kothner asks Walther in the opera whether he had chosen sacred matter (ein heil'gen Stoff) for his trial song, which provokes the reply from the ardent young knight that he would sing of love, a subject sacred to him. Whether sacred or secular, however, the form and style of the songs are alike. Nothing could more completely illustrate the absurdity of the fundamental theory of the foolish old pedants that poetry might be written by rule of thumb than the publication of a few of the songs in this old book. The nature of the poetical frenzy which fills them can, perhaps, be guessed if I record the fact that the majority of them, I think, begin with a citation of chapter and verse, or some statement equally matter of fact, as thus:

"The twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis records," or "Diogenes, the wise master," or "Strabo writes of the customs," or "Moses, the eleventh, reports," or "The Lesser Book of Truth doth tell," etc.

The last of these lines is the beginning of a master-song which has a twofold interest. In the first place, it is a secular poem by Hans Sachs which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been printed or written about. In the second place, it is set to a melody by the veritable Pogner who, in Wagner's comedy, offers his daughter and his fortune to the winner in the singing contest which makes up Wagner's last act. The poem is so amusing that I would like to give it entire in English, but its irregularity of accent and peculiarities of rhyme do not lend themselves willingly to translation. Of musical accent the master-singers, who followed the rhyming rules of those marvellously ingenious rhymesters the Minnesinger, had not the slightest idea. Wagner knew that. Sachs' first critical tap on his lapstone in Beckmesser's serenade is evoked by a blunder in accent which the veritable Sachs would have passed unnoticed, though, being a real poet, his sins in this respect were not as numerous as those of his colleagues and predecessors. I content myself, therefore, with the first Stollen, or stanza, and its Abgesang, or burden, which the curious student will find to be composed in strict accordance with the rules which, in the opera, Kothner reads from the blackboard. These Leges Tabulaturæ, by-the-way, are almost a literal transcription from the original laws preserved in Wagenseil's book. The matter of the song is this: A boor falls ill. Finding that his appetite is wholly gone, he calls in a physician, who informs him (in a drastic fashion) that the trouble is caused by an accumulation of slime in the stomach. He administers a purgative, but without result. The sickness increases, and the boor upbraids the doctor, who retorts that his patient will be a dead man within an hour unless he consent to having his stomach taken out and scoured with chalk. The boor consents, the physician performs the operation, cutting the man open with a pair of shears, brushes out the offending organ with a wisp, and hangs it on the fence to dry. What the farmer does meanwhile is not recorded; but before the physician could replace his stomach a raven carried it off to the woods and ate it. In this dilemma the physician disclosed himself as a worthy progenitor of the modern race of surgeons. He was terribly frightened, but didn't let any one see it. By stealth he procured a sow's stomach, introduced it into the farmer's body, and quickly sewed up the aperture. The farmer got well, and paid eight florins for the job. But heavens, what an appetite was that which he developed! To satisfy him now was utterly impossible, for which reason, concludes the moralist, an insatiable eater is nowadays said to be a hog (literally "to have a sow's stomach"), who devours more than he produces, as many women lament:

"Darum spricht man noch von ein Man,

Den man gar nicht erfuellen kan,

Wie er hab einen Sawmagen;

Verthut mehr denn er gewinnen kan,

Hoert man vil Frawen klagen."

FIRST STOLLEN.

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The Less - er Book of Truth doth tell,
How ill - ness on a boor once fell,
Taste for all food de - stroy - ing;
A - gainst all drugs it did re - bel,
His pleas - ures all al - loy - ing.......
One day there came a doc - tor wise,
Who glanced him o'er with search - ing eyes,
Found out what caused his ail - ing.
His learn - ing proof a - gainst sur - prise,
Made work like that plain sail - ing.......

THE ABGESANG.

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"Far - mer, of all your pains... the cause,
Is slime with - in your stom - ach wide dis - tend - ing."
The far - mer heard with gap - - ing jaws,
For gnaw - ing pains in - side his paunch were rend - ing.

The tale is an old one, popular in one form or another in the Middle Ages. A variant of it is to be found in the Gesta Romanorum, to which extraordinary collection of moral tales it is possible that Sachs had reference when he spoke of the Buch der Kleinen Wahrheit, or Lesser Book of Truth, as I have rendered it. In the Gesta, however, the physician substitutes a goat's eye, and subjects his patient to an extraordinary strabismus. Hans Sachs's variation is eminently characteristic of the man and the people for whom he wrote.

CHAPTER IV.
"DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN."

The common error of looking upon the outward covering of things for the things themselves has led to the real plot of Wagner's tetralogical drama "The Niblung's Ring" being overlooked by the majority of persons who have written about it. Especially has the significance of the prologue to the tragedy failed of appreciation. I shall try to tell what I conceive to be the true story of the tragedy, and at least hint at the meaning which that story had when it came into the mind of the sagaman and myth-maker ages ago, which meaning, moreover, Richard Wagner, unlike his modern predecessors among the poets who have treated the subject, apprehended and conserved.

It is a pretty solemn fact that unless this tragedy in four parts be approached with other aims than mere diversion, much will be found in it that appears ridiculous to the judgment, no matter how it affects the senses. To some it may seem a fatal confession to say that sincere and sufficient enjoyment of "The Niblung's Ring" is only to be had by persons willing to let critical judgment wait upon the imagination; yet I am willing to make that confession, and even to augment it by the statement that there are scenes in the tragedy when even this unfettered faculty must needs be as ingenuous as the "raised imagination" of Charles Lamb at his first play, which transformed the glistering substance on the pillars of Old Drury into "glorified sugar-candy." Yet I do not believe that thereby the potential beauty, impressiveness, and significance of the tragedy are brought into question. Is it not easy to conceive of a mental condition which would accept such a childlike receptivity as the only mood in which an art-work designed to appeal to emotions which the humdrum routine of modern life leaves untouched ought to be approached? Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen" is not an idle fairy-tale, the offspring of a mind working with fanciful material amid the environment of the nineteenth century. It is a tragedy Hellenic in its scope and proportions, dealing with one of the great problems of human existence, reflecting the operations of the quickened mind and conscience of humanity in its impressionable childhood.

"Das Rheingold" is the prologue to a tragedy which has not only the dimensions, but also the aim, of a Greek trilogy. This conception of its dignity greatly widens the significance of its few incidents. Of necessity? Yes. Observe the manner in which Wagner approaches his subject. The hero of the mediæval epic popularly called "The Lay of the Niblung" is Siegfried; and this story of Siegfried is mixed with considerable historical alloy. The character of Gunther, which figures in the story, is Gundikar, founder of the Burgundian monarchy, who was slain by Attila, A.D. 450. Attila himself is one of the personages of the poem, the scene of which plays largely at Worms.

It was Wagner's aim to illustrate a profound truth of universal bearing, and in harmony with his belief that such truths are best taught by presenting pictures of humanity stripped of all conventionality, he went back to the earliest forms of the tale which the mediæval poet wove into the "Lay of the Niblung." By this means he purified it of its historical dross; but also came in contact with the creations of the myth-maker. The period into which he moved his drama was the period reflected by our Northern ancestors when they were striving by an exercise of a vivid imagination and unyielding logic to answer the questions raised by a primitive religious instinct. Whether we want to or not, we must look upon "The Niblung's Ring" as a religious play which, by means of the symbols created by the Northern myth-maker, teaches a lesson universal and eternal in its application.