Studies in the Wagnerian Drama

by Henry Edward Krehbiel

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.

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.