Wagner wrote this explanatory programme:
“A primitive old love poem, which, far from having become extinct, is constantly fashioning itself anew, and has been adopted by every European language of the Middle Ages, tells us of Tristan and Isolde. Tristan, the faithful vassal, woos for his king her for whom he dares not avow his own love, Isolde. Isolde, powerless to do otherwise than obey the wooer, follows him as bride to his lord. Jealous of this infringement of her rights, the Goddess of Love takes her revenge. As the result of a happy mistake, she allows the couple to taste of the love potion which, in accordance with the custom of the times, and by way of precaution, the mother had prepared for the husband who should marry her daughter from political motives, and which, by the burning desire which suddenly inflames them after tasting it, opens their eyes to the truth and leads to the avowal that for the future they belong only to each other. Henceforth, there is no end to the longings, the demands, the joys and woes of love. The world, power, fame, splendor, honor, knighthood, fidelity, friendship, all are dissipated like an empty dream. One thing only remains: longing, longing, insatiable longing, forever springing up anew, pining and thirsting. Death, which means passing away, perishing, never awakening, their only deliverance.... Powerless, the heart sinks back to languish in longing, in longing without attaining; for each attainment only begets new longing, until in the last stage of weariness the foreboding of the highest joy of dying, of no longer existing, of the last escape into that wonderful kingdom from which we are furthest off when we are most strenuously striving to enter therein. Shall we call it death? Or is it the hidden wonder-world from out of which an ivy and vine, entwined with each other, grew up upon Tristan’s and Isolde’s grave, as the legend tells us?”
PRELUDE TO “DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG”
The idea of the opera occurred to Wagner at Marienbad in 1845. He then sketched a scenario which differed widely from the one finally adopted. It is possible that certain scenes were written while he was at work on Lohengrin; there is a legend that the quintet was finished in 1845. Some add to this quintet the songs of Sachs and Walther. Wagner wrote to a friend on March 12, 1862: “Tomorrow I hope at least to begin the composition of Die Meistersinger”—the libretto was completed at Paris in 1861. He worked at Biebrich on the Rhine in 1862 on the music. The prelude was sketched in February of that year. The instrumentation was completed in the following June.
He wrote to his friend Dr. Anton Pusinelli from Penzing near Vienna on March 14, 1864: “I have tried with the greatest care to ensure myself the proper leisure for completing the Meistersinger by next winter. Unfortunately, everything has been very difficult for me because my continual indisposition and my sad frame of mind have kept company with my other trials, so as to make it more difficult for me to have any desire for work.” He wrote again to Pusinelli in a long letter about his “poor wife” Minna, questioning whether he should return to her: “Under favorable conditions I finally can complete my Meistersinger. Very probably this work will quickly become popular, and it can bring in good returns for me. But one can’t count on this, and my life from month to month must not depend on such possibilities; for if I have no ‘good inspirations,’ then I have nothing to write down, and with continual worries I no longer have very good inspirations now.”
At Lucerne on May 10, 1866, he wrote that he had won for a little time the quiet for creating “a great and joyful work. Wish me this success and—perhaps I dare to say it—wish it to the world!” He had already completed Act I and was progressing well with Act II, which was finished in December.
In 1868 he wrote from Lucerne: “In Dresden I had in mind an attempt to procure some guarantee for the Meistersinger against abominable incompetence of the Kapellmeisters there, and with what a nice reception was I met there!” The principal Kapellmeister was Julius Rietz, who was hostile to Wagner, as he had been at Leipsic.
The prelude is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, triangle, cymbals, harp, and the usual strings.
Wagner in his Autobiography tells how the idea of Die Meistersinger formed itself; how he began to elaborate it in the hope that it might free him from the thrall of the idea of Lohengrin; but he was impelled to go back to the latter opera. The melody for the fragment of Sachs’ poem on the Reformation occurred to him while going through the galleries of the Palais Royal on his way to the Taverne Anglaise. “There I found Truinet already waiting for me and asked him to give me a scrap of paper and a pencil to jot down my melody, which I quietly hummed over to him at the time.” “As from the balcony of my flat, in a sunset of great splendor, I gazed upon the magnificent spectacle of ‘Golden’ Mayence, with the majestic Rhine pouring along its outskirts in a glory of light, the prelude to my Meistersinger again suddenly made its presence closely and distinctly felt in my soul. Once before had I seen it rise before me out of a lake of sorrow, like some distant mirage. I proceeded to write down the prelude exactly as it appears today in the score, that is, containing the clear outlines of the leading themes of the whole drama.”
Wagner conducted the two overtures. The hall was nearly empty; there was a pecuniary loss. This was a sore disappointment to Wagner, who had written to Weissheimer on October 12, 1862: “Good: Tannhäuser overture, then. That’s all right for me. For what I now have in mind is to make an out-and-out sensation, so as to make money.” He had proposed to add the prelude and finale of Tristan to the Prelude to “Die Meistersinger”; but his friends in Leipsic advised the substitution of the overture to Tannhäuser. There was not the faintest applause when Wagner came on the platform; but the prelude to Die Meistersinger was received with such favor that it was immediately played a second time.