[The following review is reprinted from the most recent (June 2003) issue of Wagner Notes, the bimonthly publication of the Wagner Society of New York. © 2003. All rights reserved.]

Die Meistersinger—from Many Angles

Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’: Performance, History, Representation. Nicholas Vazsonyi, Ed. Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2003. Pp. viii+ 248. List price: $85.00. Member price: $60.00.

Intellectually speaking, this is a delicious tome. Meant for scholars of and initiates in Wagner’s sole mature comedy, it supersedes such introductory, yet helpful, anthologies as those edited by John Warrack and Attila Csampai and Dietmar Holland. Its eleven detailed essays comprise personal observations by a stage director, a conductor, and a singer as well as scholarly analyses by a philosopher and literary and musicological scholars. If previous compilations were meant as introductions, this indispensable book is intended for serious Wagnerites to reevaluate their critical understanding of Meistersinger. The volume’s three-part structure is unique: the first portion concerns performance practice; the second discusses the work’s historical implications; and the final section deals with “representa­tion” or the opera’s thematic and stylistic complexities.

The four essays that comprise the performance section deal with re-creative interpretation. Here, Editor Nicholas Vazsonyi focuses on Meistersinger as a viable stage work. Conductor Peter Schneider’s “Climbing Mount Everest” warns his colleagues to pace themselves properly in their accounts of one of the longest music dramas in western culture. Schneider avers that the second act scene in which Sachs plays Marker to Beckmesser’s song is “from the perspective of conducting technique” the most difficult passage Wagner ever composed. In the second essay, Harry Kupfer, who staged the opera at the Berlin Staatsoper in 1998, employs a Nietzschean “double perspective,” saying that Germans need no longer be embarrassed about Hans Sachs’ apostrophe to Germanness at the end of the opera. Simultaneously, he defends his timeless staging to underscore the opera’s universality. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s thoughts on Hans Sachs are revelatory, saying that Sachs is a more difficult role than Wotan because of the parlando style often required. The great singer echoes Schneider’s warning that the performer must pace himself if he is to complete the performance with his voice intact. His statements on minimal hand gesturing and other physical aspects of the role are equally insightful. Lydia Goehr’s erudite “The Dangers of Satisfaction” theoretically addresses the role of performance in the opera and the comedy’s relationship to Tristan und Isolde.

The second section, “History in/of Die Meistersinger,” contains three essays, all intellectually stimulating. Lutz Koepnick’s “Stereoscopic Vision: Sight and Community in Die Meistersinger,” unearths the reorganizing effect of the stereoscope on 19th-century visual culture as it pertains to Heinrich Döll’s innovative stage sets for the opera’s final scene in its initial production: “The design—like stereoscopic sight—encoded the ‘real’ as an aggregate of individual scenes and manifold surfaces, of sculptured depth and horizontal flatness.” His juxtaposition of Döll’s sets and their use throughout the final scene with Heinz Tietjen’s (à la Leni Riefenstahl) “cinematically” tendentious treatment of the opera during the Nazi period is helpful. David B. Dennis’ essay on “Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich” is thought-provoking because Dennis goes directly to the propagandistic press during the twelve years of Nazi rule to show how journalists would Nazify the opera—not by turning the nasty Beckmesser into a Jew, but by highlighting Hans Sachs’ pronouncements on the German spirit and lauding politically charged performances. In fact, Dennis cites a Berlin account of a March 1933 Staatsoper performance during which the chorus, representing the German Volk, turned in Hitler’s direction, knowing full well that he was sitting in the royal box, to sing its “Wach auf” chorus. Peter Höyng’s “An Interview with the Composer” is marked by levity—after all, Meistersinger is a comedy. Imaginatively interviewing the composer on the World Wide Web, Höyng finds him explaining how the opera is a product of his own deeply rooted 19th-century concerns and, as such, should not have provided fodder for Nazi propaganda. In typical ornery fashion, Wagner repeatedly asks the intrepid interviewer to stop interrupting him!

The third section, “Representation and/in Die Meistersinger,” is comprised of four essays. Klaus van den Berg’s “The Performative and Social Signification of Genre” deftly employs Northrop Frye’s model of comic discourse to analyze Sachs as the opera’s catalyst for the development of the new artist and Beckmesser as “the blocking character.” Musicologist Thomas S. Grey’s “Masters and their Critics” links Wagner’s obsession with Eduard Hanslick to the composer’s decision in 1869 to reprint his inflammatory “Judaism in Music” of 1850—its new afterword being directed at the Viennese anti-Wagnerian music critic who had served as prototype for Beckmesser. Hans Rudolf Vaget’s pellucid “The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited” deals, in part, with the relationship between the eponymous protagonist of the Grimms’ “The Jew in the Brambles” and Beckmesser, illustrating how this fairy tale serves as a mirror for Beckmesser, “the true referent of Walther’s asides about the ‘Dornenhecke.’” Eva Rieger’s “Gender Construction and Die Meistersinger” begins to make up for the heretofore-critical neglect of Eva. In particular, the musicologist’s discussion of Wagner’s resignation vis-à-vis Mathilde Wesendonck and how this parallels Sachs’s relationship with the heroine (employing allusions to the conclusion of the cult film Casablanca) illuminates Eva’s pivotal role.

The primary person to be congratulated for this stimulating anthology is Nicholas Vazsonyi, whose steady editorial hand can be sensed throughout. His impeccably written extended introduction promises: “for the reader, the multidisciplinary multiperspectivism should result in a truly interdisciplinary experience”—and he never disappoints. In addition, his translation of four of the essays, originally written in German, is excellent. The textual apparatus must also be praised: helpful illustrations and detailed scholarly footnotes abound, and the edition ends with an up-to-date bibliography.

If a reprint is to be contemplated, the following constructively critical points might be considered. As the price of this edition is pretty steep ($85.00), it would make for an egalitarian gesture on the part of Rochester University Press to publish a less expensive paperback edition—thus making it accessible to individual readers. In addition, Vazsonyi might consider including a few extra essays on Walther, the collective eponymous mastersingers themselves as a whole, and even Sachs. So much throughout the volume focuses on Beckmesser and Wagner’s racism, that at times the reader craves a few more work-immanent readings. In addition, bibliographic citations of taped and recorded per­formances of the opera might be included: for example, the Bel Canto Society’s VHS tape of “Great Conductors of the Third Reich: Art in the Service of Evil” actually includes scenes of Nazified performances of Meistersinger from the 1930’s. These, however, are minor points. Vazsonyi, Rochester University Press, and the individual essayists are to be roundly congratulated on an outstanding contribution to Wagnerian scholarship.

Steven R. Cerf

Steven R. Cerf is Skolfield Professor of German at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.