The contrasts between Tristan and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which Wagner almost immediately went on to write, seem to be almost complete. Since Wagner generally starts as he means to go on, we might compare the openings of the two works. There is the painful whisper of Tristan, the tremulous beginnings of passion, leading to the so-called ‘Tristan chord’ which will keep analysts busy as long as their pursuit remains legal. And there is the gloriously confident stride of Die Meistersinger, beginning with a C major chord, the paradigm of Western tonal music. Where Tristan, if not quite monothematic (musically speaking), approaches that condition, at least for the music of its two central characters, Die Meistersinger shows a Haydnesque fertility of and delight in invention, much of it carelessly discarded as soon as it has been played once (David’s recital of the Modes). Variety of characters, no single leading subject (I have even seen Die Meistersinger criticised for not being ‘about’ anything, which suggests that the critic could only respond to works that are about one thing). A firm allegiance to the values of the Day – the Second Act, which takes place at night, ends in a brutal riot, as nocturnal escapades are wont to do; and in his great ‘Wahn’ monologue in Act III, Hans Sachs dwells with pained bemusement on what went on at night, and then turns, as the music does too, with great relief, to greet Midsummer’s Day, when there is as little darkness as possible. Instead of two death-devoted lovers achieving their delusive aim, two happy young things united in the prospect of marriage. Even, daringly, a passing quotation from Tristan to demonstrate that Sachs has no intention of playing King Marke. A committee-meeting set to flowing, glowing melodies which truly do transfigure the untransfigurable. And the climax of the work, the ineffable Quintet, which not only appears to break Wagner’s self-denying ordinance against ensembles, but suggests a contentment with this world that would make any efforts to transcend it both supererogatory and absurd.
That is the standard image of Die Meistersinger, and I don’t want to say that it is wrong. But it is damagingly incomplete, not only because it neglects the crueller aspects of the work, always to be expected when we encounter comedy, but because it so ignores the explicit philosophising that Sachs goes in for, and then – revealing him as a most atypical philosopher – proceeds to put into practice. This is, it must be said, a mischievous work, almost a musical crossword, in which Wagner constantly diverts our attention from what he is most interested in. The greatest and most fascinating contrast between Tristan and Die Meistersinger is not that one is preoccupied with metaphysics, and the other unconcerned with it, but that Wagner moves from his most patently doctrinal work to his most covertly instructive one.
The teasing begins in the magnificent Prelude, one of Wagner’s most virtuoso displays of the traditional German skills of playing around with themes, combining them, parodying them, making them part of a grand procession which ends in overwhelming splendour. It proclaims itself as the specimen in excelsis of the overture as potpourri, with what we will come to recognise as the music of the Mastersingers themselves, their apprentices, the ardour of the young lovers, the Prize Song with which Walther von Stolzing will win Eva’s hand, the mockery of the crowd when Beckmesser, the comic villain, attempts to sing the Prize Song himself. It seems as if we have all the elements here of a rich comic drama, the framework established in terms of which things will be worked out. But oddly, and puzzlingly, that is not the case. For there is no hint, in the Prelude, of the central figure of Sachs. Not, of course, that one demands, even in so rich a potpourri, that all the ingredients should be presented. But as Die Meistersinger progresses, it turns so much into Sachs’s work that we must be surprised that he receives no mention in so powerfully mood-setting a piece.
In fact, it is a consummate stroke of Wagner’s to exclude him. For it is as if he (Sachs) had written the Prelude himself, and set up the terms in which the drama was going to be played out, a crucial factor being, as we discover in due course, that he is intent on manipulating things without anyone realising, at least until he has accomplished his work, that that is what he is doing. Furthermore, Wagner gives us a full-length portrait of Sachs in the profound Prelude to Act III, which is all the more moving because it has not been adumbrated, except in some of the contrapuntal complexities of Act II. All the other characters, as befits a comedy, are presented in their fullness on appearance. As soon as we see and hear them, we know them. Which is not to say that they are all simple, though most of them are (quite). The music gives them some complexity, thanks to Wagner’s sovereign mastery by this stage of his career. So as soon as we encounter Pogner, Eva’s father, we recognise him as a burgher of dignity, kindness, pride and determination. Walther is instantly the headstrong young aristocrat, haughty and vulnerable. And so on.
But Sachs is someone whom we get to know only gradually. In Act I he is often hardly noticed, his interjections in the meeting of the Masters are so unassertive, though he is intent on making his points. But he gets to know himself only gradually, too. At the end of Act I he is left on stage alone, scratching his head in bemusement, not yet sure how he can order events. And it is clear from the confusion in which the act ends that he is going to have to be a master-strategist. For Walther has made a fool of himself with the Masters, and it is difficult to see how he can even take part in the Song Contest the next day, a necessary condition for winning Eva’s hand. Stung by their rejection, Walther is liable to ignore their rules even more comprehensively, though he is determined to gain the prize, just as Eva is determined to be gained by him. ‘You or no one!’ she cries after having known Walther for five minutes.
Early in Act II, after the wonderfully tender scene in which Eva and Pogner discuss the coming contest, both of them keeping their cards close to their chests, Sachs has the first of his monologues, and we find him meditative, impatient with his own shortcomings, susceptible to the new in art – most of the monologue involves his trying to capture the song which earned the Masters’ ridicule, and finally succeeding – and deeply understanding of the nature of Walther’s talent: ‘nun sang er, wie er musst’; und wie er musst’, so konnt’ er’s’ (he sang as he had to, and as he had to, so he could). He realises, too, that because of the nature of Walther’s talent, which is the genuine expression of his feelings, what he sang obeyed no rules, and yet was without fault. Equally, since Walther sang of familiar states of mind in fresh ways, because the states are fresh for him, ‘Es klang so alt, und war doch so neu’ (It sounded so old, and yet was so new). And Sachs’s reflections here contain several references to birdsong; yet he knows that a bird doesn’t produce art, so that to the extent that Walther takes birds as his model (and has been taunted for doing so in Act I), he needs to learn the difference.
What Sachs has to say about Walther’s song is also what he feels about Walther himself: Die Meistersinger is, more than anything else, about the connections between life and art, between individuals’ lives and the art they produce, and between the life of a community and its attitude to art. Walther’s art is glamorous, impetuous, passionate and (so far) undisciplined, all qualities that it almost too obviously shares with the man himself. Though Sachs alone among the Masters appreciates the positive qualities there, he is also aware (as the creator of Tristan surely was too) of the dangers involved. As he says to Walther during their long scene in Act III: ‘Eu’r Lied hat [die Meister] bang gemacht; und das mit Recht: denn wohlbedacht, mit solchem Dicht’ – und Liebesfeuer verführt man wohl Töchter zum Abenteuer; doch für liebseligen Ehestand man andre Wort’ und Weisen fand’ (Your song made the Masters anxious, and with good reason: for if you think about it, it’s with such fire of poetry and love that one seduces daughters to adventure; but for loving and blessed marriage other words and tunes must be found). This, it is clear, is an artist issuing a warning about the power of art. The tones in which Sachs expresses it are half-humorous, half-solemn. The solemnity is justified, because Walther almost did elope with Eva the previous night; and though she hasn’t yet been exposed to his music-making (that will happen a few minutes later), since it is the unbridled expression of his personality, the chances are that she would succumb to it as readily as she did to him.
At a deeper level, and one which really concerned Wagner more, Sachs is stressing the importance of having more than one kind of art around. Walther can only see the value of his own kind, but that is because, as Sachs explains to him in one of the most touching parts of the score, anyone can sing in spring, in their time of youthful ardour. But after that come ‘Kindtauf’, Geschäfte, Zwist and Streit’ (children, business, discord and strife), and the real test of a Master is whether he can make music out of them. Walther’s reply, an ecstatic and impatient ‘Ich lieb’ ein Weib, und will es frei’n’ (I love a woman, and want to have her), raises the emotional temperature in a way that vindicates Sachs’s wisdom. But Wagner must have been thinking of more than the appropriateness of different works of art to advancing stages of life, since Sachs himself is susceptible to the ardour of Walther’s song. A prosy distillation of Sachs’s reflections, throughout the drama, on art might run like this: art is an illusion, like everything else – he calls the Prize Song, in the preliminary version he has heard in his workshop, a ‘selige[r] Morgentraum’ (beautiful morning dream) – but it is a conscious illusion, and therefore won’t mislead us into taking it for truth – or will it? It won’t if we subject our immediate promptings to the discipline of tradition. (But what if it is aware of tradition in order to ignore it, the case of Tristan, once more, or of Le Sacre du Printemps?) If we fail to do that, the result will be intoxicating formlessness, which will defeat the whole purpose of art.
In other words, ones to be used sixty years later to make a related but separate point: there must be a balance between tradition and the individual talent. The Masters have succumbed to the danger of prizing tradition at the expense of the new; Walther is contemptuous of rules, because for him spontaneity is everything. And in the wings, as it were, there are Beckmesser and David, the former perhaps once just like the latter now is – and a warning for David of what he might become. David is so enraptured by his own success in having learned the rules that he uses them to show off, precisely the wrong use of tradition, and the recipe for being the worst kind of teacher, as Wagner shows that he is in Act I. Beckmesser too is a prisoner of the rules, and so when he has genuine emotion to express, as in his wooing of Eva in Act II, the result is a comprehensive mess, in which the rules are misapplied and the emotion becomes ridiculous.
Sachs, as the voice of his creator, realises all this, understands the conditions for genuine creation, and therefore wouldn’t attempt a Prize Song himself. For the object of the Prize Song is not only to demonstrate mastery of tradition, but also to win Eva’s hand: one must take account not only of how to compose, but of what the composition is for. And Eva is not for him: he has to renounce her, and therefore contents himself, when he is in songful mood, with singing his cobbling songs, which serve more than one purpose – in Act II to keep Beckmesser quiet, in Act III to conceal his emotions by turning his song into a more than half-serious complaint – and thus show, once more, that art has various roles to play in relation to life.
How easy it is to miss, or overshoot, the mark had in fact been made very clear to Sachs the previous night. For his cobbling song, designed successfully to put Beckmesser off, and also to prevent Eva from eloping with Walther, had triggered off a scene of ugly violence, in which Beckmesser was beaten up, and the citizens of Nürnberg in general showed themselves in a bad light. It is that which leads to the greatest of Sachs’s monologues, on the subject of ‘Wahn’, the next morning, near the opening of Act III. The Prelude to that act has begun with the theme usually called ‘Sachs’s resignation’ on the gloomy lower strings, and as it is taken up and developed contrapuntally we get a sense of the depth and pain of his reflections. But these musings give way, with noble effect, to the melody which will be the hymn with which the populace greets him on the Festival Meadow later in the day: intoned softly by the brass, it conveys the wealth of emotion which exists between Sachs and the community. Then his cobbling song, his signature tune, as it were, is breathed out by the strings, in a gentle, hesitating form, and ascends to the heights, ‘very tenderly and expressively’, spinning itself out to reveal the warmth at the centre of Sachs’s character. The chorale enters again, reaching a resplendent climax; and finally the massed strings break in angrily, or tormentedly, to stress how all Sachs’s wisdom is founded in his suffering. It is a complete portrayal of a complex person such as Wagner had not attempted before, but would be doing again, in the next Prelude he wrote (to Act III of Siegfried).
The mood lightens, as it needs to, for the scene between David and his master, though it is punctuated by the Resignation theme, as indeed the whole act is. Then Sachs is left alone with his world chronicle, and he ponders on ‘Wahn’, a word that is the despair of translators, but which is located in the area marked out by ‘illusion’, ‘folly’, ‘madness’. For Sachs it is the word which characterises everything, and which therefore seems to mark him out as a faithful Schopenhauerian avant la lettre. He begins, certainly, in very low spirits, only able to see ‘Wahn’ as a source of pain and evil – tearing their own flesh, people mistake their own cries for those of their neighbours whom they are mistreating (this is echt-Schopenhauer). His reflections along this line come to an abrupt end, as he finds himself completely at a loss. He turns, after a pause, to thinking about his beloved Nuremberg, peacefully basking in the centre of Germany. But that leads him back to reflecting on what happened last night, when things got hopelessly out of control (thanks to his song), and he is brought to another dead end. A bigger pause, and then magical music, suggesting another midsummer night – but that was a dream, and Sachs’s was not – leads him to whimsical explanations of how such things can happen: no other kind of explanation will do. This is the grand moment, referred to earlier, when night gives way to day, and Sachs has his moment of deepest insight into what he, as an artist, must do: ‘Jetzt schau’n wir, wie Hans Sachs es macht, dass er den Wahn fein lenken kann, ein edler Werk zu tun; denn lässt er uns nicht ruh’n, selbst hier in Nürnberg, so sei’s um solche Werk’, die selten vor gemeinen Dingen, und nie ohn’ ein’gen Wahn gelingen’ (Now let’s see how Hans Sachs can manage things so that ‘Wahn’ can be made to do nobler work; for if it will not let us rest even here in Nuremberg, then let it be in the service of such works which seldom arise from ordinary things, and never succeed without a touch of ‘Wahn’). This astonishing mouthful is set to music of transporting rapture, which Wagner can’t possibly have thought would do anything to make his elaborate thought, and its contorted expression, easier to follow. But when one scrutinises it at home, it becomes clear that Sachs has moved from Schopenhauer to late Nietzsche, again avant la lettre, this time on Wagner’s part too. In Twilight of the Idols (German title: Götzendämmerung) Nietzsche presents a hilarious six-part account, in one page, of the history of Western thought, the last stage of which is as follows: ‘The true world we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have abolished the apparent one’ (Nietzsche’s italics). Thus Sachs has realised that everything is ‘Wahn’, that there is no getting round it or beyond it. So if there is to be positive value in the world, as well as ineliminable evil, that will be by ingenious manipulation of illusion, not by its replacement by truth, or reality. Optimism can only, but it can, be cultivated within the framework of pessimism.
This is only the most blatant indication, perhaps, of the strange relationship that has developed by this point between Sachs and Wagner. In one way it seems that they are the same, and it hardly needs adding that Wagner has often been accused of both glamourising himself as the noble renouncer, and of identifying with Walther too, so that he both has his Eva and grandly forgoes her.
That seems to me uninteresting. The vital question, more taxing than this piece of pseudo-biographical impudence, is that of whether we can get any perspective on Sachs, or whether we are back yet again with the figure Wagner wanted to escape, but that the intensity of his successive convictions kept on forcing him to create: the ‘absolute artist’. That Sachs is almost wholly sympathetic, the most completely sympathetic character Wagner created, is not the point at issue either. It is whether he is invested with an authority, or a kind of authority, which takes him out of the framework of the drama, and allows him to play god. Well, he does take it upon himself to get two potential disasters averted: he has to make sure that Beckmesser is discredited, and he has to get Walther admitted as a competitor in the contest even though he doesn’t have the Masters’ required credentials. The methods he adopts to bring those results about show that he is a man who believes that the ends justify the means. He is happy to let Beckmesser claim the text of the Prize Song as his own, knowing that he will make a hash of it, thereby provoking him to claim that the words were by Sachs, a charge which can only be refuted by letting the genuine author step forth and show what the Song is really like.
But though he plans and executes Walther’s success by getting everyone to play to his tune, while rather boorishly complaining that no one does, Sachs gives no indication at any stage that he is all-knowing. It is rather his devotion to Eva and his affection for Walther which motivate him, and his rejection of the role of King Marke, already referred to, shows that he is acting out of self-interest as well as concern for the young pair. Though he makes light of the reference to the ‘sad tale’ of Tristan and Isolde, it is actually a pivotal moment in the action. For Eva has been, under the stress first of Walther’s singing of his Song, and second of Sachs’s ironic tirade, shaping up to see herself as an Isolde-figure, for which she has neither the right kind of voice nor the right temperament. Her outburst ‘O Sachs! Mein Freund!’ is both a cry from the heart and a piece of self-dramatisation. When Sachs cuts her off, to the accompaniment of Tristan’s yearning motif, the effect is of recoil: ‘For Heaven’s sake, not that!’ Sachs is rejecting both the role of King Marke and the whole ethos in which being Marke is a possibility. That is made clear by the brevity of his reply, before the orchestra enters in top Meistersinger form. Eva’s brief flirtation with the metaphysics of transcendent love – she would choose Sachs, she sings, if she had any choice, but she is in the grip of ‘ein Müssen…ein Zwang’ (a ‘must’, a compulsion), and is destined ‘zu nie gekannter Qual’ (for never-known anguish) – is conclusively scotched by Sachs. She is clearly overdoing things, and by the time she opens her mouth again it is to launch the Quintet, which really is an unaffected utterance, and the deepest she can give voice to.
Sachs, then, for all his authority and decisiveness, is no Prospero or Sarastro; what he does is done on the basis of what he knows, and the consequences vindicate him. And while he is the drama’s central figure, and certainly its most interesting one – Walther, apart from his musical gifts, is nothing special, and Eva is ideally suited to him – he is still dependent on the community in which he lives not only for his livelihood, a comparatively humble one, but also for his status. The crowd are perfectly prepared to question him after Beckmesser’s indictment. If Wagner were any closer to him than he is, we would feel unease. Some people do anyway, but that is because they have failed to observe the subtle touches which Wagner employs to indicate Sachs’s fallibility. Further, by excluding him from the Overture, Wagner shows that there is plenty of exuberant life without Sachs, that he is a contingent element in the drama, however important to its outcome.
So the complexity of Die Meistersinger might be put, almost diagrammatically, as follows: the essence of the world is ‘Wahn’, but most people, being fully in thrall to it, don’t realise that. So they are happy or miserable, but with no comprehensive view of what those states come to, or why they are in them. Since it is anyway not the kind of knowledge that most people could make any use of, that is a good thing – and so Die Meistersinger is a comedy. Sachs has the knowledge, it saddens him, but it doesn’t incapacitate him. The likelihood of things going wrong rather than right is sufficiently great for him to have no high estimate of the possibilities of life in general – so at the level of true insight, Die Meistersinger is pessimistic, though not tragic. But sometimes it is possible for a sufficiently wise person to involve himself in events to good purpose, so long as he keeps some distance from the passions at the centre of them. Sachs seizes the opportunity when it comes, things work out as he planned, so Die Meistersinger is a comedy in the end, as well as in the beginning. It is the intrusive central layer that is so moving and fascinating, and which gives the work its depth.