This deluxe four-CD/book
set constitutes
the first official release of the 1937
Salzburg performance of Wagner's most human masterpiece, remastered by restoration maestro Ward
Marston.
Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg must be counted among the least expected of masterpieces. Who could have predicted that the great, brooding Wagner, supreme iconographer of love and death, had a comedy in him — let alone a comedy of such heartiness and humanity? To be sure, Verdi would startle his own audiences with Falstaff, as would Richard Strauss with Der Rosenkavalier, but Wagner's glorious volte-face is in some ways the most arresting of them all.
Indeed, the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, by no means a perfect Wagnerite, once called Die Meistersinger the "most enchanting of fairy-tale operas." Thomson continued, "It is enchanting musically because there is no enchantment, literally speaking, in it. It is all direct and human and warm and sentimental and down to earth. It is unique among Wagner's theatrical works in that none of the characters takes drugs or gets mixed up with magic. And nobody gets redeemed according to the usual Wagnerian pattern, which a German critic once described as 'around the mountain and through the woman.' There is no metaphysics at all. The hero merely gives a successful debut recital and marries the girl of his heart."
Die Meistersinger also marks one of the few times that Wagner, the intrepid futurist, permitted himself to look backward — not only to 16th-century Nuremberg and to the shoemaker-musician Hans Sachs (who really existed), but to some operatic conventions he had mostly abandoned. For Die Meistersinger has real arias in it — the "Fliedermonolog," the "Wahnmonolog" and, of course, the "Prize Song" itself — and, in the bejeweled quintet "Selig wie die Sonne," Wagner created a genuine ensemble piece that Donizetti would have recognized.
This radiant burst of good cheer was hardly the spontaneous outpouring it seems. Wagner made his first sketches for what would become Die Meistersinger in 1845, 23 years before the world premiere, on 21 June 1868, in Munich. To be sure, the composer managed to complete some other projects during this time (including Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and almost three quarters of Der Ring des Nibelungen — no mere bagatelles!). Still, the evidence suggests that Die Meistersinger was an unusually difficult opera for Wagner to bring to life; he labored on the Prelude and Act I alone for more than four years.
The result, of course, was a smashing and unqualified success: Wagner was never more purely loveable than in this massive, busy comedy. For Thomson, the score was "rich and witty and romantic, full of interest and of human expression." The American journalist H. L. Mencken went even further. "I believe that Die Meistersinger is the greatest single work of art ever produced by man," he wrote in 1925. "It took more skill to plan and write it than it took to plan and write the whole canon of Shakespeare."
Click
here for more information on "Wagner: Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg."
