Wagner's Meistersinger: Some flaws cannot be fixed

After seeing Meistersinger some years ago, and having written an episode of Helen Nordstrom actually conducting a performance of it, I now find that I'm less than thrilled with the opera as a whole.

Richard Wagner always liked to write operas that were major spectaculars: Wagner had anticipated epic movies a hundred years before movies were invented.  For his purposes, Wagner needed to find plots that were larger than life.

In his earliest attempts, the stories were fairy tales.  Then he went on to legends, and for a long time, his operas were inspired by various legends, or epic sagas, such as the King Arthur legends (and other legends which had been incorporated into the Arthurian cycle).  Then he went on to epic sagas of an earlier time, in which Wagner was no longer fettered by Christian morality, and Wagner was free to impute various interesting motives to the gods themselves, in their epic existential struggles.

For his last work, Wagner chose not so much a legend in the mythical sense, but the legend of an historical personality: Hans Sachs, a medieval German poet.  The plot line is a story concerning the annual singing competition held by the singing guild of Nuremburg, at which it had been announced that the prize would be the hand of the daughter, Eva, of the president of the guild Veit Pogner.  A young nobleman is visiting, Walther, and falls in love with young Eva.  But Eva has to remain unattached, in order to be given to the prizewinner!  So Hans Sachs must conspire now to arrange for the young knight Walther to not only gain admission to the guild, so that he can participate in the competition, but also for him to win it.  Luckily, Walther is talented, and does not face any serious competition.  A further complication is that, while Eva is supposedly infatuated by the handsome visitor, the twice-widowered Hans Sachs himself, and young Eva (who has practically grown up in Sach's cobblery) are extremely fond of each other.

Now, Wagner, by his very nature, was fond of complexity.  He is unsatisfied with Hans Sachs simply teaching the young knight how to put together a winning song that satisfies all the complicated rules of the guild, but has a few quirks to give it a little extra excitement.  He makes Sachs agonize over the entire business, and makes Eva agonize over the situation, and generally makes the whole thing an embarrassment to anyone who is paying attention.  The comedy is very heavy-handed, though one can almost see how a perfectly satisfactory story could have been salvaged from the elements that are present.  This is an opera whose duration is more than four hours, but it could be shortened considerably.  In fact, I daresay it could be trimmed by two whole hours, if it were to be made into a musical, even retaining some of the musically more interesting parts.

The First Act is where the visitor comes seeking Eva and her maid at the local church, where they're attending Mass.  Later on, the girls leave, and Walther attends a meeting of the singing guild, right after Mass, and is denied entrance to the guild, not knowing the singing Rules.  This is a fun scene, and introduces the pompous guild members, as well as a host of apprentices, all of whom are both apprentices to their particular masters as tradesmen, as well as singers.  Hans Sach's apprentice, David, is both an aspiring cobbler, as well as a promising young tenor.  Wagner's sung dialog proceeds quite briskly, but is filled with numerous irrelevant details.  It could certainly be hurried along considerably if the scene were to be rewritten in the style of, say, the opening scene of My Fair Lady, which accomplishes a huge amount of plot using a mixture of song and speech.

In the Second Act, later that evening, the scene is on the street between the homes of Sachs and Eva's father, the cobbler and the goldsmith.  The only other serious entry in the singing competition is the Town Clerk, a comic figure who accuses everybody of trying to steal his prize Eva away from him, which actually precipitates a riot on the street, which Wagner of course turns into a melee of epic proportions.  The riot is a lot of fun for opera buffs (and stage directors), but it could certainly be abbreviated, and merged into the Third Act.

In Wagner, everything is sung, even the dialogue.  The soliloquies of the Third Act could be shortened considerably.  (Hans Sachs muses that his job is to bring a little sanity into the insanity of his world, which has ever been the responsibility of artists.  Then he muses that perhaps it would be best if he marries young Eva, but he talks himself out of that temptation.)  The knight comes in, and reveals that he's seen a beautiful dream.  In a pivotal sequence, Sachs turns the knight's account of the dream into the first two verses of a song.  As one could expect, the dream is all about Eva.  The knight is sent away to get into is glad rags for the festival.  Then Eva comes in, pretending that something is wrong with her shoes.  Presently it emerges that she has come to see the young knight, who is staying temporarily with Sachs.  Walther is still asleep, but Eva is strung out, and needs some serious talking down.  The conversation goes as far as Eva wondering whether it makes sense that Hans himself should enter the competition, and win it, and marry Eva: how bad could that be, she wonders.  All this, too, goes on forever.  By the end of the scene, David, Walther, Hans, Eva and her maid Magdalena (Lena) all gather round at Hans's behest, to christen the newly-composed song, and sing a lovely quintet.

Now, in opera, a quintet is often its own reason for existence.  But in this case, it could easily be sacrificed, or at least simply played instrumentally, as Hans declaims what a wonderful song Walther has created, shortening things considerably.  There is a visit by the inane Town Clerk, which goes on forever, and fails to be the comic interlude it is intended to be.  The Clerk steals the paper on which Hans transcribed the words of the song.

Finally, in the Fourth Act, there is a lot of dancing and singing and general high spirits, in keeping with the Midsummer festivities, and of course the Feast of John the Baptist; more opportunities for tossing out some silliness that can't really carry its weight.  Then there is the competition, which would seem a little incompressible, and to end the opera, a major oration by Hans Sachs about German Art.

Historically, German Culture had struggled to overcome its fragmentation, because the political elite had been a bunch of jealous rivals, the remnants of the robber barons of the Rhine.  It was understandable that Wagner took this opportunity to praise German Culture, because in the 19th Century, too, it was still a struggle to push the German principalities into some semblance of being a modern nation, able to compete with the French and the British.  But today, the political subtleties of the play are too irrelevant, and of course, take up too much time as well.

So, I dearly wish someone would take the surgeon's knife to this opera, and convert it into a modern musical, with sensitivity and taste.

Kay