Lortzing’s Hans Sachs as inspiration for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger In his essay A Communication to my Fri- ends, Wagner recalled that, in the mid- 1840s, ‘certain good friends’ (including, no doubt, Röckel) had tried to persuade him to compose an opera in a lighter gen- re, for which Lortzing provided the obvio- us model. The 1845 sketch for Die Meistersinger And so, during a health cure at the spa at Marienbad in Bohemia in 1845 (a semi- nal year in the Wagner story) he began to think about Hans Sachs and the Master- singers of Nuremberg as possible subjects for a lighter work. At Marienbad on 16th July 1845, he signed off on a long and de- tailed three-act prose sketch that was re- markably close to the drama we know to- day. ‘I took Hans Sachs’ he wrote later, ‘as Albert Lortzing composed an opera about the final manifestation of the artistically Hans Sachs (1494–1567), a cobbler and Hans Sachs. creative popular spirit, and set him, in this poet. sense, in contrast to the pettifogging bom- Albert Lortzing (1801-51) wrote his comic bast of the other Mastersingers; to whose the love-interest is fully developed in the opera Hans Sachs in 1840, and it was first absurd pedantry of Tabulatur and prosody, I first scene, whereas it is handled more ten- performed that year at Leipzig. His best- gave a concrete personal expression in the tatively and to better effect in the final sco- known work, Zar und Zimmermann (Tsar figure of the “Marker.” ‘6 re. Sachs’ soliloquy in Act Three is not the and Carpenter) had had its premiere three Virtually all of the key ingredients of philosophical reverie on folly and delusi- years earlier. Wagner’s finished work are to be found in on that it became, but a discourse on the For 150 years, Lortzing was, after Mozart that 1845 sketch, and at the end, added decline of German poetic arts. There is and Verdi, the most performed opera com- as an afterthought, is the couplet with its no reference yet to ‘the sad tale of Tristan poser in Germany.1 In 1928/29 there were word play on ‘Holy Roman Empire’ and und Isolde’ because Wagner hadn’t consi- 843 performances of his works in German ‘holy German art’: dered this story in 1845. But there are re- theatres, compared with 821 of Mozart’s.2 ferences in the sketch to Siegfried, Grim- The decade 1955-65 saw 8,719 Lortzing ‘Tho’ the Holy Roman hilde and Hagen, and to Wolfram’s Parzi- performances, a number exceeded only by Empire dissolve in mist, val, characters who were already jostling the operas of Verdi, Mozart and Puccini.3 yet for us will holy for attention during that crucial holiday However, there have been fewer stagings German art persist.’ at Marienbad. of Lortzing’s works in recent years.4 Die Meistersinger wasn’t finished until In modern times, Hans Sachs was per- Sachs’s final words echo those of Schiller, 1867 – Lohengrin, most of the Ring and Tris- formed at the Young Artists’ Festival at written fifty years earlier. ‘While the poli- tan having intervened. However, the huge Bayreuth in 1983, and since then it has tical empire totters’ said Schiller, ‘the spi- libretto was completed in January 1862, been staged at Saarbrücken (1985), Hei- ritual empire has become increasingly se- well before Bismarck came to office in Prus- delberg (1986) and Osnabrück (where it cure and more perfect.’ sia, two years before Wagner met Ludwig was also recorded) in 2001. However, there are interesting differen- II of Bavaria, four-and-a-half years before Lortzing was related by marriage5 to Au- ces between the 1845 sketch and the finis- Prussia’s victory in its war with Austria and gust Röckel, Wagner’s assistant at Dresden hed version. Some are matters of detail such Bavaria, and eight-and-a-half years before and fellow revolutionary, who spent thir- as the relocation of the action in Act One the Franco-Prussian War. teen years in Waldheim prison for his invol- from the church of St Sebaldus, Wagner’s National pride in the ‘old Thuringian vement in the 1849 uprisings. Röckel was first choice, to that of St Catherine alt- spirit’, ‘the great Emperors’ and the poetic the nephew of Hummel who was a pupil of hough, in fact, St Catherine’s wasn’t used wealth of ‘our great German past’ features Mozart, Clementi, Albrechtsberger, Haydn by the Mastersingers until the 17th centu- in the 1845 sketch but not in the libretto, and Salieri, friend ry, long after the time of Hans Sachs. Ot- and there is a reason for this. The works of Beethoven and her differences are of greater consequence that influenced Wagner in 1845, such as Schubert and te- and relate to the characters. Sachs is cyni- Lortzing’s opera, the play on which it was acher of Mendels- cal, even calculating in the sketch; and the based, and even the original writings of sohn and Czer- (unnamed) young knight is more prone to Hans Sachs, stressed love of the father- ny who, in turn, self-pity than self-confidence. The sketch land, and so he picked up this theme. Ho- taught Liszt. It also reveals that Wagner was in two minds wever, by 1861 his ideas had matured and was a very small as to how the Marker (unnamed) should the finished work became a study in aest- world, musically get hold of the prize song. Should he steal hetics and humanism. Any traces of those speaking in tho- it? Or should Sachs give it to him, passing earlier influences were now directed firm- se days. it off as a work of his youth and thereby ly towards art. Text: Peter Bassett perpetrating a cruel hoax? In the sketch, Wagneriaani 23 The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation We know that at the time of the 1845 sketch, Wagner was interested in the his- tory of ‘the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ as it had been called sin- ce the late 15th Century. This thousand- year Reich that had begun with Charlemag- ne in 800 AD, was finally dissolved on 6 August 1806 at the behest of Napoleon. The empire had been in a long, slow decli- ne and it took only a puff from Napoleon to blow it away. The constituent kingdoms and principalities then became attractive targets for the French. Wagner was espe- cially interested in the empire’s Ottonian dynasty (also known as the Saxon dynas- ty) that included King Henry the Fow- ler, immortalized as König Heinrich in Lo- hengrin (begun 1845), and the Hohenstau- fen dynasty. The latter featured in his 1843 plans for an opera to be called Die Sarazenin (The Saracen Woman) and 1846 plans for an opera about Friedrich Barbarossa. The Hohenstaufens were also at the centre of his Wibelungen essay of 1849, in which he sought to link history and myth. Nuremberg had been a free imperial city from the 13th century, which meant it was governed by a powerful town coun- cil answerable directly to the emperor but not to other princes and rulers. It did not become part of Bavaria until 1806. The emperor at the time in which Lortzing set his drama, 1517, was Maximilian I. Ma- ximilian was a keen supporter of the arts and sciences, and surrounded himself with scholars whom he appointed to court posts. His reign saw the first flourishing of the Re- The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I appears in Lortzing’s opera. naissance in Germany. Maximilian appears on stage in Lortzing’s opera, resolving con- through the recurring metaphor of baptism. works of various kinds including more than flicts and restoring harmony, as good mo- The action is set at a time when Luther’s 4,000 mastersongs, disseminated through narchs should. Reformation was taking hold in northern the agency of moveable type. In Die Meistersinger, Sachs refers in his Europe, and the Counter-Reformation was closing address to the threat of ‘foreign being launched by Pius IV, whose pontifi- mists and foreign vanities’, a provocati- cate began in 1560 – the very year in which Lortzing, Deinhardstein, ve phrase to modern ears but one that ref- Die Meistersinger is set. How can we be so Goethe and Wagner lects a historical reality – the anxiety felt sure about this date for the opera when Wag- It seems unlikely that Wagner had seen a about the cultural alienation of the empe- ner specified only ‘about the middle of the performance of Lortzing’s Hans Sachs befo- ror from his people following the death of sixteenth century’ in his libretto? Because re he penned his own thoughts on the sub- Maximilian in 1519. Maximilian’s succes- 1560 was the only year in which the his- ject, since he was in Paris at the time of the sor was Charles V of Aragon and Castile, torical Hans Sachs was a widower. He re- 1840 premiere and was still there in 1841 who claimed that he spoke Spanish to God, married the following year. when further performances were given in Italian to women, French to men, and Ger- Lortzing’s comic opera – Singspiel really, Leipzig and in Detmold where Lortzing had man to his horse. He was succeeded by his because it has a lot of spoken dialogue – had once lived. He was fully engaged in his du- brother, Ferdinand I, who was emperor du- its first performance on 23 June 1840 as part ties as Kapellmeister at Dresden when anot- ring the period in which Die Meistersinger of a Leipzig festival that celebrated the qua- her performance was given at Detmold in is set, although neither he nor any other dricentenary of the invention of moveable May 1843, and he was preoccupied with political figure appears in Wagner’s drama type.