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Now the veritable Sachs was a widower in the summer of the year 1560. I visited Nuremberg in 1886 in search of relics of the mastersingers and had no little difficulty in finding the church. It had not been put to its original purposes for more than a hundred years, and there seemed to be but few people in Nuremberg who knew of its existence.
Did they or the still mightier Beethoven dream of creating a Bayreuth? In the midst of years of privation Richard Wagner planned and partly executed the Ring; he completed Tristan and the Mastersingers; as quite a young man he had dreamed of a Bayreuth; as an old man he turned his dream into a reality.
We are still no nearer to the perfect blending of the orchestral stream and the vocal parts that we get in Tristan and in the Mastersingers. The style is not homogeneous: the stream is broken by theatrical exclamations and snatches of recitative that not only break the flow, but differ in character from the rest.
The manuscript books known serve to prove one thing which needed not to have called up a doubt. In them are poems from all of the mastersingers who make up the meeting which condemns Walther in St. Catherine's church. Wagner has adhered to the record.
As I have mentioned, he went to Triebschen to complete the Ring for the sake of his conception of the hero Siegfried and he went there a jaded man. And there is an unmistakable quality in the music of his Third Act. In Tristan and the Mastersingers we have the perfectly mature Wagner; inspiration, invention and technical accomplishment are perfectly balanced.
It is easy to see that these critics are symbolized by the old pedant Beckmesser, and that in Walter we have Wagner himself. When he is first brought in contact with the Mastersingers, and one of their number, Kothner, asks him if he gained his knowledge in any school, he replies, "The wood before the Vogelweid', 'twas there I learnt my singing;" and again he answers: "What winter night.
At the first glance Wagner might seem a startling exception to the nearly universal rule; but he is no exception. The theatre was his first love, and to the theatre he ever remained faithful: only through the theatre did his genius manifest itself; apart from the theatre it may be doubted whether he could have developed into the consummate technical musician of Tristan and the Mastersingers.
The Dutchman was conceived before Rienzi was finished; Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were slowly shaping themselves in his imagination while he scored the Dutchman; the Mastersingers libretto, in its first form, was drafted immediately after Tannhäuser was finished, and before Lohengrin was begun; the composition of the Ring, Tristan and the Mastersingers went on simultaneously.
Poetry sank rapidly into dullness and mediocrity, while the so-called poets rose in conceit and arrogance. They generally called twelve poets among the minnesingers their masters, and hence their name Mastersingers. They met on certain days and criticised each other's productions.
It is significant that the very title he gave his work is a peremptory warning to us of what to expect: it is not Hans Sachs, nor Walther von Stolzing, nor even the Mastersinger, etc., but in the plural form, the Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
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