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The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries; the Mastersingers; Satires and Fables; Mysteries and Dramatic Representations; the Mystics; the Universities; the Invention of Printing. PERIOD SECOND. From 1517 to 1700. 1. The Lutheran Period: Luther, Melanchthon. 2. Manuel, Zwingle, Fischart, Franck, Arnd, Boehm. 3. Poetry, Satire, and Demonology; Paracelsus and Agrippa; the Thirty Years' War. 4.
I have already laid sufficient stress on the true source of Lohengrin; in Tristan adequate and appropriate scenery is absolutely demanded to sustain the atmosphere; and here, in the Mastersingers, music and a series of pictures go together, and the pictures seem to inspire the music or rather, music and pictures are parts of the first inner vision.
Night has come on, and Isolda falls on Tristan's body and dies, fulfilling the promise she had made that where he went she would follow. And so ends the greatest music-drama ever written, and the greatest likely to be written for centuries to come. We must pass on now to The Mastersingers, an old idea of Wagner's. The music was completed at Triebschen.
This sense of the past, the historic sense call it what you will was thus strong in Wagner at this early period, and it grew even stronger later on, finding its most passionate expression in Tristan and its loveliest expression in the Mastersingers. The faculty to shape pregnant musical themes is the stamp of the great master.
But there is no human element in it, and without that Wagner could not get on. We have already seen that he abandoned the idea of the Mastersingers for years until, in fact, he had created a soul for Sachs: then he went ahead and gave us a series of magnificent pictures of old Nuremberg.
Veit Pogner, a rich silversmith, desiring to honor the craft of the mastersingers, to whose guild he belongs, offers his daughter Eva in marriage to the successful competitor at the annual meeting of the mastersingers on the feast of St. John. After a flirtation in church during divine service, Walther meets her before she leaves the building, and asks if she be betrothed.
In the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, incorporated with the Municipal Library of Nuremberg, there are several volumes of mastersingers' songs purchased from an old mastersinger some 135 years ago, and from these the students may learn the structure and spirit of the mastersongs of the period of the opera as well as earlier and later periods, though he will find all the instruction he needs in any dozen or twenty of the 4275 mastersongs written by Hans Sachs.
After composing Tannhäuser, Wagner thought of doing what Germans call a comic pendant to that tragedy; though what there is in the Mastersingers that hangs from Tannhäuser I beg the reader not to ask me. There is this similarity: the central scene of each is a minstrel-contest; there is this dissimilarity: one opera is tragic in spirit and the other comic in spirit.
The prelude is the only operatic prelude in the world which is an integral, organic part of the drama; it cannot be omitted without detriment to the drama. In several of Mozart's operas the overture, by means of a modulation, is made to lead without a break into the first scene; Gluck had done precisely the same thing; Wagner, in the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, did the same thing.
The harmonisation is extraordinary, not only for its gigantic strength, but for the free employment of chromatics that do not weaken it: in fact, chromatic harmony is so employed throughout the Mastersingers that it sounds diatonic.
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