Steve Schwartz disagreed with my disagreements with Wagner:

>This is only because we have been brought up on interpretations that take
>into account Wagner's ideas when considering his music.  I'm not saying
>that one has nothing to do with the other.  However, Wagner typically
>works as a fabulist, and one can interpret a fable in many ways.

After doing some thinking, I'd probably now agree with your general opinion
on Wagner.  Certainly the Ring, Tristan and (I assume - I only really know
the prelude and the basic elements of the plot) Parsifal can be seen as
fables or myths:  they touch such broad concerns and are so difficult to
pin down that one can, and probably should, to do them justice, abstract
these works from their creator, and try to see them from as many angles as
possible.

However, I still don't think that you can take the Mastersingers so
blithely on their own terms.  In general, M.  is also a 'fable' with
universal themes:  the conflict between form and content in art, or between
the artist and his public, or between the radical individual and the
establishment, or whatever else you can read into it.  The problem is that
the strident caricature of Beckmesser and the paranoid gallophobia which
suddenly appears in Sachs's last speach undermine this very universality,
and for me, thereby diminish the stature of the work.  From the heights of
a work which otherwise transcends cultural boundaries and Wagner's own
shortcomings, they throw us back down to his own pet hates.

However, I think my complaint is more basic than that.  As you say, we
can't always expect 'the truth' from even the greatest artists - and
perhaps here, too, I'm making the mistake of judging Beckmesser in the
light of Wagner's own motivations.  But I think the Beckmesser plot
damages the opera on a simple artistic level - even if we take its
creator completely out of account.

You said that Beckmesser's disgrace is justified by his own bad character,
and I'd probably say you were right:  but both are fundamentally at odds
not just with the ethics, but with the tone of the rest of the opera.
Beckmesser's inveterate nastiness in the context of a generally sunny
and generous plot just jars - he is a shrill dissonance running through
the plot.  Now comedies can, of course, contain dissonant elements:  but
first of all different degrees of dissonance are appropriate in different
cases; and in a comedy, those dissonances need somehow to be resolved -
however tenuously, if only to show by what a close shave we escaped
tragedy.  Perhaps I can make myself clearer with an example:  compare
the Mastersingers with the Marriage of Figaro.  Now there you also have in
the Count a particularly nasty piece of work who disturbs the plans and
feelings of all the other characters.  In the course of that opera, the
Count is also humiliated; but at the end there is that brief moment where
he asks he wife for forgiveness and she grants it.  Now of course we know
that his contrition is a sham:  he will have soon forgotten that moment and
will be back to his old ways.  But a comic resolution has been achieved,
and that it is so unrealistic and fleeting makes up a great part of its
poignancy.  Beckmesser, on the other hand, is not dramatically 'resolved'
in any way:  he simply disappears, harmony being restored in his absence.
Now to me, that's just not a satisfying comic conclusion:  the dissonance
keeps ringing in my ear after the opera is over.  Note that I'm not talking
here about absurdist comedy or Friedrich Duerrenmatt or 'Seinfeld' or
anything like that:  M.  is a warm-hearted, serious, 'feel-good' comedy -
far more than Figaro - and both Beckmesser himself and his unqualified
disgrace just don't fit.  (This is completely disregarding the ugly
political implications:  misfits are best drummed out of town to restore
harmony, and moreover they are such died-in-the-wool scumbags that they
thoroughly deserve it.)

Ditto for Sachs's final speech - or rather just that xenophobic middle
section where Sachs goes into the minor key and says more or less 'Watch
out!  Evil tricks threaten from across the border, we are being overrun by
superficial foreign trash' etc.  (I have nothing against the hymn to German
culture itself:  there is nothing jingoistic about it, and it is a fitting
ending to an opera which is after all about German art.) But that middle
bit is again a sudden shrill note which spoils the festive and dignified
tone, and it's all the more disappointing for coming from the wise lips of
Hans Sachs.  That's my real problem with it:  it's not just that it's in
itself paranoid or mean-spirited:  it's not 'in character' - not for Sachs,
not for the opera as a whole.  Unlike Brahms's 'Triumphlied' whose whole
purpose was patriotic triumphalism - there that sort of thing would be
entirely appropriate.

(Of course you're right, most opera-goers, especially in non-German
countries, can happily listen to the music without too much concern for all
this stuff; as a native speaker, I can't help understanding the text if the
singers' diction is reasonable.)

Felix Delbruck
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