Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the question of anti-semitism

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

03/12/2009

Category :

Arts & media

Sub category :

Arts and art history

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Summary :

Introduction.
Wagner's suspicion of all things Jewish.
Wagner's highly charged article, 'Judaism in Music'.
1. Wagner's explicit descriptions of Jewish artists and fear of their eventual artistic domination.
Die Meistersinger.
1. Beckmesser as an anti-Semitic caricature.
2. The first opportunity to see Beckmesser in an anti-Semitic light.
3. Beckmesser's attempts to decipher the pilfered song.
4. The juvenile A-B-B-C-C-A-A rhyming pattern.
5. Glorifying Sachs rather than Walther.
Conclusion.
Bibliography.

Abstract

The eighth of wagner's operas and his only comedy, die meistersinger von nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) tells the story of a knight who wins a wife by challenging the musical establishment. It was the first of wagner's operas to not be based in myth; rather, the composer went to great pains to research sixteenth-century Nuremburg and its mastersingers. The opera's main theme is the regeneration of art; this is illustrated by the contrast between the mastersingers' guild (which represents the current declining state of art) and its antithesis, Walther, whose music is self-taught, improvisatory, and not governed by a strict set of rules. wagner uses this conflict as a means to wrestle with his own questions of how to best mediate the old and the new in music and opera. However, wagner also examines the elements which could throw this new way forward into chaos: for this, we must look at Beckmesser as a personification of this chaos.