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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 June 2016
For the past twenty-five years a key piece of evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has been identified in the Grimm Brothers’ anti-Semitic tale ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ and a possible allusion to this in the text of Walther’s Act I ‘trial song’. This article argues that the passages in question are better explained with reference to a medieval poetic tradition still prevalent in nineteenth-century German culture involving the vocal contest between birds, paradigmatically the owl and the nightingale. Since the twelfth century, the owl and the nightingale have debated the merits of high and low art, religious themes, social forms, poetic diction and more. The associations of pedantry and harsh, coarse vocal character with the figure of the owl maps readily onto the negative traits of Beckmesser, just as the contrasting associations of the melodious nightingale with springtime, courtship and ‘natural’ musicality align with traits of Wagner’s artist-hero, Walther von Stolzing. Rather than displacing the possible anti-Semitic reading of Beckmesser, however, this alternative reading of the Beckmesser–Walther antagonism through the lens of avian conflict or debate poetry relocates that reading within a broader discursive and figurative context, one that is more commensurate with the possible role of anti-Semitic subtexts within Wagner’s music dramas in general.
Thomas Grey, Stanford University, tsgrey@stanford.edu; Kirsten Paige, University of California, Berkeley, kpaige@berkeley.edu.
1 ‘Ho ho! You learned master-song from finches and titmice? The results will bear that out, no doubt!’
2 Jacob, Cf. and Grimm, Wilhelm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm, 3rd edn, 1837, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Darmstadt, 1999)Google Scholar.
3 Millington, Barry, ‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?’, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991), 247–260CrossRefGoogle Scholar; here 259. Millington takes his cue from earlier comments by Egon Voss; see ‘Wagners Meistersinger als Oper des deutschen Bürgertums’, in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Texte, Materialen, Kommentare, ed. Attila Csampai and Dieter Holland (Reinbek, 1981), 25–31.
4 Vaget, Hans Rudolf, ‘“Du warst mein Feind von je”: The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited’, in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Reception, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester, 2003), 202Google Scholar.
5 Adorno, Theodor W., Versuch über Wagner (Frankfurt, 1974), 19Google Scholar; cf. In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 2005), 13. The examples Adorno cites – Alberich, Mime and Beckmesser – are of course the roles most commonly viewed in this light since then; but Beckmesser is not singled out here with regard to any details of the ‘Jew in the Thorn-bush’ story.
6 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 11; cf. Versuch, 17–18.
7 ‘Der Jude im Dorn’, from Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 467. The first version of the tale, printed in volume 2 (1815) of the first edition, was somewhat shorter than that printed in subsequent editions, and differed in some details. Translations from the 1837 edition, cited here, are our own.
8 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 11 (translation emended); cf. Adorno, Versuch, 18.
9 Millington, ‘Nuremberg Trial’, 259.
10 MacFarland, Timothy reviews the case for hearing allusions to ‘Der Jude im Dorn’ in the scene of Walther’s trial song in Act I in a recent essay, ‘The Humiliation of Beckmesser: “Der Jude im Dorn” and the Authority of Jacob Grimm in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, Oxford German Studies 41 (2012), 197–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and comes to similar conclusions to those presented here: the situational details lack sufficient congruity to support the case for a deliberate allusion, which, however, ‘is not the same as claiming that an understanding of Wagner’s anti-Semitic views is of no relevance to the interpretation of his operas, including Die Meistersinger’ (209).
11 Vaget, Hans Rudolf, ‘Sixtus Beckmesser – A “Jew in the Brambles”?’, Opera Quarterly 12 (1995), 35–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. the fuller version of this first of Vaget’s contributions to the debate, ‘“Der Jude im Dorn” oder: Wie anti-semitisch sind Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg?’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 69 (1995), 271–299CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Vaget, ‘Sixtus Beckmesser – A “Jew in the Brambles”?’, 40.
13 In addition to the essays by Vaget cited in notes 4 and 11 above, see also Borchmeyer, Dieter, ‘Beckmesser – The Jew in the Brambles?’, in Program Book: Bayreuther Festspiele (1996), 100–109Google Scholar and MacFarland, ‘The Humiliation of Beckmesser’.
14 MacFarland suggests that if the somewhat unusual locution ‘Grimm-bewehrt’ is in fact intended as a punning reference to the cultural-literary ‘authority’ of the Grimm brothers, the reference might be to Jacob Grimm’s 1811 essay Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang, which Wagner mentions having consulted around the turn of the years 1861–2 while starting to develop the libretto of Die Meistersinger. See ‘The Humiliation of Beckmesser’, 204–9. In this essay, Grimm was arguing for the essential continuity of style and genre between the medieval courtly Minnesang and the bourgeois, ‘learned’ tradition of master-song in the sixteenth century, thus between the (authentic) poetic tradition in which Wagner’s Walther von Stolzing has schooled himself and the derivative version of the Nuremberg masters whose approval he is constrained to seek in the opera.
15 Walther von der Vogelweide is portrayed in the famous Manesse Codex (UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 848) beneath the heraldic emblem of caged songbirds; a related image in the same Codex represents Walther’s contemporary, Heinrich von Veldecke, similarly seated beneath heraldic emblems, but surrounded by an image of Wagner’s ‘holder Stimmen Gemenge’ (‘abundant fair voices of nature’). See http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0243?sid=ae087ae92cae22abfb2be6646b5b2adf and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Manesse_Heinrich_von_Veldeke.jpg. A later nineteenth-century illustration of Walther von der Vogelweide freely merges aspects of both images: see Figure 1.
16 See Bowen, Anna Maude, ‘The Sources and Text of Richard Wagner’s Opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, PhD diss., Cornell University (1987; published Munich, 1987), 68Google Scholar. The draft in question is that identified as WWV 96, Text X in Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis, ed. John Deathridge, Martin Geck and Egon Voss (Mainz, 1986), 474.
17 The dawn colloquy of Romeo and Juliet in Juliet’s chamber, for instance (Romeo and Juliet, III, 5) opposes the nightingale to the lark, ‘the herald of the morn’, but the point remains that both might be heard singing at the threshold between night and day.
18 Literary historian A. T. Hatto notes the afterlife of this literary trope in medieval German folk ritual as well as courtly poetry. The sources of the Conflictus, he writes, are ‘a fable of Aesop, a poem by Theocritus, and the Third Eclogue of Virgil. It is significant … that the refrain of the Conflictus is dominated by the Cuckoo of Spring, an unclassical motif which can come only from unrecorded Germanic or Celtic and very possibly from Anglo-Saxon folk-poetry. Some of the German Minnesinger will have known the Conflictus.’ , Hatto, Essays on Medieval German and Other Poetry (Cambridge, 1980), 49–50Google Scholar.
19 The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. and trans. J. W. H. Atkins (Cambridge, 1922), 152.
20 The Owl and the Nightingale, 158–9.
21 The Owl and the Nightingale, 159.
22 ‘Ist’s wohl, Astilus, glaublich, daß Alcon, unkundig des Liedes, Nyctilus habe besiegt? Dann mag den Stieglitz die Krähe, mag das Krächzen der Eule der Nachtigall Töne besiegen.’ Friedrich Adelung, trans., Des Titus Calpurnius Siculus Ländliche Gedichte (Sechste Idylle, ‘Der Zank’) (Saint Petersburg, 1804), 141. The Appendix reproduces some of the sample source texts cited in this article with regard to the tradition of ‘owl vs nightingale’ conflict or debate poetry closer to the time of Die Meistersinger. Some are given in more extended or complete form there, and some additional (later) examples of the tradition are given as well. For this text, see Appendix item 3.
23 See the complete text and translation given as item 6 in the Appendix.
24 ‘Vermischte Aufsätze’, Amts- und Intelligenzblatt von Salzburg (Salzburg, 1819), 361.
25 Youens, Susan, ‘The Cry of the Schuhu: Dissonant History in a Late Schumann Song’, in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge (Oxford, 2010), 37–39Google Scholar.
26 On this association, obviously pertinent to Beckmesser’s ‘owlish’ status, see also Robert Dodesly’s eighteenth-century version of ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’ (Fables of Aesop and Others, 1772, given as item 2 in the Appendix), which pits the pedantic-bookish owl against the Romantic-natural nightingale. An illustration from the 1809 edition of Dodesly’s Fables is shown in Figure 2.
27 Wilhelm Wander, Karl Friedrich, Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexicon (Leipzig, 1867), 902–903Google Scholar.
28 Oehlenschläger, Adam, ‘Im Frühlinge’, in Schriften, vol. 18: Gedichte (Breslau, 1830), 36Google Scholar. See larger excerpt given as item 7 in the Appendix.
29 Taylor, Archer, Literary History of Meistergesang (Chicago, 1937), 95Google Scholar. The mastersinger debates were traditionally referred to as débat or conflictus. On these and their relation to the Tannhäuser legend, see also Hatto, Essays on Medieval German and Other Poetry, 50.
30 Taylor, Literary History of Meistergesang, 95.
31 Wagner, Richard, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1912–14), 8: 238–260Google Scholar (see especially 243–6).
32 Aesop’s story ‘The Owl and the Birds’ clearly casts the owl as a ‘tin-eared pedant’, aligning the bird with the prototype of critical failure in the legendary King Midas, rewarded with ass’s ears for misjudging the contest of Apollo and Pan. See Townsend, George, ed., Three Hundred and Fifty Aesop’s Fables (Chicago, 1885), 210Google Scholar.
33 Wagner, Richard, Judaism in Music, trans. Charles Osborne, in Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays (New York, 1973), 28Google Scholar. Original text in Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 5: 71–2. Sander Gilman’s reading of quarrelling Jews in Salome in terms of contemporary Jewish-Yiddish caricature speaks to the same tradition of anti-Jewish vocal stereotype. See , Gilman, ‘Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siècle’, New German Critique 43 (1988), 35–68Google Scholar, esp. 56–7.
34 The Owl and the Nightingale, 152.
35 Wagner, Judaism in Music, 28.
36 Wagner, Die Meistersinger, Act II, scene 6 (Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 7: 216).
37 Directly following the nightingale’s insult about the owl’s repulsive ‘gurgling’, the poem continues: ‘The Owl waited till evening fell, and then she could contain herself no longer: for her heart had become so swollen, that she was almost breathless with rage’ (The Owl and the Nightingale, 152).
38 The salt mines of Wieliczka in southern Poland near Kraków.
39 A Sprosser or ‘bastard nightingale’ refers to the ornithological species sylvia Philomela. This species seems to have been understood as a hybrid of the thrush and the nightingale. See Rennie, James, The Field Naturalist (London, 1833), 1: 428Google Scholar. Its song is described as ‘far inferior to that of the true Nightingale. It is said to be common in Egypt’ (The Penny Encyclopedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London, 1840), 16: 231).
40 ‘Als der verewigte Kaiser Alexander von Rußland das weit berühmte Salzwerk zu Wieliezka besuchte, ward in dieser von den Fremden angestaunten, an natürlichen Wundern überreichen Unterwelt ein Wald errichtet, und ein Jude, welcher die Nachtigallen nachäffen kann, in demselben verborgen. Dort schlug der hebräische Sprosser vor heller Freude wie zehn Philomelen, und der gütige Kaiser belohnte die falschen Silbertöne mit ächten Goldstücken.’ August Müller, Karl Friedrich, ‘Allerlei’, Der Bayerische Landbote (Munich, 1828), 907Google Scholar. Also reprinted in ‘Nachrichten vom Auslande’, Der Bayerische Volksfreund 5: 141 (Munich, 1828), 606.
41 Albright, Daniel, Stravinsky: The Music Box and the Nightingale (New York, 1989), 24Google Scholar.
42 This is how Wagner expressed his view of the two projects in the 1851 review of his professional career, Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (‘A Communication to my Friends’): Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 4: 284.
43 Lydia Goehr takes the mythical trope of the contest (agon or paragone) between Apollo and Pan (or Marsyas) as an interpretive leitmotif in the history of opera in ‘The Concept of Opera’, in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (Oxford, 2014), 92–133. On the relevance of the contest to Beckmesser and Die Meistersinger, see 96–7.
44 This reading makes more sense, at any rate, than Ernst Bloch’s attempt to rehabilitate Beckmesser’s performance as an anticipation of high modernist verbal experiments of his own generation, specifically cultivation of syllabic nonsense in Dadaist poetry. Bloch, Ernst, ‘Über Beckmessers Preislied-Text’, in Literarische Aufsätze (Frankfurt, 1965), 213Google Scholar. See also Daub, Adrian, ‘“An All-Too-Secret Wagner”: Ernst Bloch the Wagnerian’, The Opera Quarterly 30 (2014), 188–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levin, David J., ‘Reading Beckmesser Reading: Antisemitism and Aesthetic Practice in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’, New German Critique 69 (1996), 127–146CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Die Meistersinger, Act III, scene 5 (Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 7: 260). The details of the chorale text differ slightly in the published text from that in the orchestral score, and are emended accordingly here.
46 Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 7: 265.
47 These punishments focus on stipulated gestures of public humiliation (‘Das Stirnrunzeln, Das Lächeln, Die laute Lache, Das Naserümpfen, Das Hohngelächter’) and are distinctly evocative of the punishment undergone by Beckmesser after his failed performance of Walther’s song. See , Klopstock, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (Hamburg, 1774), 24–26Google Scholar.
48 Klopstock, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik, 119–22.
49 Weiner, Marc, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE, 1995)Google Scholar.
