So in my case these thematic thoughts might be called “interperformative,” with the text at hand for consultation. Most of them hark back to the operas of Wagner’s early maturity, most directly to Tannhäuser, with its Sängerkrieg and Stolzing’s “guter Meister,” Walther von der Vogelweide, as an actual character. But there are also the clear parallels to Der Fliegende Holländer (e. g., Daland, basso, offering his daughter Senta, soprano, as marital prize; the secondary tenor cut off in the last act while dancing with a pretty stranger by the onslaught of a major choral arrival), and to at least one plausible interpretation, suggested by Wagner himself, of Lohengrin, as a parable of the transcendent artist’s fate in human society.^(I) And much as I love entering the spellbinding worlds of Wagnerian myth, I always find it refreshing to come back to that of historical legend and to the reworking of these and other themes in a comedy, which is to say in a work of social accommodation. In this world the supernatural plays no part, the artist is incorporated into the community, and redemption keeps its lower-case initial cap—Walther “redeems” himself (and Eva) in the comparatively mundane sense that one redeems a coupon or savings bond, which is to say by realizing its matured value. He earns that redemption by finally discerning and accepting the allowable limits of the disruptive effects of artistic innovation on social stability.

It pleases me, too, that with Meistersinger Wagner is again on the trail of the metanarrative which, I contend, is the driving force of E-19 opera,^(II) and off which he meanders in the Ring and Parsifal. He is just two steps from its very source, the plight of the artist/knight seeking his rightful place through a love-at-first-sight union with a lady of position—a tale born from the dispossessions of heretical suppressions and the tradition of courtly love, passed on to the Minnesingers and, by the opera’s “now” (the mid-Sixteenth Century), in the process of absorption into the mores of the arts-and-crafts, cottage-industry culture of an urban, middle-class citizenry (and just as Stolzing is, in effect, downsizing his noble status to join that citizenry). Wagner, writing at the time of an analogous political transition with cultural implications both promising and unsettling, looked three hundred years back to set his story, which in turn reaches back another three and a half centuries to its displaced-artist-rebel beginnings in another era of portentous social change.