In E-19 opera, this protagonist couple tale almost always ends badly. The sought-after union is thwarted, with mortal results for one or both of the protagonists. Had any of those many tragic operas ended happily, the result would have been the reign of the protagonist couple over the community represented in the stage world: the banished outsider gains his “rightful” place through the alliance, and lovers-at-first-sight see their passion consecrated. And though we are free to envision a joint reign, under the rules of patrimonial descent that obtained in all the relevant times and places, it is the male that becomes the de facto ruler.^(I) In Meistersinger, though, as in the other summarizing comic masterwork of E-19, Verdi’s Falstaff, there’s a democratizing shift. In both cases, a marriage between the “right” partners (Fenton/Nannetta, Stolzing/Eva—the traditional tenor-soprano pairings) is the engine of the plot, but the center of attention is an older bass-baritone figure whose machinations make off with the oft-told narrative, and it is he who in the end is lauded as the opera’s ruling spirit.

Though there certainly clings to Walther an upper-class air that cannot be separated from the artistic superiority he demonstrates, and we imagine him playing an important role in the Nürnberg community, he and Eva (let alone Fenton and Nannetta) are not going to “reign.” But what if they did, or at least assumed the sort of prominent social position that is the Bürgerlich equivalent? In another booklet essay, Dieter Borchmeyer, author of one of the most useful recent Wagnerian commentaries I know of^(II) points out that the Nürnberg we are shown apparently governs itself, without benefit of either civic or religious authority, according to a sort of common law based on aesthetic principles.The only representatives of civil governance would be the soon-to-be ridiculed antagonist, Sixtus Beckmesser, who is the Town Clerk, and the Night Watchman, who first crosses an empty scene upstage, bidding all to beware of spirits and spooks and to praise God the Lord, and then repeats the song and blows his Watchman’s horn at the act’s end, again on an empty scene but now downstage, where he crosses in the opposite direction and exits, blissfully unaware of the raucous riot that’s just concluded. (And which, we might note, has been brought under control through the intervention of Sachs and Pogner. Evidently their father-figure, craftsman/artist identities has been sufficient to stand in place of civil authority.) As for religious authority, Wagner devised the Act 1 set so that we see only the townsfolk parishioners at an angle in the back rows of St. Catherine’s, and hear only the concluding hymn of the service—no fragment of a reading or prayer from the pulpit beyond. Nor does religion factor in anywhere else in the work, except in the most casual everyday references (“Hilf Gott! was fang’ ich an?” or “Gott weiss, wie das geschah?“, etc.), or in the masters’ passing resistance to a “worldly” song. Borchmeyer observes that when we arrive at the Festwiese for the final scene, it is unthinkable in any real-world sense that the Mayor and Town Pastor would not be present for the contest and Midsummer’s Day celebration. But they aren’t. We have only the craft guilds, the contestants and other Mastersingers, and townsfolk. Now, I believe I detect some special pleading in Borchmeyer’s observations. The St. Catherine’s hymn is the very top of the show, led into by that extraordinary “surprise curtain” moment as the Vorspiel concludes its mighty summation-in-advance and suddenly switches into an entirely unanticipated, religiously dedicated tone. It goes on for a noticeable while, is quite beautiful, shows us our heroine with her prayer-book and, I think, effectively establishes religious devotion as a lodestar for the community. Though it’s true that the references to the Town Council are fleeting and easily lost, they are there, and the Council is represented throughout by a leading character, Beckmesser. Certainly Wagner wasn’t seriously suggesting that Nürnberg had no government. But it is true that in the onstage world he shows us, that government is beside the point. The police have been defunded, and Nürnberg is an Autonomous Zone regulated by the rules of Art and Love.