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  • Wagner and the Wonder of Art: An Introduction to Die Meistersinger
  • William Germano (bio)
M. Owen Lee. Wagner and the Wonder of Art: An Introduction to Die Meistersinger. University of Toronto Press. xii, 134. $45.00

‘I am more moved by “Die Meistersinger” than by any other opera,’ writes M. Owen Lee, ‘because Hans Sachs is what I would like to be.’ It is the most revealing, and most important, sentence in this slim and joyous book on Wagner’s comic masterpiece.

Long ago Lee – classicist, Catholic priest, and veteran Metropolitan Opera broadcast intermission guest – found a lucid and compelling way of talking about opera, nowhere more feelingly than when he is engaged with the composer of the Ring and its gigantic siblings.

Wagner and the Wonder of Art is a small book with a long history. The text began as a 1968 article in Opera News, was reprinted in a Bayreuth Meistersinger program, and subsequently became the basis of a lecture the author has given for forty years. Not many lecturers, or many lectures, can sustain that sort of career. Yet what could be an exhausted exercise in plot summary remains instead remarkably fresh. Lee writes with two aims: first, to illuminate Die Meistersinger for a general audience, clarifying the plot as well as the psychological and emotional development of Wagner’s characters. With a light hand, the author draws on his scholarly [End Page 312] expertise, marking out classical connections (for example, character types and their relation to Roman plays) as well as the libretto’s biblical inflections. This is, after all, an operatic tale of an Adam in search of an Eve on a sun-drenched Johannistag morning.

The heart of the book is its first three chapters – ‘The First Stollen,’ ‘The Second Stollen,’ and ‘The Abgesang’ – which cover the opera’s plot act by act and name the three formal components of the song Walther must learn to sing. The Nuremberg comedy is an opera about learning to sing –learning and singing – art’s rules and its bliss: this is the Meistersinger Lee celebrates here.

But then there is Wagner, who is perhaps easier to love than to like. Lee’s secondary objective is to counter an academic generation’s inquiry into the taint of anti-Semitism within Wagner’s operas themselves. Lee has no patience with it. If even the Nazis themselves didn’t identify Beckmesser as Jewish and worthy of ridicule for that reason, then, Lee argues, how can we? Lee’s Wagner is an imperfect person, but one who ‘not in spite of but because of his failed human nature, expresses humanity’s needs and hopes more compellingly than any other composer for the stage.’

This short volume concludes several times. In 2001, Lee delivered another Meistersinger intermission broadcast text, sounding the opera’s themes anew in the shadow of the World Trade Center attack. While it is nice to have that text here, one might have preferred an additional chapter that did not repeat points and language made in earlier in the volume. In any case, no reader should miss Lee’s notes, which contain a wealth of details about the composition of the opera. A short review of recordings, a translation of Sachs’s ‘Cobbler’s Song’ and Walther’s ‘Prize Song,’ a bibliography, and an index of proper names conclude the volume.

This is finally less a book than an essay, and, in a way, less an essay than a song, but it is a good song and one worth hearing, even if one has heard a version of it more than once before. We now have it in its final shape. In Wagner and the Wonder of Art Owen Lee finally commits to paper his own Preislied.

William Germano

William Germano, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

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