Was Deutsch ist, und wahr und rein...

My brief stay in Nürnberg took me right to the heart of lots of the big questions: what was Wagner really on about, what being German is all about, and why was I nervous when I first showed up in Germany a week ago. Some rambling thoughts on these questions:

Wagner. I came to Nürnberg in particular because it’s the location of perhaps my favorite Wagner opera, MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG. (It’s hard to pick a favorite Wagner opera. PARSIFAL could very easily be my favorite, as well. And do you consider the RING one opera? That’s crazy.) MEISTERSINGER is unusual among the Wagner operas, we always say, because it’s set on Planet Earth (the others having more mythic/supernatural elements). That’s probably not really the case; the biggest difference, I think, is that MEISTERSINGER is broadly diatonic. That’s why it seems to have more to do with Planet Earth: he’s writing in a musical language which, although distinctly Wagnerian, is far closer to the musical language the rest of humanity uses than some of his other operas (to me, TRISTAN and PARSIFAL are the most ‘Wagnerian’ sounding operas, if that means anything).

MEISTERSINGER is set on Planet Earth, without any magic except the kind that happens on a Midsummer Night when a bunch of young lovers get very confused about the proper course of action, and maybe there were fairies involved. (See? Just like MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM!) The only very specific location is the first act scene in St. Katherine’s church, which was destroyed during the war (like most of Nürnberg) and hasn’t really been rebuilt. There’s an outdoor stage now on that spot, with part of the original wall behind it:

The second act and first scene of the third act take place in or near Hans Sachs’ house, which I suppose one could find, although I didn’t. I did find this statue of him:



The final scene takes place in a field on the banks of the Pegnitz river, which winds its way through the walled city. I didn’t find any fields still existing, but it’s a lovely river, and indeed an incredibly lovely city, as these pictures indicate.







MEISTERSINGER is an incredibly lovely opera, because it’s Wagner’s most upbeat, optimistic work, unambiguously positive, outrageously funny, and the fullest expression ever of his really utopian humanism. Anyone who thinks Wagner is all about seeking death through sex must remember that MEISTERSINGER suggests a different value-system. Tristan (the man) is for me Wagner’s ludicrous selfishness pushed to its inevitably nihilistic conclusion. Anyone who loves himself that much, and has such disregard for others, will end up in Kareol clutching his wound in agony. But MEISTERSINGER is not about championing extreme individuality, it’s about community. That’s why the music is so diatonic, and contrapuntal—there are rules in place so that all these different melodies can live together in the same piece of music, as there are rules governing human behavior which allow a human community to exist—nay, to flourish.

In the RING, Wagner objects strenuously to a world based on rules; the rules, symbolized by Wotan’s spear, are the cause of lots of misery. And in MEISTERSINGER, the rules—symbolized by the Mastersingers’ endless musical forms and conventions and procedures and patterns—cause the protagonists terrible headaches, but Wagner doesn’t break the spear in MEISTERSINGER the way he does in the RING. In the end, the rules get validation and respect even as they are superseded by innovation and an outburst of genius that figures out a new way to do things.

I’ve got it, I can tell you the big difference between MEISTERSINGER and the rest of Wagner: most of his plots avoid anything mundane, being occupied rather with the divine/mythic/symbolic/weighted with tragic import. It’s one of the things that many people find ‘heavy’ about Wagner, how it seems to have so little to do with real life. But MEISTERSINGER is all about the little stuff—the specifics of how do you write a song, how do you make a shoe, what do you say to a pretty girl you spotted in the first row on your way out of church. I remember once watching a video of MEISTERSINGER (this was years ago, back in the distant days of video) after a long ‘retreat’ day spent with the board and directors of Seattle Opera, analyzing and discussing the future of our Young Artists Program. Boring stuff, mundane stuff, stuff you do at work. And how astonished I was to find that Wagner had set the exact same discussion to music, at the end of MEISTERSINGER Act One, as all the Mastersingers are arguing about what to do with the next generation of singers, about whether the public should have any voice in the future of art, about the proper relationship between tradition and innovation.

In my real life example, we’d been talking about opera singing; in MEISTERSINGER, Wagner is really talking about setting words to music, the writing of songs, the relationship between sound and sense. But the discussion applies to basically every human activity. The Mastersingers are crafting songs, but they’re all craftsmen in their other lives: cobblers, bakers, tailors, etc. And everything they make, they do by hand, with loving care and craft. Because that’s a crucial part of Wagner’s Utopian vision: HOMO FABER, man the maker, a vital relationship between who you are and what you make. Whether it’s a car, a cake, a building, a chair, a theatrical production, a book, a website, a student smarter, a sick person healthier, a nation stronger or more peaceful or more prosperous, WHAT WE MAKE=WHO WE ARE. Everything created counts as a work of art; everything manufactured thus deserves care and respect, and ought to be both beautiful and functional. It’s Tolkien’s thing with the elves, as I mentioned before. Being extra-human, everything the elves MAKE is somehow extra-special; elf-cloaks help you hide from your enemies, elf-bread is really light and unusually filling, elf-rope is somehow intelligent. If it’s magic, it’s the same as the magic of MEISTERSINGER; Walther ends up writing a song so good it is magical. The specifics of the magic are kept vague, in these kinds of stories, because we mustn’t think too literally about what the story is saying—metaphor is king. The great artistry of MEISTERSINGER lies in the layering and echoing of metaphors, images like John the Baptist, David, Eve, and the Garden—images we already know and connect with feelings and stories, and then deployed throughout MEISTERSINGER in a contrapuntal explosion of cross-references and metaphorical echoes. Wagner never took as much care MAKING anything as he did MEISTERSINGER.

I think it’s a valid point about a utopian society, or indeed any dream of a strong human community. Especially in our world, post-industrialization, where most makers are so far removed from the product they are making. I have a strange perspective on this issue because I work for an opera company, which is still operating more or less (disastrously, as far as our budget is concerned) according to a medieval-trade-guild-type structure: everything made for an opera production is made especially by skilled craftspeople in our Seattle Opera ‘school’. All the costumes, all the props, all the set pieces, every single supratitle lovingly hand-crafted. That’s great, that’s how to guarantee a good product—don’t have too many middlemen. It’s true that you in the audience don’t necessarily know which of our cutters made each particular costume; but there’s only about 20 of them, as opposed to when you buy a pair of jeans at the Gap, where you really have no way of knowing which little enslaved Asian monkey-child made that particular pair of pants. Frankly, the old Nürnberg guilds worked the same way: a crafted product (an alter-piece, or a portrait of Luther, or whatever) came from ‘the school of’ Lucas Cranach the Elder, or Albrecht Dürer, or whoever, it wasn’t necessarily created by the individual master artist himself, but by his team. If the Gap can have a signature logo, it’s certainly possible for such a team to have an identifiable style.

The problem is, there’s little room in our world today for anything that doesn’t make a profit, and craft of this kind is never going to make much of a profit. Profit comes from mass-producing your product very cheaply and making sure that everybody buys one; and that’s not what MEISTERSINGER is about. Honestly, the system presented in MEISTERSINGER makes far more sense to me; it seems sustainable, unlike the profit-driven system. Eventually, Planet Earth will run out of hidden reserves of gasoline, and then people with cars will really be in trouble (we may very well have melted the ice caps and drowned everybody, or destroyed mankind with nuclear war, well before that point, it’s true); what happens when the profit-driven economy runs out of potential profit?

Anyways, I can’t ramble on about MEISTERSINGER without pointing out the problem with it. It’d be such a lovely opera—if only Hans Sachs, Wagner’s fantasy vision of the best man he himself could possibly be, didn’t give that stupid speech at the end, warning all of Germany: “Watch out for Jews and for the French! They’re up to no good! Only trust your German masters!” But yes, it’s here, in this opera, in that one little speech, that Wagner really does sound like a Nazi. Sometimes you cut it, when you put MEISTERSINGER on today; oftentimes you have the guy sing it, but somehow undercut it with the staging.

My trip to Nürnberg gave me a slightly different perspective on the problem. A couple things I’ve learned recently:

The Nazis didn’t look evil. To Americans, the Nazis have become cartoon stereotypes of evil. When you call someone a Nazi, as an insult, it seems to most people an overstatement—maybe the person is a jerk, but no one in our world today, it seems, could ever be quite as evil as the lowest-ranking Nazi. We’ve seen so many movies featuring wildly evil Nazis, stories of suspense where the very presence of a Nazi onscreen chills the blood and makes you tense; and the history has been taught so glibly, in most of our schools, that I think it’s hard for many of us to realize: the really dangerous thing about evil is that it can be incredibly seductive. It can look just the same as good. Much of what the Nazis stood for we might applaud: strong individuals, strong communities, order, discipline, security, etc. Remember that the common man-in-the-street hadn’t read 'Mein Kampf', probably didn’t really understand the Nazi political agenda, and certainly didn’t know about the mass murders and genocides. Similarly, the average American today understands that we’re at war; but the media is doing a wonderful job of protecting us from seeing the truth of that war, and we haven’t begun to feel the economic impact. When you are in a group, are you honestly good at noticing when a terrible decision is being made? And in that situation, are you strong enough to stand up and speak out against the decision? And brave enough to sever your ties with the group, if no one pays heed to what you are saying?

The Jews were emancipated too quickly. Take heed, gays! It was Richard Wagner who said it: “We weren’t ready for the Jews, they were freed too quickly.” Remember, the Jews had been kept in ghettoes for thousands of years in Germany and across Europe, and it was Napoleon (and behind him, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment) who ‘emancipated’ European Jewry in the 1810s—made it possible, at long last, for Jews to have the same rights and opportunities as anyone else. In Paris, this went over great; in places where the Enlightenment thought hadn’t yet reached, this didn’t go over so well. And Naziism was at heart a radical conservative movement, fantasizing about recreating a society like the one in MEISTERSINGER—so “Hey, you Jews! Back into your ghettoes!” Or worse, much much worse, with the new technology and weird new godless philosophies that make it okay to kill human beings. The point is, it was 120 years after the emancipation that this backlash happened with such appalling severity. These things take time, lots and lots of time. Perhaps food for thought to gays impatient with the slow process of acquiring civil rights, pushing for legalized gay marriage, and so forth. A generation or two ago, gays were as vigorously despised a minority as Jews ever were in Germany. Things have come a long way; but when you move too fast the backlash can be fearsome. The generation that’s currently in high school in America seems (to me at least, an occasional visitor in our nations' high schools) to be considerably less homophobic than even my generation (I graduated from high school in 1991). Slow and steady wins the race. Don’t give up any ground; but wait until our parents’ generation are all dead. When the people graduating from high school today are in their 60s (say in 2045) maybe the world will be ready for so radical a restructuring of human society. By then, same-sex partnerships will probably be a much-needed method of dealing with overpopulation!

Unifying? Great! Why stop at a nation? Nürnberg has a big wall around the old city, a reminder of its long-held status as the ‘free, imperial’ city. That is, there was no such thing as the country of Germany until the 1870s; there was a loose affiliation of states, sometimes called the “Holy Roman Empire”, and variously administered from different spots, but Nürnberg was a popular site for an imperial headquarters since it belonged to no bigger kingdom but was a free city that ran itself. The push toward German unification began in earnest after the fall of Napoleon, when Wagner was a little kid; he got involved, everybody got involved, and after the Franco-Prussian war (and some little war in the 1870s between Bavaria and Prussia, the two big chunks that came together to make up the new nation of Germany—Prussia won, that’s why the capitol is Berlin) there was for the first time a legitimate German nation. But if they were a serious nation, they needed an empire, like the French and the Dutch and the English and the Spanish; and certainly Hitler’s agenda included further imperial aggression—his idea was to expand the German reich to conquer the entire globe, eliminate all the vermin races, and have Germans in charge everywhere (with some of the other people kept alive as slaves). All of which follows, in a horribly logical progression, from that initial push for unification of an assemblage of diverse states.

This is why I’m uncomfortable. Now of course America basically defeated Germany in both world wars, and we got the world empire that the Germans wanted. In fact, it worked much the same way, because in the 1860s as Germany was uniting as a nation, so was America; from a loose confederacy of states to one vast federalized behemoth, with imperial ambitions. And while we haven’t been as bloodthirsty and violent in our territorial aggression (or as insanely genocidal) as the Germans were in World War II, the basic American attitude—that we’re better than everybody else, that all of them should learn to do everything our way, and that inevitably, eventually, THEY WILL—this is eerily reminiscent of what was happening here. Germany reminds me of America in many, many ways: both nations are vast and complicated, full of different kinds of environments, different kinds of communities, different kinds of people. Hard to make generalizations about these places! Both really love cars (although I think Americans like the convenience of cars, whereas the Germans like and take pride in making them). If I had to make crude generalizations about the German national character (I went to a fascinating exhibit today at Nürnberg’s Germanisches Museum, all about “What is German?") I’d say they are big on order, on rules and restrictions, to contrast them with the Danes, who are really big on individual freedom. I think there’s something reassuring to a German about ‘Dies ist verboten/das ist verboten’, a kind of security that comes from knowing the limits. I find it kind of annoying, but then again I’m much more Danish in this than I ever knew. I discovered this about myself when the smoking ban went into effect in Seattle last winter; although I’d been terribly anti-smoking, prejudiced against smokers, for years, now that legally they were second-class citizens, I FELT without knowing why exactly that what we were doing was wrong, that they should be allowed to smoke if they feel like killing themselves, that I had no right whatsoever to tell them how to behave. It’s not exactly an American maverick/individual thing; it’s about valuing freedom, honest-to-goodness freedom to do anything whatsoever (short of harming another) more than anything. Which is what I value, although I don’t know if it’s a good thing. And that uncertainty--plus being an American--makes me nervous.