‘Social Character’: Adorno on Wagner and ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’

The notion that Walther’s trial song alludes to the Grimms’ tale of ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ derives – indirectly, but essentially – from Theodor Adorno’s reference to the tale in the first chapter (‘Social Character’) of his Versuch über Wagner, originally published in 1952. It seems unlikely that this tale would have become a topic of discussion in the critical literature on Die Meistersinger if Adorno had not initially drawn attention to it in his Wagner essay. Thus it is important to stress a basic point that is generally overlooked: Adorno himself did not connect the Grimms’ tale with Beckmesser or with any specific element of Die Meistersinger. Rather, he cited it in relating Wagner’s personal character, specifically his quasi-sadistic ‘cat and mouse’ treatment of the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi while preparing for the Bayreuth Festival premiere of Parsifal, to his musical-dramatic treatment of the ‘villains’ and ‘rejects’ of the operas generally, leading up to the much quoted observation that ‘all the rejects [Zurückgewiesenen] of Wagner’s works are Jewish caricatures’.Footnote ⁵ Adorno is at first describing the process whereby malicious humour serves to ‘suspend justice’ and thereby validates aggression and injustice towards victims of such questionable humour: ‘The insistence that something is all a joke is a time-honoured device for rationalising the worst.’Footnote ⁶ (Nietzsche was also very conscious of this streak in Wagner’s character.) This is an element in the fairy tales of the German tradition that spoke to Wagner, Adorno maintains, and ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ epitomises it distinctly.

Adorno points to the titular episode from the short tale, the punishment of a wandering, ethically suspect Jew at the hands of an initially naïve young German lad in possession of a magic fiddle. The lead-up to this episode is as follows. A poor youth, recently released from service to a miserly master, gives his paltry three-years’ wages of three pennies to a mysterious dwarf he encounters on the road, in return for which he is granted three wishes, one of them being ‘a fiddle which, when played, will make everyone who hears it start to dance’.Footnote ⁷ (The other two wishes are for ‘a fowling-piece [Vogelrohr] that will always hit its target’ and ‘the power to make a request that no one in the world may refuse’.) Shortly thereafter the youth encounters on the roadside ‘a Jew with a long goatee [Ziegenbart]’ who is listening to a songbird perched atop a tree. ‘Good God’, cries the Jew, ‘That such a little creature can have such a terribly powerful voice! If only it were mine! If only one could sprinkle some salt on its tail-feathers.’ The youth takes up his magically endowed fowling-piece and shoots the bird, which falls into a hedge of brambles or thorn-bush [Dornhecken]. ‘Go on, you rascal’, he says to the Jew, ‘go get your bird from in there.’ The Jew crawls into the thorn-bush, whereupon the boy starts playing his fiddle. Responding to the sound of the fiddle the Jew starts leaping about in the thorn-bush, scratching himself and tearing his clothes; he promises the boy a purse of gold if only he will desist from his fiddling. The boy stops, accepts the gold and goes on his way. ‘Wagner’s music, too, is such a worthy lad and treats the villains [Bösewichter] in like manner’, Adorno comments, ‘and the comedy of their suffering not only gives pleasure to whoever inflicts it; it also silences the question “Why?” and tacitly proclaims the mere action itself as the ultimate authority [proklamiert den stummen Vollzug als gebietende Instanz].’Footnote ⁸ For Adorno, this element of ‘social character’, the dramaturgy of Schadenfreude that characterises Wagner’s treatment of his negatively drawn characters, is consistent with Wagner’s personal character – specifically that element conducive to his increasingly vicious anti-Semitic streak. The perversion of justice by means of sadistic mockery was also a feature of the public anti-Semitism Adorno would already have had ample opportunity to witness before his emigration from Nazi Germany in 1934 (or during subsequent return visits to Berlin up to 1937). This legacy of Wagner’s ‘social character’ was vividly present to him, and it is not surprising to find it serving as a springboard for his essay on Wagner first drafted a few years later (1937–8).

Thus Adorno proposes an affinity between the ‘social character’ manifested in Wagner’s treatment of his negative characters (‘villains’ or ‘rejects’) and the Grimms’ tale of ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’, and also between Wagner’s personal character and a pervasive spirit of Schadenfreude in the traditions of Germanic folk tale in general. Hans Sachs’s rather cruel joke on Beckmesser in Act II of Die Meistersinger, where he gleefully undermines Beckmesser’s efforts to serenade Eva Pogner, even to the point of inciting a violent public riot, resonates all too well with the spirit Adorno identified in ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ (a point underlined by Millington).Footnote ⁹ Sachs’s gleeful hammering on his cobbler’s lathe echoes the youth’s fiddling while the Jew is caught in the thorn-bush: both seem to relish the discomfiture of their victim. Further comparisons with the tale might be drawn in the case of the elaborate orchestrally choreographed pantomime at the opening of Act III, scene 3 (where the limping Beckmesser finds and steals what he takes to be Sachs’s draft of an entry for the song contest), or the scene of Beckmesser’s grotesquely failed entry in the contest in the opera’s final scene. However, a closer look at the scene of Walther’s trial song in Act I, where the specific textual allusion to the Grimms’ tale has been identified, reveals a lack of direct correspondence supporting this allusion in any concrete form.Footnote ¹⁰

Rhetoric, imagery and form in Walther’s trial song

Walther’s song is set up as an act of inspired improvisation. From behind the marker’s screen Beckmesser calls out the direction to begin the audition, ‘Fanget an!’ (‘Begin!’), and Walther duly incorporates this simple imperative into the elaborately devised rhetorical conceit of his song, which clearly has not been prepared in advance. As with the similarly elaborate conceit underpinning the text of the other Wagnerian ‘Spring’ song, in Act I of Die Walküre, the complexities of metaphor and syntax discourage any close reading during the act of listening, when the listener is more likely to surrender attention to the impassioned melodic surge of the musical setting. (The same point applies to the greater part of Act II of Tristan und Isolde, among other passages.) All the same, the form and rhetorical content of the song are carefully worked out, as is ‘Walther’s’ musical realisation of the text.

The song turns out, of course, to be a complete Bar form, in compliance with the rules of Meistergesang, but with some complications (as Hans Rudolf Vaget has noted), above all in the two critical interruptions from the ill-disposed ‘Marker’, Sixtus Beckmesser.Footnote ¹¹ The two Stollen of the Bar form each consist of twenty-one lines of three- and two-stress verse, grouped into three rhetorical ‘periods’ of seven, eight and six lines, respectively. Riffing, so to speak, on the command ‘Fanget an!’, Walther’s first Stollen imagines an allegorical personification of ‘Spring’ calling out these words into the forest (‘Fanget an! So rief der Lenz in den Wald’ – ‘Begin! Thus cried Spring in the forest’). The words resound through the forest and elicit in response a chorus of natural voices (‘es tönt der Wald / von holder Stimmen Gemenge’ – ‘the forest resounds / with an abundance of fair voices’). The forest responds to ‘Spring’ by striking up a ‘Spring song’ of purely natural voices – implicitly the voices of songbirds, accompanied perhaps by soft breezes, rustling leaves and other pastoral acoustic topoi. Walther’s second Stollen offers a parallel image, in matching verse and rhetorical structure. Here ‘Love’ issues the same call (‘Fanget an!’) inside the breast of the poet-singer, who has been heretofore innocent of that passion (‘Doch – Fanget an! So rief es mir in die Brust’ – ‘But, begin! Thus cried the voice within my breast’). The ‘insides’ of the poet-singer respond in kind, welling up like the voices of nature in the forest, and striking up the ‘noble love song’ that Walther is now performing for his audition.

At the end of the first Stollen, however, Walther is interrupted by the impatient groans of Beckmesser and the noisy sounds of chalk tallying the singer’s alleged errors on the marker’s slate. Rather than losing his composure at this rude interruption, Walter improvises a contrasting interpolation, an eight-line Gegenstollen, as Vaget calls it.Footnote ¹² This is where the supposed allusion to the Grimms’ tale is first embedded:

Since the first stanza of Walther’s song takes the personification of Spring as its motivating conceit, a counter-stanza personifying its enemy, Winter, is perfectly apposite to both the poetic rhetoric and the singer’s immediate, ‘real-time’ situation.

Walther returns to the regular Bar form with his second Stollen, describing the voice of ‘love’ calling out within him. Beckmesser mistakes the cadence of this second Stollen for the conclusion of an irregular song form, instead of a proper Bar, and interrupts the performance (again). After a vociferous extended debate between Beckmesser, Sachs and the other masters, Walther resumes his song, filling out the new extended form prompted by Beckmesser’s noisy interruption. To this end, he returns to the negative figure of the dark, wintry ‘thorn-bush’ in a second counter-stanza or Gegenstollen (such that each normative Stollen will have its own parallel Gegenstollen):

Here the allegorical equation of Beckmesser and Winter is replaced by a related one: Beckmesser as a shrieking ‘owl’ who rouses a hoarse-voiced chorus of crows or ravens – the rest of the masters, who have been muttering and scratching their heads during the intervening debate. Indeed, while Walther sings of the owl leading the chorus of crows, Beckmesser runs from one master to the other, thrusting in their faces his slate marked with all Walther’s outrageous infractions. Ironically, as he continues this catalogue of errors during Walther’s Abgesang – to which the singer remains oblivious – Beckmesser correctly identifies Walter’s interpolated stanzas (‘ein “Flickgesang” hier zwischen den Stollen’ – ‘a patched-in verse between the Stollen’), precisely at the moment their structural meaning could become clear to the attentive listener. Neither the masters nor Wagner’s audience, however, can hope to register the details of all this within the frenzied chaos of Wort and Ton that engulfs the scene from here to the end of the act.

What, then, of the ‘Jew in the Thorn-bush’? Vaget, Dieter Borchmeyer and Timothy MacFarland have already pointed out the lack of clear, situational correspondence between the plight of the Jew in the tale and the role of Beckmesser as ‘Marker’ in this scene.Footnote ¹³ Aside from the question of whether the phrase ‘Grimm-bewehrt’ (‘fiercely’ or ‘grimly armoured’) may be taken as a pointed reference to the authority of the Brothers GrimmFootnote ¹⁴ (punning ‘bewehrt’ with ‘bewährt’ – attested or authenticated), a few details do remain suggestive. In the later (1837) edition of ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’, the Jew appears to be both impressed and annoyed by the loud voice of a songbird at the top of a tree. Possibly he wishes to silence it, just as Beckmesser, personifying Winter, seeks to silence Walther’s song of Spring. Walther’s singing, one might argue, does increasingly agitate Beckmesser, who (as noted) hops excitedly around the hall showing the other masters his catalogue of Walther’s errors while the latter attempts to sing his Abgesang. The physical punishment of Beckmesser is deferred until the riot-scene of Act II, however (the episode that might be thought to parallel the Jew’s plight in the thorn-bush). What could be regarded as his symbolic ‘execution’ for theft of Walther’s intellectual property (the parallel to the Jew’s execution at the end of the tale) and his implicit rejection from Nuremberg society occurs, appropriately, in the opera’s final scene. The basic gesture of the Jew’s plight in the thorn-bush is simply not present, however, in the scene of Walther’s trial song. Moreover, if Walther is to be identified with the singing bird that preoccupies the Jew in the tale, how to account for the fact that it is the young lad, with his magical fowling-piece, who shoots the bird dead, causing it to fall into the thorn-bush as bait, so to speak, for the unsuspecting Jew? (The Jew’s attitude towards the songbird is in any case ambiguous in the different versions of the tale: does he covet it, resent it, both of these, or something else?)

The imagery of birds and birdsong is a consistent presence in Walther’s poetic text, and it extends back to Walther’s pre-trial song, ‘Am stillen Herd’, in which he explains how he learned the art of song from reading the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide (literally, ‘Walther of the Bird-heath’ or meadow) in wintertime, and then from the songs of the birds themselves in the springtime.Footnote ¹⁵

Fig. 1

Frontispiece illustration from Selected Poems of Walter von der Vogelweide, The Minnesinger, done into English Verse with an Introduction and Six Illustrations, ed. and trans. Walter Alison Phillips (London, 1896).

This poetic-musical résumé already takes the form of a seemingly improvised Bar form, giving evidence (for those willing to hear it) of Walther’s natural musical talents. Besides Sachs, it is Master Kunz Vogelgesang (whose surname means ‘Birdsong’) who does hear it, commenting on the ‘two well-made Stollen’ with which this lyrical résumé begins. When Walther first appears at the mastersingers’ meeting-place, shortly before this, the first masters to whom he is introduced by his family friend, Pogner, are Vogelgesang and Konrad Nachtigall (‘Nightingale’). In the first publication of the libretto (December 1862), both Vogelgesang and Nachtigall pointed out the emerging Bar form of the subsequent trial song, which in the final version is never openly acknowledged.Footnote ¹⁶ The two tonally contrasting, harmonically unstable, dissonant-tending Gegenstollen are at once fully coherent – if seemingly spontaneous – responses to the immediate situation (Beckmesser’s noisy signs of disapprobation from inside the curtained marker’s box) and apt rhetorical antitheses to the principal Stollen: first, envious Winter thinks to ambush the emerging Spring; second, the owl leads a chorus of hoarse, croaking birds of night (and/or Winter) in opposition to the poet’s song of love, Spring, and daylight. The poetic figures involved are all internally coherent, and the Dornenhecken or thorn-bush image does not call attention to itself in a way that might support an intertextual allusion to the Grimms’ fairy tale.

Rather than looking for the Jew in the thorn-bush of this tale, then, it might be more pertinent to interrogate the connection between the allegory of Winter, in the first counter-stanza, and the role of the owl, in the second. If Walther stands for Spring and all its traditional positive attributes, in contrast to Beckmesser-as-Winter, perhaps Walther’s affinity with nature’s musical voice – the songbird – plays into the implied rhetorical antithesis of the second counter-stanza? If there is a traditional folkloric context at work in the trial song, it might be one that figures more consistently in the scene and in the general poetic-figurative conception of Wagner’s opera: a network of tales, poems and other cultural artefacts concerned with a singing contest among the voices of nature, specifically between the ‘owl’ and the ‘nightingale’. At the same time, it may turn out that this alternative poetic-folkloric trope will lead to the discovery of a Jew in Wagner’s poetic thorn-bush after all, albeit by another route, to which we now turn.

The Owl and the Nightingale (Conflictus and debate poetry traditions)

A far older and far more widespread poetic-folkloric tradition than the Grimms’ tale of the ‘Jew in the Thorn-bush’ is that of the owl, typically hiding in a thicket or bramble, cast as a hoarse-voiced antagonist to the nightingale, the classical emblem of melodious, amorous, naturally beautiful song. As a night bird and predator, the owl is often associated with winter in this tradition, as is his barren, hostile hiding-place in the thorny thicket. While the song of the nightingale, as the name suggests, likewise carries nocturnal associations, these extend to the dawning of day.Footnote ¹⁷ Placed in opposition to the owl, the nightingale comes to represent amorous, life-giving springtime. Also in opposition to the owl who hides in the inhospitable briars, the nightingale is usually perched aloft on a branch, singing in the open, most typically in some locus amoenus conducive to young lovers. This nexus of images finds considerably more purchase in the lyrics of Walther’s trial song and the context of its singing than does the Grimms’ tale of the Jew.

Walther denounces his antagonist Beckmesser, as we have seen, in two interpolated counter-stanzas (Gegenstollen) to his improvised trial song. The first such counter-stanza identifies the concealed ‘Marker’ as an allegorical personification of Winter, hiding in a thorn-bush surrounded by dead foliage, ‘consumed by envy and spite’, and meditating on ways to silence the voice of springtime and renewed life. The second, sung amidst the hubbub of the masters who have been stirred into vocal protest against Walther’s song by Beckmesser, speaks of an owl who flies up from the same ‘dark thorn-bush’ or brambles, inciting a chorus of hoarse, croaking ravens with his own ‘harsh cries’, and joined by yet more harsh-voiced birds (‘the magpies, crows, and jackdaws’). The envious, embittered and implicitly unmusical Marker concealed in his judge’s booth is obviously identified with both images in these counter-stanzas: first Winter, and then the owl who leads the chorus of discordant critical voices (a roster of ‘unmusical’ birds). Following the second counter-stanza, Walther begins his long-deferred Abgesang, unnoticed by the masters with the possible exception of Sachs. The imagery of birds and birdsong continues, as Walther sings of a ‘wondrous bird’ who soars ‘on golden wings’ above the raucous din of the other (unmusical) birds, the squabbling masters, leaving behind the narrow confines of the town (Nuremberg) to return to his native meadows and forests, where he first learned the true, natural art of song:

The figurative language of Walther’s trial song throughout its two Stollen as well as the interpolated Gegenstollen, and finally the culminating (if largely unheard) Abgesang is thus unified by references to the ‘voices of springtime’ in the woods and in the poet’s heart, and – in response to Beckmesser’s angry challenge from the concealment of the marker’s booth – by the countervailing voices of winter, night and pedantic ‘mastersong’.

Both the situation and the text of Walther’s trial song thus map directly onto tropes of ‘debate poetry’ with a robust medieval and early modern genealogy: 1) a debate, often quasi-legalistic in tone, staged through the allegorical voices of competing birdsongs (commonly the owl and the nightingale); and 2) a figurative battle between allegorical representations of Spring (or Summer) and Winter. The originary literary text for the second of these, the allegorical conflict of seasons, is an early medieval Latin poem from the eighth to tenth centuries called Conflictus Veris et Hiemis (‘The battle of spring and winter’), attributed to Alcuin of York.Footnote ¹⁸ The originary text of the first, most immediately relevant trope here is the important Middle English poem ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’ (or ‘Hule and the Nightingale’), dating probably from the early to middle thirteenth century. While Wagner would have had no direct knowledge of either text, presumably, many aspects of both continue to be echoed in poetry, fables and folklore in various European traditions, including German, from the Middle Ages down through the nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the English poem, the nightingale addresses his opponent (or rather ‘her’, as both birds are feminine gendered) in terms immediately suggestive of Walther’s response to his antagonist, Beckmesser, in the trial song scene and after: ‘And truly, the sight of thine ugliness often brings my song to an untimely end. My heart doth sink, my tongue fails me, when thou dost thrust thyself upon me. I had rather spit than sing on hearing that gurgling noise of thine.’Footnote ¹⁹ Furthermore, the identification of the owl (here, Beckmesser) with winter and the nightingale (here, Walther, the ‘natural songbird’) with springtime is already an explicit component of the medieval poem. ‘Owl!’ cries the nightingale, ‘Why behavest thou so, ever chanting in winter thy song of woe? … In winter thou singest angrily and mournfully: whereas in summer thou remainest dumb.’ ‘It is all because of thy malicious spite that thou art unable to rejoice with us’, the nightingale continues, ‘for thou art almost consumed with envy, when happiness chances to come our way.’Footnote ²⁰ Here is an almost verbatim pre-echo of Walther’s reference to ‘Winter’ hiding in the thorn-bush ‘consumed by envy and hate’ (‘von Neid und Gram verzehrt’). The nightingale, like Walther in his trial song, of course identifies him-/herself with springtime, conversely: ‘But I all happiness with me bring: … Blossoms burst forth and unfold themselves on the trees and in the meadows.’Footnote ²¹

The poetic trope of the owl as antagonist to the melodious nightingale, and as a symbol of winter (maliciously hiding in a thorn-bush or brambles) thus has a distinguished pedigree going back to the early Middle Ages, while the folkloric origins go back much further. The general trope and its constituent metaphorical imagery maintain a relatively constant presence in German folklore and poetry from the time of Hans Sachs through the early Romantic era and beyond. Such a genealogy would naturally have recommended these motifs to Wagner’s purposes within the poetic framework of Die Meistersinger. The avian contest has roots ultimately in Aesopian or pseudo-Aesopian fable, despite the competing status of the owl as a classical symbol of wisdom and attribute of Athena. An ‘idyll’ by Titus Calpurnius Siculus (late third century or before), for instance, alludes to the opposition of the owl’s and nightingale’s voices in relation to a classical singing competition. In one passage, here from an 1804 German translation (as ‘Der Zank’ – ‘The Quarrel’), the pastoral figure Lycidas asks:

A short poetic ‘fable’ by Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim on the theme of the owl and the nightingale (Die Eule und die Nachtigall) echoes several elements traceable to the medieval poem and relevant to Walther’s trial song. The owl is resentful of the melodious voice of the nightingale and seeks to silence it, with a further suggestion that the owl’s predatory nature is being turned towards its vocal competitor (the threat of physical harm to the nightingale on the part of the owl is a recurring motif in the Middle English poem). As usual, the songbird is perched on a branch above the owl, who appears to be hidden in some enclosed space below. (Compare Walther’s position perched on the Singstuhl, itself placed on a raised dais, with Beckmesser concealed in the marker’s booth on the floor.) The nightingale asserts that he was ‘born to sing freely’, as well as to laugh at the pretensions of his foe and would-be rival (the text and translation are given as item 5 in the Appendix).

A poem from 1819 (signed ‘Friedehold’), ‘Die Vögel: Eine gefiederte Unterhaltung’ (‘The birds: A feathered conversation’), represents the debate between an owl and a nightingale, as adjudicated by the sovereign eagle.Footnote ²³ The conceited owl complains that the nightingale’s singing (or ‘screeching’, as he deems it) is preventing a proper appreciation of his own voice. The nightingale asks just to be heard, in turn. The eagle responds with a refrain with (for us) distinctly Sachs-like resonance: ‘Der Vogel singt zu jeder Frist, / wie ihm der Schnabel gewachsen ist’ (‘Each bird sings in his turn / just as his beak inclines him to’). Recall, of course, the contemplative cadence to Sachs’s ‘Elder’ monologue in Act II of Die Meistersinger: ‘Dem Vogel, der heut sang, / dem war der Schnabel hold gewachsen; / macht er den Meistern bang, gar wohl gefiel er doch Hans Sachsen!’ (‘The bird who sang today, his beak was nobly formed; / if he made the masters uneasy, he pleased Hans Sachs all the same!’) Like Wagner’s Sachs, the nightingale enjoins ‘the people’ to judge. A ploughman expresses indifference to the contest, but a ‘maiden’ makes her preference very clear. (Recall here Sachs’s claim that the ‘people’s choice’ will suitably conform to that of a simple, untutored maiden: the judgement of Eva and of the Volk are bound to harmonise.) The maiden naturally sides with the ‘beautiful and delicate’ song of the nightingale:

The thorn-bush or brambles of the Grimms’ tale of the hapless Jew offers no functional analogue to Beckmesser’s position during the trial song, as we have noted. Beckmesser is not lured into the marker’s box, as the Jew is into the thorn-bush by the shooting of his coveted songbird; Walther’s singing elicits only Beckmesser’s rude tally of ‘errors’ on the slate, no automatic movement on the part of his antagonist; and no immediate physical or symbolic punishment is meted out to this antagonist (Beckmesser). The role of the same thorn-bush or brambles, however, as the traditional habitat of the hoarse-voiced owl, symbol of night and winter, is well attested, and fits very clearly with the rhetoric of Walther’s interpolated counter-stanzas. Thorns, briars, or brambles as the owl’s hiding place also have a biblical provenance, a negative counterpart to the ‘wise’ Athenian owl of Classical Greece. Susan Youens traces this negative, anti-Classical image of the owl to several verses in Isaiah associating owls (along with ravens and other predatory or nocturnal birds) with desert wastelands:

(Youens also notes a twelfth-century bestiary that identifies owls as symbols of ‘the Jews who repulse our Saviour’.Footnote ²⁵)

The thorny, barren habitat of the owl remains a standard trope in European poetry from the Middle Ages onwards, contrasted with the flowery, airy, spring-like environment of its competitor, the nightingale, in the neo-Aesopian fabular tradition. A lengthy poem from the mid-eighteenth century by Johann Adolf Schlegel (father of August W. and Friedrich Schlegel) recounts the owl–nightingale conflict in the form of an Ovidian ‘metamorphosis’ myth, in which the nightingale is rescued by Apollo from the pursuit of the angry, spiteful owl and transformed into a human singer-poet, while the owl, in turn becomes a sterile, bookish pedant. (The poem thus explains the transformation of the ‘wise owl’ of Minerva into the emblem of pedantry and narrow-minded criticism.Footnote ²⁶) Following an explanatory prologue, the setting of Schlegel’s poem re-inscribes the emblematic contrast of habitats of the two birds (see item 1 in Appendix). As in the medieval poem, the owl poses a mortal threat to the songbird, and, as throughout the poetic tradition, its voice is described as anti-musical ‘screeching’ and ‘howling’. Moreover, this owl’s attitude towards its melodious competitor evoked in terms that resonate distinctly with Beckmesser’s envious spite towards Walther. Twice the term ‘ergrimmt’ – angered or enraged – is used in connection with the owl’s antagonism, suggesting a conventional etymology for Wagner’s possibly puzzling phrase ‘Der Winter Grimm-bewehrt’. The first of these, for instance, reads: ‘Ergrimmt straft oft die Eule/Die Kunst der Sängerinn mit kritischen Geheule’ (‘In anger, the owl would often/attack the singer’s [nightingale’s] art with howling criticism’).

Fig. 2

Illustration to ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’, from Robert Dodesly, Select Tales of Aesop and other Fabulists (London, 1809), 124.

The owl hiding within thorn-bushes or thickets easily suggests some evil agency waiting to ambush innocence and goodness. That suggestion can be heard in various proverbs current in the nineteenth century, for example: ‘Ist eine Eule aus dem Busche heraus, so sitzen wieder ein paar andere darin’ (‘If an owl flies from the bush, two more sit still waiting inside’).Footnote ²⁷ A popular Danish-German poet of the early nineteenth century, Adam Oehlenschläger, refers to the contest of owl and nightingale (and the related contest of Winter and Spring) in a Romantic poetic allegory entitled ‘Im Frühlinge’ (‘In Springtime’):

Here again the owl and his kin are hidden in a thicket (Hecken), though in his case a flowery one shared with the nightingale. The coarse, unmusical sounds of these other birds (owls, ravens, along with frogs and toads and, here, the elegant-looking but harsh-sounding peacock) threaten the song, and perhaps the very life, of the melodious nightingale. (An illustration to ‘The Owl’s Assembly of Birds’ from an 1828 collection of fables depicts a relevant congeries of birds, including the peacock, attending upon the central owl figure: see Figure 3).

Fig. 3

Illustration to ‘The Owl’s Assembly of Birds’, from James Northcote, One Hundred Fables Original and Selected (London, 1828), 144; engravings by William Harvey.

What then of the nightingale, the owl’s poetic-musical rival? In Walther’s counter-stanzas, the owl is cast as a conspiratorial opponent to the voices of Spring and Love – the voices Walther’s song is designed to celebrate. Walther is thus logically aligned with the nightingale, the owl’s rival in this folkloric tradition. As we have seen, the nightingale was routinely associated with ‘springtime poetry’ in the culture of the Minnesänger and, after them, the culture of Meistergesang into the era of Hans Sachs. Moreover, the structure of the poetic-allegorical debate was central to both of those literary cultures. If Walther explicitly identifies his opponent in the trial song scene as the envious, wintry owl, then his own role as the melodious emblem of ‘Spring’ and ‘Love’ (the nightingale) is the implicit consequence. The dramatic and aesthetic tension between Walther and Beckmesser during the trial song reflects the specific tradition of mastersinger debates, broadly defined as ‘contests between two poets, often for a prize’ consisting of ‘serious, though often abusive discussions of moral, religious, or political points’.Footnote ²⁹ These debates gradually evolved into more formal ‘presentations of competing songs to be judged for their success in meeting the requirements [of Meistergesang]’.Footnote ³⁰ This format is replicated at various discursive levels within the scene of the trial song in Act I. The conflict between Walther and Beckmesser reflected in these allusions to the contest of nightingale and owl is thereby associated, too, with the conflictus trope of a seasonal contest between spring and winter. All these tropes also foreshadow, of course, the culminating song competition for Eva’s hand in the Festwiese scene of Act III.

‘Der Raben heis’ren Chor’ (The owl as the voice of the ‘Jewish’ critic)

In German folkloric-poetic tradition, as we have seen, the aesthetic antagonism of the owl to the nightingale takes on a harshly personal, even physically aggressive, tone. The hoarse-voiced owl seeks not merely to silence the song of the nightingale, but even to destroy its mellifluous competitor. It is not difficult to map this aspect of the avian debate/competition fables onto the animosity between Wagner and his celebrated critic, Eduard Hanslick (from Wagner’s perspective, that is) as figured in the Walther–Beckmesser conflict in Die Meistersinger.

At the time he was completing the libretto of Die Meistersinger and preparing to compose it, Wagner was becoming convinced that he was the victim of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ in the press led by the influential Viennese critic Hanslick. While living in Vienna in 1862–3, Wagner had deliberately rebuffed the critic in social situations in retaliation (it seems) for his negative reviews of Lohengrin in Vienna some years before. (The affair is reminiscent of Wagner’s attitude towards Meyerbeer during and after the Paris stay of 1839–42, where the younger composer became convinced that the elder one had betrayed him and was secretly intent on impeding rather than fostering his career.) Later on, in the foreword to the 1869 republication of Jewishness in Music, Wagner explained that Hanslick and the whole ‘Jewish dominated’ musical press were out for revenge on the author of that essay, even though, as Hanslick himself pointed out, the piece seems to have attracted little attention at the time of its first publication in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1850, under the pseudonym ‘K. Freigedank’, and it is unlikely that anyone outside of Wagner’s own circle was aware of his authorship. It was also in the new 1869 afterword (reprinted as ‘Aufklärungen über Das Judentum in der Musik’ in the Gesammelte Schriften) that Wagner drew public attention to Hanslick’s part-Jewish parentage, a personal detail that Hanslick had apparently divulged to him in private conversation.Footnote ³¹

As is well known, it was only upon reconsideration that Wagner refrained from alluding openly to his caricature of the aesthetically incompetent critic in the figure of his ‘Marker’ through the invented name ‘Veit Hanslich’. No doubt he took a malicious pleasure – precisely in the spirit of Adorno’s reference to ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ – in executing the caricature all the same, even without the pointed pseudonym. If we recall the denunciation of Hanslick in the 1869 ‘Afterword’ (‘Aufklärungen’) as the ringleader of the alleged anti-Wagnerian cabal of Jewish critics, the parallel with Walther’s second improvised Gegenstollen within the trial song (performed while Beckmesser is gleefully showing around to the other masters his slate full of the singer’s alleged errors) is manifest. The text of that second counter-stanza reads, again:

Beckmesser has already finished vocalising his own cavils in Mime-like dissonant agitation following Walther’s second Stollen. Now, as described in Walther’s improvised lines, the loud and anti-musical ‘owl’ rouses a chorus of croaking disapproval from the rest of the masters (besides Sachs, of course), whom Walther figures as a mixed flock of similarly harsh-voiced, unmelodious birds.Footnote ³²

The 1869 afterword to Jewishness in Music suggested that all of Wagner’s critics were essentially Jewish ‘in spirit’ or by association, thanks to the malign influence of Eduard Hanslick. The graphic analogy to this perceived influence provided by Beckmesser’s hectoring of the other masters during the trial song also recalls the rhetorical invective of the original 1850 ‘Jewishness’ essay. There, in constructing his argument for the incapacity of modern European Jews to become composers with any claim to a genuine artistic voice, Wagner insisted on their essential incapacity to speak their ‘borrowed’ language (German) with proper native feeling, and, by extension, their incapacity to sing. If singing is a heightened form of emotional speech, he argues, the flaws of Jewish speech will only be magnified in Jewish song. The harsh, unmusical noises elicited by the ‘shrieking owl’ from the ‘hoarse chorus’ of critical ravens, crows, and magpies in Walther’s text suggests precisely the ‘Judaised’ voices of Wagner’s critics, as he imagined them. ‘Jewish speech’ (or ‘Semitic pronunciation’), he maintains, quite apart from matters of content, diction, or grammar, is inherently off-putting to the native speaker merely as acoustic phenomenon: ‘The shrill, sibilant buzzing of his voice falls strangely and unpleasantly on our ears.’Footnote ³³ (Recall, too, the nightingale’s revulsion towards the owl’s voice in the medieval Owl and the Nightingale poem: ‘I had rather spit than sing on hearing that gurgling noise of thine.’Footnote ³⁴)

The merely acoustic perversion of language is, indeed, characteristically joined to false, unidiomatic, or confused word choice or phrase construction: the Jew’s ‘misuse of words whose exact shade of meaning escapes him and his mistakenly placed phrases combine to turn his utterance into an unbearably muddled nonsense’.Footnote ³⁵ (This charge of ‘muddled’ diction is almost certainly parodied in Beckmesser’s perverted rendition of Walther’s prize song in Act III, discussed further below.) Additionally, a typically overexcited, passionate delivery is viewed as an attempt to compensate for the underlying failure of proper linguistic communication. Both the linguistic and the musical dimensions of Wagner’s critique are undoubtedly reflected in Beckmesser’s tirade against Hans Sachs’s interference in his Act II Serenade (to which Sachs responds with bemused irony: ‘War das Eur’ Lied?’ – ‘Was that your song?’).Footnote ³⁶ Beckmesser’s excitable lack of self-control recalls the owl’s responses to the nightingale’s taunts throughout the fabular tradition, going back, again, to the medieval English poem.Footnote ³⁷

Beckmesser’s performance (The ‘false nightingale’ and the purloined prize song)

When Beckmesser attempts to serenade Eva in Act II of Die Meistersinger, he attempts, in a sense, to disguise the naturally hoarse, raspy, ‘owlish’ voice of the ‘Jewish critic’ (figuratively modelled on Hanslick) with a feigned lyricism, the voice of the nightingale who is traditionally imagined to perform amorous serenades in the dark of night. Afterwards, when he tries to compete in the song competition the next day, his dissimulating ways, including the unscrupulous theft of the text of Walther’s prize song earlier that morning, are exposed to the light of day. The false nightingale is exposed for the unmusical owl he really is. The awkward coloratura of both the serenade and the ersatz prize song signifies at various levels. Millington suggested a parody of Jewish cantorial singing, as well as the melismatic excesses of Italian bel canto that other critics have pointed to in the past. The fourth-based intervallic style of the ornamentation derives from the tuning of Beckmesser’s lute, and, along with the sequential patterns used, suggests aspects of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century instrumental variation or ‘division’ technique. In the context of the poetic imagery of birdsong under discussion here, it would not be out of the question to equate Beckmesser’s ornamental effusions with this ‘owl’s’ attempt to appropriate the voice of his figurative opponent, the nightingale, whose true singing voice will only to be heard in Walther’s authentic performance of the prize song at the climax of the opera.

One might not at first be inclined to hear suggestions of birdsong in the punchy, chaotic tumult of notes unleashed among the chorus of masters and assorted neighbours by the serenade. The strokes (Schläge, singular Schlag) of Sachs’s hammer on his cobbler’s last, the catalyst for the entire brouhaha of the end of Act II, are, however, linguistically allied with the German term for birdcall figures: Wachtelschlag for instance, meaning the call of the quail, or Nachtigallenschlag that of the nightingale. The reiterated perfect fourths, with repetitions of the lower degree of the interval, constituting the fugato subject of the whole ensuing riot scene are a staple of German Romantic birdsong imitations, from the cuckoo and quail of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony through the forests of Mahler’s ‘Wunderhorn’ symphonies. When the masters are awoken from their early slumbers by the ruckus of Beckmesser’s competition with Sachs’s hammering, they complain of a ‘braying ass’ (emblem of the tone-deaf critic going back to the fable of the judgement of Midas). Then, as Beckmesser desperately approaches the final cadence of his song, they denounce his noise in terms that directly recall the pejorative acoustic vocabulary of the owl, in contrast to the melodious nightingale:

‘Herbei, herbei, ’s giebt Schlägerei’ (‘Come quick, come quick, there’s a brawl going on!’), the cry goes out, at first from concerned masters and then from rowdy apprentices, itching for a good fight. As a collective acoustic and dramatic gesture, this Schlägerei encompasses Sachs’s hammering, Beckmesser’s ‘hooting’ and the general melee of awoken burghers in the streets. Beckmesser’s attempt at nocturnal wooing in the voice of the nightingale goes predictably awry – thanks in part to Sachs’s malicious interventions – and he is exposed as an unmusical, screeching owl.

Sachs will ponder the causes and effects of this episode of public Wahn in a calmer mood in the following scene (Act III, scene 1): ‘God only knows how that all came to pass? A goblin played some trick, perhaps? A glow-worm sought his mate in vain?’ He concludes, on a poetic note, that it was the strange magic of midsummer’s eve and the intoxicating scent of the elder flowers; perhaps public brawling and ‘poetic frenzy’ have some common source, Sachs wonders. His own principal concern the previous evening had been to obstruct the elopement of Walther and Eva, and so to preserve the proper social order. But Beckmesser’s misguided courtship ritual also plays a role. Still not having learned his lesson, Beckmesser will try once again to perform in ‘borrowed plumes’ of the true nightingale, Walther von Stolzing, when he decides to purloin the draft of Walther’s prize song shortly after Sachs and Walther first rehearse it. The ‘false’ suitor with his stolen song is a provocation within the social order of comedy, an error demanding refutation and punishment.

As we know from Jewishness in Music, Wagner claimed that the deficiencies of Jews in the sphere of music, whether composition or performance, were rooted in fundamental linguistic and cultural deficiencies. The Jew has no ear for the ‘borrowed’ or assimilated languages of his host country; he inflects them with a shrill, ‘unmelodic’ dialect of his own (i.e., the central European Germanic dialect of Yiddish or Mauscheln, with its Hebraic inflections). His imitations of modern European musical idioms may be fastidious, bordering on pedantic (Mendelssohn), or coarse and garish (Meyerbeer), but any true ‘soul’ will be audibly missing. Beckmesser’s pedantic tin ear as critic in the Act I trial song scene, followed by his failed attempt at ‘original’ composition in the Act II serenade, and culminating in his ludicrously botched attempt to sing Walther’s prize song in Act III can each be read as manifestations of this allegedly Jewish incapacity for creative musical expression. In each case, too, they resonate clearly with aspects of the folk-tale tropes of the owl and the nightingale, or related avian fables of competitions between natural, beautiful voices and their negation.

The inherent artificiality of Jewish song according to Wagner’s view, as with most of the views expressed in the ‘Jewishness’ essay, was a piece of received anti-Jewish bias in the time of Wagner’s youth, as demonstrated by a short curiosity notice published by Karl Müller in a Bavarian journal in 1828, headed ‘Jewish Nightingales’ (‘Jüdische Nachtigallen’):

In this anecdote, the skilful Jew’s performance is a sort of sideshow act; his gleeful imitation of the nightingale, hidden within the artificial grotto, recalls the kind of mechanised birdsong associated with exotic, ‘eastern’ emperors, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1843 fairy tale ‘The Nightingale’ or its poetic echo in Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.Footnote ⁴¹ A Jewish voice (also in the figurative sense of a creative persona) could amount to no more than mechanical ‘imitation’ of some authentic artistic voice, in Wagner’s view. The imitation may prove at best pretty, but soulless (the case of Mendelssohn); or it might be merely tasteless, awkward and grotesque (the case of Meyerbeer and Beckmesser).

Wagner’s initial ideas for Die Meistersinger go back to the mid-1840s, at the time he was composing his Romantic opera merging the story of the song contest of the Minnesänger at the Wartburg with the Tannhäuser legend. For a while he imagined the two operas as a potential pair, the tragic-Romantic drama of Tannhäuser with its dignified medieval courtly milieu would be followed by the bourgeois comedy of the Nuremberg ‘mastersingers’ as a kind of ‘satyr-play’ in the ancient Greek tradition, a light parody of the foregoing tragedy.Footnote ⁴² The comparison applies not only to the contrast of plot and genre, but also to the sense that the art of the Renaissance mastersinger guild was itself a sort of unwitting parody, a late and somewhat cumbersome debasement of the medieval poetic traditions. The comic version of the song-contest motif, additionally, echoes the long tradition of conflictus fables and poems, described above, about song contests among birds, nearly all of which thematise the contrast of beautiful and ugly or grotesque singing (thus unlike the non-comic song contest of the Wartburg Minnesänger). This version of the song contest motif goes back to the Greek myths of Apollo and Marsyas or Apollo and Pan (and the judgement of Midas).Footnote ⁴³ In these originary aesthetic myths, the representatives of ‘bad’ art are humiliated and punished: Midas is given ass’s ears for his preference of Pan’s vulgar piping over the exalted lyre of Apollo; the satyr Marsyas is flayed alive for merely presuming to challenge the god of music himself. Beckmesser, of course, is punished in the brawl precipitated by his inept serenading of Eva in Act II (‘My, hear that donkey braying!’ as several of the masters cry out from their windows) and publically humiliated throughout his attempt at performing Walther’s prize song.

It is the serenade in which Beckmesser’s owl-like hooting or screeching is highlighted, whereas his attempted performance of Walther’s (purloined) prize song is halting and restrained (except for a brief, desperate accelerando to reach the cadence of the Abgesang). If Beckmesser is the owl to Walther’s nightingale, he performs in his natural night-time environment during the serenade. By contrast, his hesitant, blinking, slightly dazed demeanour in the song contest suggests something of the owl surprised by the bright light of daytime. Exposed to the bright light of day and to the sound judgement of the Volk, the owlish pedantry of Beckmesser is revealed for what it is: a mask of learning and arbitrary rules hiding creative sterility, incompetence and a tin ear. The entirely unaccompanied vocal line of his first Stollen underlines this effect of awkward exposure essential to the process of public humiliation. All these effects of vocal discomfiture are ancillary to the effect of the garbled lyrics of the song, which primarily elicit the crowd’s mocking response. The gibberish that results from Beckmesser’s faulty rendition of Walther’s poetry, as has been suggested in recent scholarship, is easily correlated with Wagner’s view of Jewish-German Jargon (Yiddish, or Mauscheln) as a verbal and acoustic distortion of the German language.Footnote ⁴⁴ Modern Jewish aspirations to culture and learning, in Wagner’s view, lacked the ethnic or racial rootedness in genuine völkisch German culture necessary to any truly creative enterprise. The result could only be a garbled, offensive simulacrum of true poetry, music, or art.

The Nuremberg Nightingale

How, then, might we hear Walther’s authentic performance of the prize song as the voice of the nightingale, in contrast to the flawed, offensive voice of the owl? Wagner avoids directly identifying Walther’s lyrical art with the song of the nightingale, for several possible reasons. First, while the relevance of the poetic-fabular tropes of owl and nightingale (and related themes of birdsong competition) to the imagery of medieval Minnesang is clear enough, it is perfectly possible (in fact, probable) that Wagner’s echoes of it in the Meistersinger libretto are more casual than systematic. Second, the florid, treble-voiced song of the nightingale is most often gendered female in traditional poetic and metaphorical applications. Third, and by extension, the nightingale as vocal figure had, by Wagner’s time, been largely co-opted by associations with modern Italian bel canto (most famously, in Jenny Lind’s moniker as the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ dating from the 1840s and 1850s). While the mellifluous diatonicism and largely periodic phrasing of Walther’s song represent part of the deliberate compromise between convention and innovation in his performance, the style avoids any association with operatic coloratura of the sort suggested by Beckmesser’s serenade (filtered through its mock-altdeutsch ornamental idiom). Along with a coherent poetic rhetoric synthesising ‘night’ and ‘day’, classical and biblical themes, the musical idiom of the prize song is to be heard as a corrective to the misconceived ornamental style of Beckmesser.

Wagner does, however, offer a means of reading Walther’s prize-winning performance in terms of the nightingale of poetic tradition. When Hans Sachs steps forward to officiate in the song contest in the final scene of the opera, the people greet him with a chorale setting of the real (historical) Sachs’s poem in praise of the ‘Wittenberg Nightingale’, the Reformation leader Martin Luther:

In this text the historical Sachs had addressed himself to the new dawn of Luther’s Protestant Reformation, as heralded by the voice of Luther in song (his Protestant hymns) and in theological pronouncements. Here, however, the hymn is addressed not to Luther, but to Sachs himself: ‘Heil, Nürnbergs theurem Sachs!’ it concludes, to the sequenced strains of the mastersingers’ processional march. In the absence of Luther or any direct reference to Reformation theology in the opera, the hymn initially celebrates Sachs’s own poetic-creative voice. Yet that voice is about to be supplanted by the new voice of Walther von Stolzing, upon receiving the benediction of Sachs, the people and eventually the rest of the mastersingers. Soon it will be Walther’s voice, returned to his natural outdoor habitat (‘im grünen Hag’), that suffuses ‘hill and dale’ with his visionary new art as night recedes and the new day dawns. In the poem of the historical Sachs the ‘new voice’ of the Reformation is figured as a nightingale’s song that bridges the close of night with the dawn of a new day. In Wagner’s opera, the prize song of Walther is born from the singer’s dreams the night before (and of the nocturnal episode of Wahn preceding and figuring those dreams), coming to full fruition the next morning on the Festwiese or Festival Meadow outside Nuremberg. With the exclusion of Reformation religious politics from the opera, the ‘Wittenberg Nightingale’ of Sachs’s hymn is replaced, we could say, by the ‘Nuremberg Nightingale’ in the person of Walther von Stolzing, greeted by Wagner’s Sachs as the embodiment of a newly ‘reformed’ age of mastersong (Meistergesang): the poetic-musical ‘Artwork of the Future’ born from an inspired revival of the art of the medieval Minnesänger.

‘The Law of the Owl’ and the question of reconciliation

In the fabular tradition of Vogelstreiten poems and tales there is no surprise about who wins the singing contest. The melodious, virtuosic and ‘musically’ modulated song of the nightingale will naturally prevail over the hoarse, raucous, awkward, ‘unmusical’ sounds of the owl or his kin (the crows, magpies, or jackdaws to whom Walther likens the chorus of clucking masters in Act I). Thus in Die Meistersinger, despite the merely administrative challenges he faces in not yet having been promoted to the rank of ‘Mastersinger’, Walther is obviously marked for the audience as the aesthetic victor from the moment he appears on the scene. The conceited, self-deluding, aesthetically deficient opponent of the ‘nightingale’ is not only destined to lose the contest, but will also most likely be subjected to public humiliation or other punishment, in accordance with the didactic rules of comedy and underlining the aesthetic moral of the fable. When Beckmesser is exposed in the final scene as a presumptuous, scheming fraud, this is fully in keeping with the punishments typically meted out to the inappropriate suitor within the traditions of comic courtship plots. We might ask, nonetheless, whether his treatment in the final scene exceeds generic conventions in a way that would bring us back to Theodor Adorno’s contention that Wagner treats the ‘rejects’ of his operas like the young lad treats the ‘Jew in the Thorn-bush’ in the Grimms’ tale. And further: does that treatment highlight an attitude that exceeds the mere debunking of pedantry and self-importance, in a way that might suggest a social predisposition on the part of Wagner and his German audiences for an eliminative (ultimately genocidal) anti-Semitism, if we do choose to read Beckmesser as emblematic of German Jewry from Wagner’s point of view, or of what he denounced as ‘Jewishness in Music’?

Beckmesser, the owlish pedant and ill-matched suitor of Eva Pogner, is set up to fail, just as Walther, implicitly anointed as the ‘Nuremberg Nightingale’ by the Volk’s rendition of Sachs’s hymn, is set up to win. As is often noted, Wagner’s scenario pointedly excludes Beckmesser from the key moment of nationalist spiritual solidarity, the singing of the ‘Wach auf!’ hymn in honour of Sachs, the people’s hero. Or rather, Beckmesser excludes himself, by turning aside in a last-ditch effort to memorise Walther’s prize song (which he still believes to be by Sachs). After his spectacularly failed attempt to perform the stolen song, and then charging Sachs with malicious intent to deceive him, Beckmesser voluntarily quits the scene (‘he rushes off in a rage and loses himself among the people’, the stage directions read)Footnote ⁴⁶ before Sachs has a chance to elucidate the true circumstances.

For some time now, stage directors uncomfortable with Wagner’s curt, even somewhat brutal, dismissal of Beckmesser after his failed performance contrive to return him to the stage for a final (if somewhat forced) reconciliation with his imagined adversary, Hans Sachs. The gesture is perfectly congruent with a standard gambit of comedies, old and new, that engineer such a last-minute redemption of the antagonist, usually smiling wryly and modestly penitent, as Beckmesser would need to be in this scenario.

The idea of reconciling these clearly delineated aesthetic opponents is suggestively anticipated, in terms relevant to our reading of them here against the tradition of birdsong competition fables, in a key passage from F. G. Klopstock’s Enlightenment fantasy text, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774). Klopstock’s text pretends to represent the by-laws and minutes of the parliamentary sessions of a fictive ‘German Republic of Letters’ ranging back to the era of Hans Sachs and forward into the (Romantic–nationalist) nineteenth-century future. The faux-archaic diction of the various rules and regulations of Klopstock’s institution notably resembles aspects of Wagner’s Nuremberg masters, as well as details of the early imperial legalese of Lohengrin. Klopstock’s Republic includes a hierarchy of ‘guilds’ and rules about how candidates may attain various levels of distinction, and also the punishments meted out for infractions against purity of language (overuse of foreign words or neologisms, for instance), according to social rank.Footnote ⁴⁷ (As in Lohengrin, knaves or serfs are to be punished more stringently than freemen or nobles.)

Following an elaborate exposition of the diverse ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ guilds, the constitution of their memberships, their insignia of merit, and so forth, the centre of Klopstock’s text presents a series of ‘laws’ governing the administration of this imaginary Germanic academy. A strange simulated ‘fragment’ is appended at the end of these: ‘Fragment eines Gesetzes, oder das Gesetz von der Eule, wie es gewönlich genent [sic] wird’ (‘Fragment of a Law, or the Law of the Owl, as it is commonly known’).Footnote ⁴⁸ The text of this appended fragment is so riddled with ellipses as to make virtually no declarative sense beyond the initial dual subject, ‘The Owl, bird of Minerva, and the Nightingale, that of Apollo’, followed by a seeming reference to the keen night-vision of the owl and to the vocal apparatus of the nightingale. The fictional editor and commentator remarks on the presumed intention of the law to ‘put an end to the continual, often unequal contest between two broad parties among the sciences, the darstellenden Wissenschaften and the abhandelnden Wissenschaften’, that is, the ‘representational’ vs the ‘reflective’ sciences, or something like the creative vs the theoretical branches of human learning. (Earlier in the text, the darstellenden Wissenschaften are elucidated as including the guilds of historians, orators and poets; the abhandelnden Wissenschaften include theologians, natural scientists, legal scholars, astronomers and mathematicians.)

The ‘owlish’ Beckmesser represents, of course, theoretical knowledge, at best, lacking the creative instincts to put this to viable artistic use. Walter, as nightingale, belongs among the orators and poets, with his natural instinct for artistic self-expression. Klopstock’s ‘Romantic’ fragment of an imaginary Classical–Enlightenment codex suggests the ancient hope of bridging this cultural divide, as well as (through its fragmentary construction) the perpetual difficulty of realising that hope. Even as a fragment, this offers a more optimistic view of cultural harmony than that suggested by the conflict between Wagner’s comic pedant-villain and his poet-hero. Yet Hans Sachs’s admonition to Walther to ‘honour his German Masters’ relays a bit of that same hope. After all, Sachs and Beckmesser have sat peaceably side by side during many previous gatherings of the Nuremberg singers’ guild, as we can infer from the meeting that issues in Walther’s trial song in Act I. Whatever the potentially ‘Jewish’ valences of Beckmesser’s character when read against the folkloric discourse of the owl and the nightingale, this reading also mitigates some elements of violence and sadistic Schadenfreude attaching to the Grimms’ ‘Jew in the Thorn-bush’. The violence of the Act II night-time brawl and the Schadenfreude surrounding Beckmesser’s public humiliation in the unsparing light of the following day are not to be denied. Overall, though, the verbal and even musical construction of Beckmesser’s conflict with the victorious protagonist, Walther, is demonstrably closer to the tradition of the avian contest of owl and nightingale than to the narrative details of ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’. Our reading, while still congruent with the potential agency of Wagner’s ‘anti-Semitic imagination’ (as suggested in the title of Marc Weiner’s influential study)Footnote ⁴⁹ in the ultimate conception of Die Meistersinger, is also more in keeping with the ways in which this imagination is most likely manifested in any of the music dramas: not in the form of concrete, esoterically coded allusions, but in a more pervasive fabric of mythic or folkloric cultural resonance. The version suggested here of how Wagner’s anti-Semitism might inform his operas is not necessarily a ‘better’ one than others that have been proposed, in the sense of being morally more acceptable. But it is, perhaps, a more plausible one.