Richard Wagner’s 1868 opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Mastersingers of Nuremberg”), is a comic book love story, set within the sixteenth century. Its plot facilities across the historic Grasp Singers, an historic guild of newbie poets and musicians who have been primarily center class grasp craftsmen of varied trades. The guild’s Tabulatur, or regulation ebook, established an intricate system of guidelines which dictated the construction and efficiency of songs.
The opera’s precept theme entails the battle between custom and innovation. The younger hero, Walther, is a brazen outsider who enters the singing contest with a radical music which breaks all the guidelines. In distinction with the guild’s conservatism, he states that he “discovered to sing from nature and birds.” Finally, Walther triumphs, profitable the competitors, in addition to the hand of Eva in marriage. A steadiness is discovered between custom and new concepts.
Wagner, himself a musical radical crammed with new concepts, composed the Prelude to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger in 1861 earlier than starting work on the opera itself. Throughout a practice journey from Venice to Vienna, he “instantly and with the best readability conceived the principle part of the overture in C main.”
A drama of instrumental voices, the Prelude reveals all the opera’s precept leitmotifs (recurring motifs related to folks, conditions, or concepts). It begins with an impressive theme evocative of the guild’s custom. A longing, sighing motif accompanies the love-at-first-sight assembly of Walther and Eva in a church quickly after the curtain rises. There’s additionally the bustling, energetic music of the mastersingers’ apprentices. With a nod to musical custom, Wagner weaves these themes right into a double fugue. The Prelude’s spectacular last moments carry a blazing show of counterpoint wherein three impartial themes weave collectively. It’s a feat which has been in contrast with the finale of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. Commentator Richard Atkinson offers a fascinating analysis of this good contrapuntal show.
This efficiency, that includes Giuseppe Sinopoli and the Staatskapelle Dresden, was recorded in Tokyo’s Suntory Corridor on January 24, 1998. Wagner served as Hofkapellmeister of the Staatskapelle Dresden for 5 years within the mid 1840s.
Featured Picture: {photograph} by Tanja Niemann
