WAGNER WANTED HIS OPERAS TO BE the nineteenth-century equivalent of what he imagined the great Athenian dramatic festivals to have been in the fifth century B.C.: a celebration and reaffirmation of collective cultural identity. In our own time the only comparable experiences are the great rock festivals of the 1960s and 1970s, which gave hundreds of thousands of young people a sense of their generational identity: festivals like Woodstock, where thousands of people came to sit around for days and listen to music, creating at the same time a kind of separate society. Wagner hoped that his operas would awaken an entire nation to an understanding of its own essence.

What Wagner wanted, however, was decidedly not what he got. While the composer envisioned his operas as mass events enjoyed by vast numbers of German citizens, they were and have remained restricted to a privileged elite. Events like the singers’ festival in Nuremberg in 1861, which drew thousands of singers and an even larger audience, attracted far larger crowds than Wagner's operas ever have. The Bavarian “national festivals” celebrated at Munich's Oktoberfest and during royal visits to Nuremberg and other cities were always, and have continued to be, more popular than Wagner's operas. It is they that have attracted truly large numbers of people, and that continue to attract ordinary Germans and tourists to this day. By the end of the nineteenth century Nuremberg was celebrated in postcards, calendars, paintings, panoramas, monuments, street parades, festivals, travel guides, school books, novels, stories, plays, poems, and songs. Most of these media had a greater direct impact on individual Germans than Wagner's demanding Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg — or any of the master's other operas, for that matter. While Wagner celebrates the mass impact of Nuremberg festival culture in the final scene of his opera, in which the citizens of Nuremberg gather for a celebration outside the walls of the city, and while this scene embodied the composer's own hopes for the reception of his musical dramas, his own opera has never enjoyed that kind of popularity.