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As far as we know, Wagner paid eight visits to Nuremberg, although I shall be concerned here only with the first four of them. The first was the longest – a week-long stay with his sister Clara and her husband Heinrich Wolfram in January 1834, when he was twenty. According to the much later account in Mein Leben, Wagner's only memory of this visit was ‘the sociable house’ of his brother-in-law and the gemütlich goings-on in Nuremberg's taverns. In July 1835, when talent-spotting for Heinrich Bethmann's near-insolvent opera company, he passed through Nuremberg towards the end of the month. It was on this occasion that he witnessed that ‘extraordinary nocturnal adventure’ which, according to Mein Leben, was to leave its mark on the final scene of Act II of Die Meistersinger. (What, to my own mind, is even more ‘extraordinary’ about this account is that it is confirmed neither by Die rothe Brieftasche – the aide-mémoire that Wagner began in August 1835 – nor by any of Wagner's letters of the time. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this is a case of life imitating art, a suspicion increased when we recall that the passage in Mein Leben was dictated between March and May 1866, just before Wagner embarked on the first complete draft of Act II of Die Meistersinger.)
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References
1 Wagner's, other visits took place on 13 11 1862Google Scholar, 16/17 April 1871, 22/3 July 1877 and 1 May 1882.
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