¹ I thank David Rosen, Steven Stucky and especially Patrick McCreless for helpful comments on various drafts of this article. Much of the older literature on Die Meistersinger is sifted by Warrack, John, Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. The literature on Meistersinger saw a rapid explosion at the beginning of the last decade, with a decided focus on the political. It includes Bermbach, Udo, ‘Die Utopie der Selbstregierung’, in Wo Macht ganz auf Verbrechen ruht: Politik und Gesellschaft in der Oper (Hamburg, 1997), 238–70Google Scholar; Vaget, Hans R., ‘The “Metapolitics” of Die Meistersinger: Wagner's Nuremberg as Imagined Community’, in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität 1750–1871, ed. Vazsonyi, Nicholas (Vienna, 2000), 269–82Google Scholar; Bermbach, Udo, ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Politische Gehalte einer Künstleroper’, in Deutsche Meister – böse Geister? Nationale Selbstfindung in der Musik, ed. Danuser, Hermann and Münkler, Herfried (Schliengen, 2001), 274–85Google Scholar and Dieter Borchmeyer, ‘Nürnberg als Reich des schönen Scheins: Metamorphosen eines Künstlerdramas’, 286–301; Wagner's Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Vazsonyi, Nicholas (Rochester, NY, 2003)Google Scholar; Bermbach, Udo, ‘Blühendes Leid’: Politik und Gesellschaft in Richard Wagners Musikdramen (Stuttgart, 2003), 247–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² The chorale's opening lines (‘Da zu dir der Heiland kam, / willig deine Taufe nahm’) echoes the hymn's initial rhyme, ‘Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam, / … / Von S. Johans die Tauffe nahm’.

³ ‘Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger’, 19th-century Music, 16 (1992), 18–34.

⁴ Indeed, Die Meistersinger soon became enshrined in guides as the German ‘national opera’: Ferdinand Pfohl, Richard Wagner's deutsche National-Oper ‘Die Meistersinger’ (Leipzig, 1892).

⁵ On composers in opera, see Betzwieser, Thomas, ‘Komponisten als Opernfiguren’, in Studien zur Musikgeschichte: Eine Festschrift für Ludwig Finscher, ed. Laubenthal, Annegrit (Kassel, 1995), 510–22Google Scholar.

⁶ For a demonstration of just how complex such ‘diegetic’ numbers can be, see David Levin's analysis of the Prize Song, ‘Reading and Staging/Staging a Reading’, COJ, 9 (1997), 47–71.

⁷ Marvin, William M., ‘The Function of Rules in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, The Journal of Musicology, 20 (2003), 414–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ For a survey of the extent to which songs by various characters approximate historical Meistergesang, see Smith, Annalise, ‘Honour Thy German Masters: Wagner's Depiction of Meistergesang in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, Musicological Explorations, 11 (2010), 92–131Google Scholar.

⁹ The text will be cited according to the edition of Kaiser, Joachim, Richard Wagner: Die Musikdramen (Hamburg, 1971)Google Scholar. On the ‘love motif[s]’, see, for example, Buck, Paul, Richard Wagners Meistersinger: Eine Führung durch das Werk, Quellen und Studien zur Musikgeschichte von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, 22 (Frankfurt/Main, 1990), 20–5Google Scholar.

¹⁰ This desire is no less problematic than the misalliance between an old man and young woman, which Sachs uses to rebuff Eva's advances in Act III by alluding to King Marke's fate with a more pointed reference to the music of Tristan. On Tristan reminiscences in Die Meistersinger generally, see Huebner, Steven, ‘Tristan's Traces’, in Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, ed. Groos, Arthur (Cambridge, 2011), 142–4Google Scholar.

¹¹ Cf. Wagenseil's treatise (n. 16 below), 522f.

¹² Thanks to the fundamental study by Jacob Grimm, Über den altdeutschen Meistersang (1811).

¹³ In the preliminary prose drafts of the libretto, he is first nameless, then called Konrad. We even learn that he has written poetry in imitation of his master. Not for nothing does Pogner think that Walther's selling his ancestral lands and coming to the city represent a renovation of the ‘old days’: ‘die alte Zeit dünkt mich erneut’.

¹⁴ Indeed, the responses by two experienced Meistersinger suggest that his answer is barely intelligible. Vogelgesang infers, ‘Ei, nun, er wagt es’ (Well, then, he's going to risk it), while Beckmesser hears only logorrhoea: ‘Entnahmt Ihr was der Worte Schwall?’ (Did you understand anything of that flood of words?).

¹⁵ As is the case with the Trial Song, Beckmesser's serenade and attempted Prize Song; cf. in Tannhäuser the hero's request to Venus for a leave of absence in Act I, the formal song contest in Act II, and Wolfram's aria in Act III.

¹⁶ An appendix from his De civitate Noribergensi commentatio (Altdorf, 1697), 435–576, ed. Horst Brunner (Göppingen, 1975).

¹⁷ Wagenseil, 548–54.

¹⁸ Wagenseil's introduction calls the Tabulatur ‘eine ordentliche Anleitung’ (p. 521).

¹⁹ The three prose drafts are printed in Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 6th edn (Leipzig, n.d.), vol. 11, 344–94, esp. 359f. and 382f. In the first version, Walther thinks he is in a gathering of Minnesänger, and when asked to perform as is appropriate to the rules, sings a song in praise of poetry (346f.).

²⁰ The 1862 version of the libretto is available in facsimile (Frankfurt/Main, 1893).

²¹ Taylor, Archer, The Literary History of Meistergesang (New York, 1937), 115Google Scholar.

²² A size still within the parameters listed by Wagenseil, 540, who has no objection to 100 lines.

²³ This may reflect the original plan to have Walther initially seem confused.

²⁴ Walther even manages to suggest the resonance between the world of the forest and the world of the heart in the last lines of the second Stollen, which become a refrain echoing those of the first: ‘Die Brust, / wie bald / antwortet sie dem Ruf / der neu ihr Leben schuf; / stimmt nun an / das hehre Liebeslied!’ (The breast, how quickly it answers the call that brought it new life, and begins singing the splendid song of love!)

²⁵ Marvin, ‘The Function of Rules in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, 435.

²⁶ Grey, ‘Masters and their Critics: Wagner, Hanslick, Beckmesser, and Die Meistersinger’, in Wagner's Meistersinger, ed. Vazsonyi (see n. 1 above), 165–89, at 176f.

²⁷ Too short/long comes from Wagenseil's list of mistakes, from which Wagner also derived most of the other criticisms of Walther's performance, pp. 521–32, at 530.

²⁸ Lydia Goehr, ‘The Dangers of Satisfaction: On Songs, Rehearsals, and Repetition in Die Meistersinger’, in Wagner's Meistersinger, ed. Vazsonyi (see n. 1 above), 56–70.

²⁹ Cf. the connections to originary music at the beginning of Rheingold or in Act II of Siegfried.

³⁰ See Wapnewski, Peter, ‘Wagners Sachs in Goethes Werkstatt’, in Richard Wagner: Die Szene und ihr Meister, 2nd edn (Munich, 1983), 67–74Google Scholar.

³¹ Hans Sachs: Dramatisches Gedicht in vier Acten (Vienna, 1829).

³² (Nuremberg, 1492), fol. 100. The second and third prose drafts call the folio volume that Sachs peruses the ‘Chronik der Welt’, 366 and 389.

³³ In the first prose draft of 1848, Sachs engages the hero – called simply ‘the young man’ or ‘the lover’ – in a discussion about the decline of German poetry. The anonymous hero has written neo-Minnesang texts, and he shows the most recent one to Sachs, who recognises his talent but advises him to return to his castle, read the writings of Hutten and Luther, and defend them with the sword. In the second and third prose drafts of 1861–2 the hero, now called Konrad, writes a poem for his beloved after the Midsummer night's riot, but does not perform it until the song contest in the final scene, where he sings it to the accompaniment of a lute.

³⁴ Facsimile reprint of the manuscript that furnished the first printing of the libretto (Mainz, 1862), printed in Frankfurt by C.F. Fay (1893), 59–61, 67f., 78–80. The text originally narrated the hero's imagined wandering out of his parental house into a foreign city, strange and familiar at the same time, where he has a dream of a white dove that plucks a branch and leads him home, where he awakes and finds the white dove transformed into his beloved and the branch into a victor's wreath. The white dove makes little sense as a dream image unless we realise that this reveals, perhaps too obviously, an intertextual appropriation from the German Romantic opera, Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz, at the end of which the hero's beloved suddenly appears as a white dove in the climactic shooting contest, shouting, ‘Schieß nicht, Max, ich bin die weiße Taube!’ (Don't shoot, Max, I am the white dove!) The intertextual connection pointedly appropriates Weber's opera, and at the same time supersedes it. Who, after all, would prefer a hunter to a composer? Nonetheless, the Weber connection was deleted in the final version. As always with Wagner, though, the apparent disappearance of a self-legitimising gesture only means that the composer has taken deviousness to the next level. And sure enough: the dream that Walther narrates to Hans Sachs in the final version is also familiar, an expansion of the dream in Goethe's 1776 poem about Hans Sachs that the Muse bestows on the cobbler-poet as a promise of future happiness:

See my ‘Appropriazione e plurilinguismo: I “Preislieder” nei Meistersinger von Nürnberg e Ariadne auf Naxos’, Opera e libretto, 2 (1993), 225–35.

³⁵ The bride's favour and the achievement of fame, paradisiacal pleasure and the poet's delight: ‘dort Huld-geboren, / nun Ruhm-erkoren, / gießt paradiesische Lust / sie in des Dichters Brust’.

³⁶ See Pfohl (n. 4 above).

³⁷ On the importance of C major in Act III, see Darcy, Warren, ‘In Search of C major: Tonal Structure and Formal Design in Act III of Die Meistersinger’, in Richard Wagner for the New Millennium, ed. Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew, Lubet, Alex, Wagner, Gottfried (New York and Basingstoke, 2007), 111–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Levin, ‘Reading and Staging/Staging a Reading’ (see n. 6 above).