Overture: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg

When Wagner was working on his music drama Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg he studied not only the social history of Nuremberg in the sixteenth century but also its music. He learned the elaborate rules of the master song, which a musician had to observe if he was to be admitted to the Guild of Mastersingers, and he discovered a couple of Mastersinger tunes of the period. He did not, however, attempt any kind of sixteenth-century pastiche. Although the prize song with which his noble hero Walther von Stolzing wins the hand of his beloved Eva does actually conform with the ancient structural rules, its harmonies are distinctly modern. Walther is, after all, an example of the liberated artist, like Wagner himself. The Mastersingers, whose themes are presented in plain C major, stand for tradition - as represented, at best, by the liberal Hans Sachs and, at worst, by the reactionary Beckmesser.

The distinctive sound of the Mastersingers Overture derives partly from the solid C major material associated with the Mastersingers and partly from the extensive use of counterpoint which, though it has little actual relevance to sixteenth-century Nuremberg, is a technique venerable enough to seem appropriate to the historic setting of the opera. The Mastersingers are represented here by the proud march tune introduced by the whole orchestra in the opening bars and, after a contrastingly lyrical intervention on woodwind, the pompous fanfare theme first heard on trumpets and trombones. Walther, whose presence has already been signalled by the woodwind episode, is represented above all by his Prize Song, the expressive melody that enters on first violins with a refreshing change of key to E major. Directly contrasted with that romantic episode is a kind of scherzo devoted to the apprentices, who apply their contrapuntal ambitions to a miniature version of the first Mastersingers theme on woodwind before, at the climax of the piece, Wagner displays his mastery of the same art by combining full-scale versions of the two Mastersingers themes with Walther’s Prize Song.

First sketched on a long train journey, the Overture to The Mastersingers was written before the opera itself, which was first performed after twenty-three years of preparation in Munich in 1868.