RICHARD WAGNER’S 
“DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG” 
AND ITS LITERARY PRECURSORS 
EDWIN C. ROEDDER. 
The first performance of Richard Wagner’s musical comedy- 
drama Die Meistersinger von Numb erg took place in the Royal 
Opera House in Munich, June 21, 1868. As to its genesis we are 
accurately and fully informed by the author himself, in passages 
of his autobiographical writings as well as in his letters. Over a 
score of years had elapsed between the first performance—the 
most memorable one that any opera had ever had up to that 
time, as an artistic achievement equalled only by the presentation, 
in 1876, of T)er Ring des Nibelungen, and surpassed only by Par¬ 
sifal, in 1882—and the first conception of the play which Wagner, 
then musical director of the Royal Opera at Dresden, jotted down, 
in 1845, during a stay at Marienbad in Bohemia, where he had 
gone for the recuperation of his health. In his posthumous auto¬ 
biography My Life 1 he says: 
“Owing to some comments I had read in Gervinus’s History of 
German Literature * 2 , both the Mastersingers of Nuremberg and 
Hans Sachs had acquired quite a vital charm for me. The very 
name of the Marker, and the part he takes in the Mastersinging, 
were particularly pleasing to me, and on one of my lonely walks, 
without knowing anything particular about Hans Sachs and his 
poetic contemporaries, I thought out a humorous scene in which 
the cobbler—as a popular artisan-poet—with the hammer on his 
last, gives the marker, who is forced to sing, a practical lesson, 
thereby taking revenge on him for his pedantic misdeeds. To me 
the force of the whole scene was concentrated in the two follow¬ 
ing points: on the one hand the marker, with his slate covered 
*1 quote from the anonymous English translation, New York, 1911, vol. I, 
page 366, taking the liberty of correcting some curious mistakes of the trans¬ 
lator. 
2 The passages in question are collected in the appendix to this paper. 
