Boedder—“Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg.” 
91 
of the sixteenth century, especially from Wagcnseil’s well-known 
mastersinger book. 1 no 
In the Introduction to his edition of Wagner’s works, p. 286, 
Golther says, 
“The original plan appears as a comic opera, which for the out¬ 
ward course of the action took a few things from Deinhardstein’s 
drama Hans Sachs (1827) and from Lortzing-Reger’s opera, but 
in the main was freely invented. ” * - . . ■., 
r 
Over against this minimizing of foreign influences, we "have in 
Miss Anna Maude Bowen’s Cornell dissertation (published at 
Munich in 1897) a scrupulous, almost meticulous attempt to gather 
every detail that Wagner might possibly have taken from others. * 11 
Miss Bowen even deems it necessary to defend Wagner against a 
possible charge of plagiarism for his adoption of motives. Wag¬ 
ner himself tells us in his autobiographical writings as a rule 
quite freely and fully about the genesis of his poetic works—we 
learn from his pages, e.g., that Das Liebesverbot was based on 
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and Die Feen on Gozzi’s La 
Donna Serpente —and informs us concerning the poetic process 
of transforming the subject matter thus provided until it suits 
his purposes. As he does not mention the plays named above, 
and as he refers to his mastersinger comedy distinctly as an in¬ 
vention of his own, it is obvious that Golther and Miss Bowen con¬ 
nect very different ideas with the term sources. Curiously enough, 
Miss Bowen overlooked Goethe’s Poem Hans Sachsens poetische 
Sendung (1776), which, if anything, must be termed a source of 
Wagner’s work if we turn our attention to the characterization 
of Hans Sachs. That she should not have mentioned Gervinus’s 
Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung is not to be wondered at, since 
at the time when the monograph was written Wagner’s autobiog¬ 
raphy Mein Leben had not yet appeared. Looking upon Wag¬ 
ner’s drama as a large stream the works that Miss Bowen cites 
10 The reference is to Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Be Civitate Norimbergensi 
Commentatio, with its appendix Buch von der Meistersinger holdseligen Kunst 
Anfang, Fortubung, Nutzbarkeiten und Lehr-Satzen. Altorf 1697. 
11 The subject was suggested to Miss Bowen by her erstwhile teacher, Pro¬ 
fessor Franz Muncker, who in his book Richard Wagner. Eine Skizze seines 
Lebens und Wirkens (2nd ed., Bamberg 1909), p. 99f., enumerates the works 
quoted by Miss Bowen, without however attaching much importance to their 
influence. 
