Boedder—“Die Meistersinger von Nurriberg.” 99 
that in the latter ease the girl is about a dozen, or perhaps a score, 
of years older than her swain. 17 Eoban’s song of Absalom is as 
silly as Beckmesser’s serenade. That is all. That there should be 
choruses of journeymen, and cobbler songs, is almost imperative 
in a musical work dealing with Hans Sachs. The invention of the 
festival on the meadow in Lortzing’s opera and the blooming tree 
in Hans Sachs’s garden in Deinhardstein’s play would not require 
an exuberant poetic imagination and need not be accounted for on 
the basis of “influence.” Both features are in Wagner’s play 
much more organically connected with the action than in either 
of the other two works. 
Of internal relationship between Reger-Lortzing’s work on one 
hand and Wagner’s on the other I am not able to detect any pro¬ 
nounced traces. Granting, for argument’s sake, that the poetic 
idea of Wagner’s comedy is present in embryo in the earlier play, 
it will be generally conceded that it has been very badly stunted, 
if not shriveled and wizened in its growth. If, at the time of the 
publication of Wagner’s text and the first performances of the 
opera, any distinct similarity with Lortzing’s work had been felt, 
Wagner’s numerous enemies, who attacked the Meistersinger as 
viciously as his earlier creations, would most certainly have pointed 
it out, to disparage the composer. But there is to my knowledge 
not a trace of this in all the acrimonious criticism of the sixties, 
which today strikes us as so irresistibly amusing. 
If we point out similarities in Lortzing’s and Wagner’s works, 
it is but fair to call attention to a radical difference. In the ear¬ 
lier opera, as in Deinhardstein’s drama, the emperor plays a 
very significant part and toward the end overshadows the hero 
completely. In fact, Emperor Max is a sort of deus ex machina, 
without whose intervention in favor of the poet the latter’s fate 
would remain very dubious. Neither does in Deinhardstein’s and 
Reger-Lortzing’s plays the principal figure fight for the recogni¬ 
tion of a new principle in poetry: here he is only, or is supposed 
to be, the superior of his colleagues and thereby becomes the ob¬ 
ject of their open and secret hostilities. In Wagner’s play the 
victory at the end is not bestowed as a present from above; it is 
17 1 do not see the necessity of assuming that I^unigunde and Kordula have 
been patterned after Agathe and Aennchen in Weber’s Freischiitz. They may 
have been; but cousins of about the same age and different temper and out¬ 
look on life do not appear to be so exceeding scarce in the pages of literature. 
