The original romantic nationalist view of medieval German art music reached its peak in another Wagner
opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The master singers of Nuremberg,” 1868), of which the first
libretto sketches were made in 1845, the same year as Tannhäuser reached the stage. The Meistersinger
were guild musicians who flourished in southern German towns between the fourteenth and the
seventeenth centuries (but chiefly in the fifteenth and sixteenth). Like the very late trouvères, on whose
confréries their guilds were evidently modeled, the Meistersinger were burghers, not nobles. Their chief
activity consisted in convening assemblies, like the puys of northern France, at which song contests were
held and prizes awarded. A Meisterlied (master-song) was the musical equivalent of a Meisterstück
(master-piece, from which we get our English term masterpiece), the culminating offering by which an
apprentice graduated to the rank of master artisan in a medieval guild. Like a master-piece, a master-song
was judged on the success with which its maker demonstrated his mastery—that is, his command of
established rules and practices. These rules—ostensibly derived from the practices of the Minnesinger,
whom they venerated—were strictly codified by the Meistersinger in books called Tabulaturen. This is
where the old “bar form” was actually christened and described in terms of its constituent parts: two
Stollen (pillars) followed by an Abgesang (“sing-off”) corresponding to the pedes and cauda of the
troubadour canso (first described, incidentally, by Dante in the fourteenth century, also long after the fact).
One can hear this lore actually being imparted in the third act of Wagner’s opera, when the shoemaker
Hans Sachs, the leader of the Nuremberg master singers (an actual historical personage who lived from
1494 to 1576, and whose musical works survive) instructs the entirely fictional Walther von Stolzing in
the making of a prize-song.
FIG. 4-9 Opening page of the so called Carmina burana manuscript, showing Dame Fortune and her fateful wheel, a favorite
topic of Goliard verse.
The Tabulaturen also contained what were said to be exemplary melodies by the leading
Minnesinger, especially Walther von der Vogelweide. Modern scholars strongly doubt the authenticity of
these melodies, as well as the Meistersinger’s claim to have inherited their art as a direct legacy from the
noble poet-singers of the earlier tradition. The art of the Meistersinger consisted mainly of the fashioning
of Töne, song-formulas à la Pseudo-Neidhardt, which they then decorated with melismas called Blumen
or “flowers” that had no counterpart in the Minnesinger tradition. By the sixteenth century, their literary
themes were fairly remote from those of the original Minnesinger. Minne itself had disappeared as a
subject in favor of Spruchdichtung, the moralizing poetry of the later German poet-singers, notably