/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18934042]

Is Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg the best comic play of the 19th century?

[Anonymous No.18934715]

bump.

[Anonymous No.18934819]

>yes

[Anonymous No.18934992]

it's not a play

[Anonymous No.18935133]

>>18934042
>H.L. Mencken thought Die Meistersinger 'the greatest single work of art ever produced by man,' and added, 'It took more skill to plan and write it than it took to plan and write the whole canon of Shakespeare.'

[Anonymous No.18935169]

>>18935133
>Each one of the characters is, for example, a comic type. I hasten to add that each is nicely individualized and three dimensional, but fundamentally Walther, Eva, Sachs, and the others are the stock-in-trade of the comic stage – typical characters. And our situation, charming as it is, had been seen on the stage hundreds of times before Wagner put it there. For our long comic tradition in the West goes back to the Roman comedians Plautus and Terence in the second century B.C., and before them to the fourth century B.C., to the Athenian Menander and to what is now called ‘New’ Comedy. In the fragments of Menander and in the twenty-six surviving plays of the Romans, we have, in play after play, these characters:

>the inexperienced young hero who has only till morning to win his girl, and who is lectured at from all sides (the adolescens – Wagner’s young knight, Walther);
>the experienced slave who does most of the lecturing but gets into a lot of trouble himself (the servos – Wagner’s apprentice, David);
>the girl who is going to be given away in the morning (the mulier – Wagner’s Eva); the nurse or confidante who tries to help the boy get
>the girl (the nutrix – here, Magdalene);
>the philosophizing old man, often secretly in love himself with the girl (the senex – Wagner’s Hans Sachs, as we shall soon see);
>the procurer who puts the girl up for sale (the leno – considerably softened by Wagner as Eva’s father, Pogner);
>and the ridiculously over-confident braggart soldier, who hopes to buy the girl in the morning (the miles gloriosus, whom Shakespeare used as a model for Falstaff, but who appears even more visibly as Wagner’s Beckmesser).

>I mention all of this, not because I am a professor of classics, or to imply that Wagner’s comedy is unduly derivative, but to place Die Meistersinger where it deserves to be placed – in the great comic tradition of the West, from Greek Menander to the Romans Plautus and Terence, to Renaissance Italy, to Lope de Vega, Shakespeare in The Tempest, Molière in Les Fourberies de Scapin, and Beaumarchais, Mozart, and Rossini in the Figaro plays. All of those post-classical writers use the old plot and characters. But of all of them Wagner in Die Meistersinger has, I think, the characters truest to classic type.

[Anonymous No.18935415]

Guys, how do I even go about appreciating Wagner?
Do I read it before listening and then also somehow learn to appreciate a true live performance?

[Anonymous No.18935483]

>>18935415
Just read it while listening.