UC Berkeley

The composer Richard Wagner was an avid reader of pre-modern literature and scholarly studies of the Middle Ages and the Reformation era; nearly all of his mature operas reflect this lifelong interest. This dissertation examines his reception of the Middle High German courtly literary tradition and its after-echoes in Early New High German textual culture in two of his operas, Tannhäuser (1845) and Die Meistersinger (1868). Chapter 1 argues that whereas Tannhäuser represents an experimental stage in Wagner’s medievalism, one that incorporates a number of ideas Wagner had encountered in his early explorations of Germanic philology, Die Meistersinger demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of the differences between thirteenth- and sixteenth-century poetic idiom and style. The same chapter also discusses the barriers, both linguistic and historical, that have for many decades stood in the way of a more philologically informed assessment of Wagner’s reception of the sixteenth century, and to a lesser extent, his reception of the High Middle Ages. Chapter 2 looks at broad trends and developments within the field of Germanic philology in the 1800s, with a particular focus on the reciprocal influence between philological scholarship and the fine arts during this era. Chapter 3 discusses a representative sampling of works on Germanic philology that Wagner is known to have owned or consulted, situating them within the developments discussed in Chapter 2. Chapters 4 and 5 consider Wagner’s staging of High Medieval courtly culture and his reception of minnesong in Tannhäuser. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 consider Die Meistersinger, arguing that the views of the heldentenor character Walther von Stolzing, on both art and life, have been indelibly stamped by the chivalric literature of the High Middle Ages, which he claims as his ancestral heritage. These chapters demonstrate as well that the real challenge facing Walther is one of cultural assimilation to the urban, bourgeois milieu that Wagner depicts in his fictional early modern Nuremberg. They trace Walther’s acculturation process through a close examination of his and the other characters’ diegetic songs, comparing them with examples of authentic texts from the High Middle Ages and the early modern period.