The Mastersingers of Nuremberg: Wagner's comedy is the greatest of all

"It will always arouse jubilation,” Thomas Mann wrote of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and jubilation illuminated the Coliseum when the greatest comedy of all returned to the company’s repertoire this month. The theatre, which has been a mournful place of late, resounded to cheers as the audience greeted the conductor, Edward Gardner, a fine team of singers and, of course, the Master himself: Richard Wagner.

The greatest comedy of all? On the dramatic stage one could make a case for Twelfth Night, notwithstanding its dark side. Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy in four acts, and a comedy it is, of sorts. Meistersinger has its dark moments, too, but it is essentially a sunny work, beginning and ending in an unquenchable spirit of affirmation. There is no work like it on the musical stage and any performance that does it justice should leave listeners thinking that they have heard the greatest opera of all.

The plot, at first sight, is simple enough. Walther, a knight, has fallen in love with Eva, daughter of Pogner, a city goldsmith, who has decided to give his daughter away to the winner of the annual song competition held on Midsummer’s Day. Walther’s rival for her hand is Beckmesser, the town clerk, who makes a mess of the Prize Song – whereupon Walther sings his own song and the people of Nuremberg declare him to be the winner. Boy gets girl, in other words.

Except there are other words; plenty of ’em. The longest role, indeed the longest in opera, belongs to Hans Sachs, Nuremberg’s cobbler-poet, who is recognised as the leading member of the mastersingers, a group of guildsmen who defend the German language against those who would abuse it. Walther’s offence, in their eyes, is his inability to master the arcane customs of language, rhythm and metre that enable an apprentice to become a master.

Put like that it doesn’t sound like the stuff of comedy. Filtered through the genius of Wagner, however, Meistersinger glows – and glow really is the verb. Although the opera takes four-and-a-half hours to tell its story, there are no longueurs. One cannot measure Meistersinger by the hands of a clock.

The questions Wagner raises are no less interesting now than in 1868, when the work had its premiere in Munich. What is art? Who is it for? What are the social forces that shape it? How significant is tradition? How should that tradition incorporate the individual voice that appears to threaten it? How much do the young owe to their elders? How should the old adapt to new ways of thinking and hearing? How easily can outsiders be assimilated?

As the mediator in this struggle – a Kulturkampf – between the mastersingers (who represent tradition in its most ossified form) and Walther (who is gifted but headstrong), Sachs achieves the Hegelian feat of reaching synthesis: an alignment if not of minds, then of temperaments. When Walther, victorious at last, declares that he doesn’t want to be a master, for he recoils from the aridity of their ways, Sachs tells him and the crowd that has gathered on the meadow: “Honour your German Masters!”

To some modern ears that may sound unsettling because we know which man admired Meistersinger so much, and we know what happened in Nuremberg 80 years ago when cheering crowds gathered under different banners. But that is to misread Wagner, whose intention was to remind the German peoples in the years leading up to the creation of the nation state in 1870 of their cultural inheritance.

Nuremberg, the Franconian city on the River Pegnitz, was the jewel of medieval Germany, and the home of Albrecht Dürer, the greatest of German painters, who was born there in 1471. So its winding streets and city guilds provide a natural setting. There is a riot in the second act, missed completely by the city’s dozy nightwatchman, which is one of the great set-pieces. The third act quintet, which enters the ear like honey, may be the most glorious sound in all opera.

But the most significant part of the score follows the overture, when Wagner supplies a Lutheran chorale that Bach might have composed had he been born 100 years later. He is saying, effectively, that though this might be a work about the necessity of change, and seeing things afresh, we must start with music that is rooted in our great traditions.

Wagner, the most extraordinary pioneer in musical history, thereby establishes himself as a conservative, in the sense that he wishes to retain the best of what has gone before. Paradoxically, that is what radical artists do. When a doubter asked Picasso why he considered himself to be an artist, Picasso drew a perfect circle. Wagner composed a Bach chorale.

Eliot, Stravinsky, Auden, Joyce: all the masters of modernism knew the value of tradition. Without a thorough grounding they could not possibly have found their own voices. Deep down, all were conservatives. Not in a political sense, though many were. But in the impulse to create, all true artists must understand the value of those who went before. Meistersinger may be a comedy, but it is a serious comedy, for all peoples at all times.

There is another paradox. Wagner, though a great man, was not a good one. In many ways he was a monster, and many people who have never heard a bar of his music dramas recoil from them on account of that forbidding reputation. Yet Meistersinger is the most generous and most intensely human work imaginable. If you have never engaged with this extraordinary man, then start here. Meistersinger is life itself.

'The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’ is at the London Coliseum, WC2, until March 10. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org