Why Hitler Loved “Die Meistersinger”
Larry Wolff reports on the new production of “Meistersinger” at the Bayreuth Festival: “Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only comedy, was an opera that Hitler loved, and it enjoyed enormous popularity in the Third Reich. When it was produced in Nazi Germany at Bayreuth, the Bavarian site of the annual Wagner festival established by Wagner himself in 1876, there were as many as eight hundred Nuremberg townspeople on stage in
the final scene as the musical cobbler Hans Sachs sang his tribute to holy German art (“die heilige deutsche Kunstâ€); they perhaps represented an operatic counterpart to the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg celebrated in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Hitler himself, after coming to power in 1933, visited Bayreuth every summer until the outbreak of the war, and the enormous chorus at the end of Die Meistersinger, singing “Heil!†to Hans Sachs and affirming German art, was sometimes singing to Hitler in the audience.”
