That's the punch line of the Prize Song that wins Eva in Wagner's late and only 'comic' opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). It's the longest opera commonly performed, the second of Wagner's featuring a song contest (after Tannhäuser 1861) and his fifth whose plot centrally involves putting up a woman for sale.
Women for sale
Senta in Flying Dutchman was just the first, sold by her father for looted treasure. In the later operas, it's a common plot. Isolde (1865) was sold as part of a peace treaty, then with goddess Freya, Wotan paid the giants to build Walhalla (1869). Then in the fourth Ring Cycle opera, even the fiery Brünnhilde, most heroic of Wagner's heroines, gets sold, in a bizarre trade by Siegfried whereby he can marry the far less plausible Gutrune.
Meanwhile, Eva, the extraordinarily passive centre of Meistersinger, (1868), was offered by her father as the prize in a song contest for the guild he headed up. After these heroines, there's only Kundry in Parsifal (1882) who was cursed, not sold. (She's the female equivalent of the Flying Dutchman: fated to live forever, but with a tougher redemption clause - she can find redemption only when she encounters a man who is able to resist her.)
If that makes you wonder how we can love the music of Wagner despite what looks like mighty misogyny, go to the end of this post for optional insights into what has become a major debate. But meanwhile, here's a quick intro to Meistersinger.
The Wagner in the Opera
It's an opera not about women's roles, but about the waning of the medieval art-song traditions steeped in chivalry and courtly love and rigidly preserved by Meistersingers. It's about the need for balance of tradition and freedom, pedantry and poetry. It's centred not on Eva but on Hans Sachs, the superbly delineated character Wagner based on a historic figure. (The poem of the nightingale chorus song is actually by the real Hans Sachs.) . The plot is complicated not by the love triangle around Eva - Sachs resolves that - but by the ways old standards of song and guild rules for singers are meeting new, more fluid poetry and music. Here's Sachs musing on the trial song from Walter which the Meistersingers had noisily rejected. Wagner would have his audience see his music thus.
No rule seemed to fit it,
and yet there was no fault in it.
It sounded so old, and yet was so new,
like birdsong who heard a bird singing
and, carried away by madness,
imitated its song,
would earn derision and disgrace!
Spring's command,
sweet necessity
placed it in his breast:
then he sang as he had to;
and as he had to, so he could:
The libretto, written by Wagner, of course, alongside creating the music, is an extraordinary read by itself. Here it is in English. That song, (at night, to the scent of the elder tree) is early in Act 2.
Our production
For the story, there's an excellent thoughtful summary of the core themes here by Alex Ross. Or go to Wikipedia here, or to Glyndebourne, (here)
Glyndebourne, unlike Bayreuth, chose to focus on the love theme and underplay both misogyny and antisemitism. That's true to the libretto. Interestingly, even Sachs, the splendidly humanist hero of it all, never questions whether a woman should be put up as a prize. He accepts that her father is expressing the supreme value he puts on the arts by making this offer. Hans toughens the conditions, but seriously considers singing for her then retires from the contest in recognition of her love for a younger man - she crowns him as the leader of tradition, and marries Walter, whose song Hans helped to craft.
We're watching the much praised production by David McVicar at Glyndebourne, screened by Glyndebourne during lockdown. For details, reviews, links and discussion go to the blog post I wrote for this screening.
...and the music?
The music of this opera is very different from Wagner's other operas. As in his earlier operas, and notoriously in the Ring Cycle he produced around this one, Wagner provides music thick with lyrical motifs and strong themes identifying characters and symbols. In Meistersinger, the leitmotifs tell us of the guild, their rules, the community, its divisions, the lovers and the extraordinary character of Hans Sachs. But they are interwoven in the music, very lyrically. Some of Wagner's most beautiful music is in the mingling of these themes in splendid counterpoint, combining different melodic lines in a woven whole. There's a splendid summary here. Wait for the quintet in Act 111 - the voices of the two pairs of lovers melding with Hans' baritone. (Reminds you of Mozart? He was one of the heroes for Wagner. Here's the quintet ending Act 1 of Cosi Fan Tutte, "Di scrivermi ogni giorno" - the private conversations of two pairs of lovers melding with the baritone Alfonso who's setting up the trick.)
Do you want to dip deeper into this music? For a fascinating and detailed exposition by Richard Atkinson, showing (as at left!) and playing the leitmotifs and their weaving into the Prelude, listen to his careful account.
Listen too for the setting and the period of the opera, lovingly spoken for in the music.
"Wagner creates an atmosphere of long ago with contrapuntal textures—many independent voices that fit together simultaneously to create a harmonious whole—characteristic of renaissance and baroque music." Read about them here, in an essay from Houston Opera.
And the Prize Song? It's Wagner's famous declaration for originality over simple lyricism. Check out this rendition on a single trumpet to follow the complexity of the music.
The other dark side
Controversy around the opera has focussed more on its antisemitism, than on the attitude to women or the core theme of radical music.
Much of the 'comedy' involves humiliation of a cartoonish Jewish character, Beckmesser, who also vies (unsuccessfully, of course), for the prize - of a woman who despises him.
This account of Barrie Kosky's 2017 Bayreuth production lays out the issues and Kosky's judgement.
Since the opera derided Jews and showcased German tradition and beauty, it was of course a favourite of Hitler. The final, long act combines thoughts about new music with Wagner's demand for recognition of what's German. It ends with a puzzling, pretty irrelevant and very long speech from Sachs about the danger of losing what he valued in German art. Not surprisingly, the opera and particularly this act, won top billing in the Third Reich and controversy ever since.
In the Glyndebourne production, this is awkwardly avoided. It's about love, actually, Paul Mason argues, and it's in the music. "There's a surfeit of love in Wagner. It comes at you from all angles and in all forms. Whatever he thought he was telling us, Wagner was actually telling us: love who you want, regardless of social norms, and if you must suppress your feelings, do it knowingly, and for a higher reason."
Optional extra: debating Eva
This section is only for those who really want to explore some of the recent debate around the heroines of Wagner, and particularly Eva the Prize! Here are some thoughts to pursue.
In a recent book by Nila Parly (Vocal Victories: Wagner’s Female Characters from Senta to Kundry) the author argues that "Wagner’s leading female characters create and shape the most significant music... The major female characters shape the stories because of the strength of Wagner’s vocal writing for them." Review here.
From a review of Eva Reiger’s Richard Wagner’s Women: "Rieger seems unwilling to conceive of positive expressions of feminine-gendered qualities, and it is this failing that prevents her from answering the excellent question she poses towards the beginning: how can we love Wagner’s music despite its apparent misogyny? The answer is that, just as he does with his anti-Semitism, Wagner subverts his insupportable message at the same time as he enunciates it. Specifically, it is the stereotypically ‘feminine’ figure of the hysteric who rejects the world whom later Wagner considers the greatest and most insightful figure of all. … Rieger misses the more striking fact that Wagner’s great later characters do not renounce love as such but rather the delusion that existing templates for its acting-out, which build female subjection into their core, are a guarantor of universal human happiness (‘Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!’, ‘Delusion, everywhere!’, is Sachs’s characteristic reflection)."
And the women of the Ring? A thoughtful critique here of the tendency to present Wagner as a new look feminist. The Independent quotes a singer tackling Brünnhilde for ENO. "They are the characters who make the crucial decisions, choices that transform themselves and the world around them. And very often they are the redeemers of the men, or of the whole world. Wagner may have been a total bastard, but I have the impression he must have worshipped women!"
And don't forget redemption. In Wagner's operas redemption recurs as a grand and triumphal core. Nietzsche commented nastily. “Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his work: sometimes a little male, sometimes a little female.” But it's usually the female doing the redeeming. Alex Ross, in Wagnerism, observes: 'Although Wagner is noted for his hatreds, almost all of his mature work turns on the redeeming force of love.'
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