Barry Millington, BBC Music Magazine, August 2003, p. 89

WAGNER 'S MEISTERSINGER: PERFORMANCE, HISTORY, REPRESENTATION Ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi Rochester UP 156pp, (60/$85

To what extent can Wagner be held responsible for Hitler and the Holocaust? The locus classicus of the long?running debate has been Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, the opera chosen to glorify the Third Reich, and many scholars have seen in the characterisation of the pedantic town?clerk, Beckmesser, a clear reflection of Wagner's anti-Semitism. Writers such as Bryan Magee, Michael Tanner and Roger Scruton (what is it with philosophers?) have struggled valiantly to exonerate Wagner, but the evidence has become overwhelming. This superb volume of essays, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi ? the best ever published on Die Meistersinger - both gathers up the most important strands of the argument to date and moves it on in several crucial respects.

In the second and third sections of the book, dealing respectively with its history and reception, half a dozen well?informed and acute writers analyse precisely why the work was from the start adopted as Germany's national opera and why it exercised such strong iconic appeal to the Third Reich: its invocation of an archetypal national community and of charismatic leadership, its fusion of art and politics. But the anti?Semitic representation of Beckmesser was not apparently exploited. David B Dennis's impressively thorough trawl through Nazi literature has turned up no significant references to the Jewish character of Beckmesser. The reason, he suggests, is that the Nazis were more interested in projecting Meistersinger's Nuremberg as a cultural and social model than in using it to stigmatise enemies. Hans Rudolf Vaget, who rightly notes that Hitler `never invoked Wagner's hostility toward Jews to justify his own murderous hatred or the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany', plausibly suggests that the Nazis drew back from exploiting `Wagner's highly auratic art for propaganda', sensing that it would thereby `lose its irreplaceable value for the ubiquitous aestheticization of political life'.

Of course, that in no way disproves the thesis of Beckmesser's anti?Semitic representation and an interesting consensus seems to be emerging here that Wagner intended it as more of a private subtext for the cognoscenti than as a political manifesto. With further fine contributions from Klaus van den Berg and Thomas Grey, there also seems to be agreement, at last, that this has been a 'historically necessary debate' (Vaget). Even while recognising that, the work is far from defined exclusively by its anti-Semitic context.

With essays also from the likes of Dietrich Fischer?Dieskau, Harry Kupfer and Peter Schneider on interpretative aspects of Meistersinger, this is a book that demands to be read by anyone interested in the politics of opera.

Barry Millington