Date of composition: 1862-1867
Premiere: of the prelude on 1 November 1862 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus under the direction of the composer
Duration: 9 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed on 17 October 1882, conductor: Ludwig von Brenner
Richard Wagner had already completed more than half of his Ring des Nibelungen when the realisation of this monumental opera cycle seemed to recede into unreachable distance. He therefore decided to compose two standalone works for the time being: Tristan und Isolde – and, beginning in 1861, the only comic opera of his mature period, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, for which he had noted the first ideas some twenty years earlier. Finding one’s place in a fractured, rapidly-changing world, discovering happiness in the private sphere, and assuming an appropriate role in society: these are the themes of the opera, explored through the lives of bourgeois craft guilds and a young nobleman. It is a story of old rules and their meaning, which must constantly be re-evaluated. This is also reflected in the music, which evokes an “old” character through fanfare-like brilliance and counterpoint, yet employs these elements in entirely new ways.
Kirill Petrenko has long been familiar with Die Meistersinger; for him, it is “a work that contains all the contradictions of the world – and that seeks to reconcile these contradictions through art.” The Prelude is unique in that Wagner, at least according to his own report, “immediately and with the greatest clarity conceived the main section of the overture in C major” during a journey from Venice to Vienna in 1861 – before writing a single line of the opera’s text. This section anticipates the opera’s essential thematic material, presenting it as the musical and ideological essence of the entire work.