"'What,' I remember him challenging a roomful of young conductors, 'is Wagner's one undisputed masterpiece?' After a few student murmurations - The Ring? Tristan? Parsifal? - he banged the desk and thundered: 'The text of Meistersinger!'" "My old Viennese professor, Hans Swarowsky, always had a Fangfrage or two up his sleeve - traps for the unwary," recalls conductor Timothy Vernon, founding artistic director of Pacific Opera Victoria. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was revealed to the world on the 1868 summer solstice at Munich's National Theatre. Writing the opera's story occupied Wagner for 17 years, during which time he composed Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and the Ring Cycle. Hans Sachs, a shoemaker and mastersinger himself, puts aside his own ambitions to marry Eva, and champions Walther's cause. It may be Wagner's only comic opera - which is to say it's heartwarming, not laugh-out-loud funny - but Die Meistersinger is also a profound statement on art, articulated through a community of 16th-century mastersingers whose traditions are shaken when newcomer Walther von Stolzing enters their singing competition to win the hand of Eva. June 21 marks the 150th anniversary of the first performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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