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What is art? What is the presumption of art? Those still hotly debated questions about the meaning of art for our society and our lives are at the heart of Richard Wagner's musical comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Set in Nuremberg at the time of the Reformation, Wagner created here anything but a backward-looking historical drama. After his Tristan, the composer had in mind a cheerful, humorous satyr play in which, based on a classical comedy situation, the rivalry of two men for a woman, he shows the competition between the categories of tradition and progress, present and future, in the form of a competition between singers. Wagner had already put his first ideas on paper in the 1840s, but it was not until 20 years later that the counterpart to Tannhäuser and one of Richard Wagner's most complex but also richest scores was completed. "What juices and forces, what seasons and skies are mixed here." (Friedrich Nitzsche)
