Publisher's Synopsis
1861 was a most disappointing year for Wagner: the Paris Tannhäuser premiere was a fiasco it went down in history as one of the biggest opera scandals of all time and, after a grueling wait, the world premiere of Tristan und Isolde planned for Vienna did not come about. Public opinion gave rise to the prejudice that Wagners recent works were unperformable. It was only towards the end of the year that the composer began to see a possible way out of this artistically and materially hopeless situation. He decided to write the Meistersinger and immediately began working on the Libretto. In the summer of 1861 Wagner and his wife Minna definitively broke up; after liquidating their joint Paris household, Minna Wagner settled in Dresden, where she spent the last years of her life.
