To Helen McNabb

You might have been as surprised as I when it turned out that I would be interviewing Richard Wagner. You might also imagine my excitement, sense of anticipation, even anxiety. Would I come across like a Sixtus Beckmesser, the pedantic fool mixing up his lines in an attempt to woo not Eva this time but the author and composer himself? Or would I seem as critical, even sarcastic, as Friedrich Nietzsche in his polemic Der Fall Wagner? Only when I recalled how this most unlikely circumstance came about did I grow calmer, a story I would like to share with you.

Given my other scholarly commitments, I was somewhat hesitant to accept an invitation to contribute to a book about Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, or to be more precise, to write a chapter about “Hans Sachs and the (Re)Construction of German History in Die Meistersinger.” However, with all the electronic tools available nowadays which can ease the scholar’s task, I decided to agree. I began my research by browsing the internet, searching through various data banks and also signing up for a listserv on “Richard Wagner.” At this listserv—the salon of the twenty-first century, a virtual salon, of course, where people from distant places share their interest on a chosen subject—I posted a somewhat generally worded request for some hints or help in regard to my project, the nexus of German history and the opera. The next day I found a rather angry response signed “Wagner.” I was baffled at first; then thought someone was trying to be cute; then it occurred to me that Wagner is, after all, a common German name; finally I became somewhat apprehensive at the thought that someone in the Wagner family—it is a rather large clan, after all—might have responded. Though the reply was a little harsh, pompous, and arrogant, I answered politely, thanking the person for her/his ideas on the German nation as a history of salvation, a nation still in search of an identity. As if I did not know that?

While pondering the next phase of my research, another e-mail arrived, this time signed “Richard Wagner.” I could not help feeling that this verged on the tasteless: it was neither original nor particularly funny. At the same time, however, it was mysterious, alluring, and intriguing to receive an email with that name.