Roger Allen, ‘Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit‘: Richard Wagner and Johann Sebastian Bach

July 2026, Volume 20, Number 2, 4–21.

‘Da zu dir der Heiland kam’ (As to you the Saviour came). Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Wagner beyond the usual selection of overtures, preludes and familiar concert excerpts will know that Act I of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opens with a Lutheran-style chorale. The assembled congregation in St Katharine’s Church intones a hymn in praise of John the Baptist whilst Eva and her knightly suitor Walther von Stolzing exchange furtive glances around the pillars to the accompaniment of soft lyrical interjections from the orchestra. In his celebrated study Wagner Nights Ernest Newman describes this chorale as ‘the only really first-rate thing in that genre […] since the great days of German Protestant chorale-writing’, by which he means above all the chorales and chorale harmonisations of J.S. Bach (1685–1750).