Ryan M. Prendergast, Deadly Serious: Humour and Humourlessness in ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’

In Richard Wagner’s stage works, dying is easy, to invoke the familiar cliché. The comedy, or more appropriately, the humour, is hard. The challenges of Wagnerian ‘humour’ – its analysis, interpretation and embodiment – remain formidable for artists, scholars, critics and audiences. The gravitas of the composer’s cultural legacy places even the most light-hearted instances of mirth in his stage works under suspicion. This suspicion encourages an inverted paradigm of ‘humourlessness’ towards the composer overall, but as Joachim Köhler has recently observed in his study of the ‘laughing Wagner’, ‘whoever would take Wagner seriously, for good or ill, must also take his humour seriously, endure his laughter’.