Book Description
Excerpt from The Sources and d104 of Richard Wagner's Opera Die Meistersinger We Nurnberg The later Minnesingers indulge in extravagant vagaries of both content and verse. It is a significant fact that Frauenlob, to whom the Mastersingers referred the foundation of their first School, was one those singers who played with artificial verse forms to the havoc of his subject. 1) But in the middle of the fifteenth century torpid Europe twas aroused. Through the capture of Constantinople by the Turks and the almost simultaneous invention of printing came, for Germany at least, the era of Humanism and the Reformation. 2) The imperial cities had been steadily growing in importance, and soon became the centers of all culture. Who but the honest burghers began now to flirt with the shy Muse, as they looked about for recreation after their day's labor? And although they clipped the wings of their Pegasus, and trained him to amble along in harness withal, yet they had taken him out of pound, and they cherished him fondly until he was ready for a new flight. From the fifteenth century on, the time of court-life and wandering for this poetry was past. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.