For the past twenty-five years a key piece of evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has been identified in the Grimm Brothers’ anti-Semitic tale ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ and a possible allusion to this in the text of Walther’s Act I ‘trial song’. This article argues that the passages in question are better explained with reference to a medieval poetic tradition still prevalent in nineteenth-century German culture involving the vocal contest between birds, paradigmatically the owl and the nightingale. Since the twelfth century, the owl and the nightingale have debated the merits of high and low art, religious themes, social forms, poetic diction and more. The associations of pedantry and harsh, coarse vocal character with the figure of the owl maps readily onto the negative traits of Beckmesser, just as the contrasting associations of the melodious nightingale with springtime, courtship and ‘natural’ musicality align with traits of Wagner’s artist-hero, Walther von Stolzing. Rather than displacing the possible anti-Semitic reading of Beckmesser, however, this alternative reading of the Beckmesser–Walther antagonism through the lens of avian conflict or debate poetry relocates that reading within a broader discursive and figurative context, one that is more commensurate with the possible role of anti-Semitic subtexts within Wagner’s music dramas in general.

中文翻译：

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猫头鹰、夜莺和荆棘丛中的犹太人：在 Die Meistersinger 中重新定位反犹太主义

在过去的 25 年里，瓦格纳的反犹潜台词的关键证据女歌手已在格林兄弟的反犹太故事“荆棘丛中的犹太人”中被确定，并且在瓦尔特的第一幕“试听歌曲”的文本中可能暗示了这一点。本文认为，这些段落最好参照 19 世纪德国文化中仍然盛行的中世纪诗歌传统来解释，该传统涉及鸟类之间的声音竞赛，典型的是猫头鹰和夜莺。自 12 世纪以来，猫头鹰和夜莺一直在争论高低艺术、宗教主题、社会形式、诗词等方面的优点。学究气和刺耳、粗鲁的声音特征与猫头鹰的形象很容易映射到贝克梅塞尔的负面特征上，就像悠扬的夜莺与春天的对比联想一样，求爱和“自然”的音乐性与瓦格纳的艺术家英雄瓦尔特·冯·斯托尔辛的特质一致。然而，这种通过鸟类冲突或辩论诗的视角对贝克梅塞尔-瓦尔特对抗的另类解读并没有取代可能的反犹太主义解读，而是将这种解读重新定位在更广泛的话语和比喻语境中，与一般而言，反犹太主义潜台词在瓦格纳的音乐剧中可能扮演的角色。