About the work
A comic opera in three acts with spoken dialogue; the libretto was written jointly by Lortzing, Philipp Reger and Philipp Jakob Düringer after the play of the same name by Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein. It premiered on 23 June 1840 at the Stadttheater Leipzig, marking the 400th anniversary of the invention of printing; an expanded version followed in 1845 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim.
Plot
The Nuremberg shoemaker and mastersinger Hans Sachs loves Kunigunde, the goldsmith's daughter, but is wrongly denied victory in a singing contest and falsely accused of abduction, leading to his banishment from the city. When Emperor Maximilian seeks out the author of some fine verses shown to him and it emerges that Sachs wrote them, the intrigue unravels; Sachs is rehabilitated and allowed to marry Kunigunde.
Cultural significance
Richard Wagner knew the work and borrowed names and motifs for his "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg," though he gave the material a fundamentally different, socio-utopian dramaturgical direction foreign to Lortzing's opera.