Worms down my shirt
Wagner, Bob Ross, and a lil etymology.
Doch da 's zum Zeugen kein Lehrbube tut,
und heut' auch den Spruch er gesungen gut,
so mach' ich den Burschen gleich zum Gesell'.
Knie nieder, David, und nimm diese Schell!
(David ist niedergekniet;
Sachs gibt ihm eine starke Ohrfeige)
Steh' auf, Gesell', und denk' an den Streich:
du merkst dir dabei die Taufe zugleich.
But since an apprentice cannot act as a witness
and since today he also sang his piece well,
I’ll promote the boy to journeyman right away.
Kneel down, David, and absorb this blow!
(David kneels and Sachs slaps his face hard)
Stand up, journeyman, and think about this blow;
you’ll always remember the christening right along with it).
- Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Richard Wagner
Hans Sachs was a real person, born in Nuremberg just before the calendar flipped over into the sixteenth century. Today, we’d say he had a portfolio career with a great side hustle; back then, he was simply a shoemaker who wrote poems and music and plays. Humans hadn’t yet come up with the economic systems that would support, for a time, widespread individual pursuit of artistic careers.
Sachs was one of a whole ecosystem of tradespeople who also made art. For both the trades and the creative activities, guilds existed. These groups provided a way of codifying, supporting, and furthering the practices to which they were dedicated. In both professional and creative guilds, there was a system of apprenticeship. Making shoes or writing verses, this was a pathway to learning from someone more experienced.
Shoemakers of Sachs’ day used an implement called a Knieriemen, or “shoemaker’s strap.” It was a simple, narrow leather strap that the seated artisan slipped under one foot and over the bent knee on the same side, over a shoe that rested between the knee and the strap. The strap held the shoe in place while the artisan worked on it, preventing any slips that might mar detailed work on the leather.
Richard Wagner wrote an entire opera about Hans Sachs, positioning him as a sort of proto-German artistic hero. It took him more than twenty years to do it, stretching from his first ideas in 1845 to the work’s premiere in 1868. Wagner was not famous for working quickly, nor did he fail to think his symbolism through. This was the dude who invented the leitmotif, a word which refers to any short musical theme associated with a particular character. If that idea seems new to you, I promise you it’s not. Go watch LOTR or any Star War and you’ll see what I mean. Wagner started all that, cagey Mutterfracker that he was.
Many things happen in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg over its six hour performance time, so many that it’s easy to miss a running theme involving Sachs and his apprentice, David. David is learning both shoemaking and songwriting from Sachs - he has to sing a whole aria about it at the beginning of the show - and there are numerous references to Sachs, how you say, abusing David for doing poorly in his music lessons. David‘s friends tease him about Sachs’ apparently famous temper, and we see Sachs threaten David physically at several points. David’s aria refers to Sachs denying him food and water for singing his scales poorly, and also describes being beaten with the Knieriemen.
It’s quite an image, a master flailing his apprentice with the very implement used to hold a shoe steady so that intricate, artistic work might be done perfectly upon it.
Anyhoo, when Sachs finally does elevate his Lehrbub to the status of Geselle, which means David’s finally free to pursue making his own living, he does so with one last act of physical violence, declaring that David will always remember the slap across his face together with the day’s happiness.
To my knowledge, we don’t have historical information about Sachs’ own experience as an apprentice (please correct me - I’d love to know if such info exists!), or about how he treated his own Lehrbuben. So when Richard Wagner created his operatic vision of Hans Sachs, he made a very deliberate choice in making Sachs a master who employs physical and emotional cruelty. It’s no stretch to assume that he was writing about a situation common enough to warrant inclusion without remark or explanation in his epic poem of praise to German art-making.
In her important research article Heroic Artists, Critical Abuse, and the Death of Maria Malibran, Hilary Poriss outlines the well-documented physical and emotional abuses perpetrated by Manuel Garcia and Friedrich Wieck, two of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated pedagogues. They were revered for the success of their students, but their physical violence and verbal threats were no secret during their lifetimes. They included all of the things listed above - denial of food and water, striking out with their own hands, and hitting students with objects. Wagner knew the work of two of these students, Pauline Viardot and Clara Schumann, two of the most influential performers of the century. Like anyone else in the business at that time, he would have known about the aggression of their training even as he experienced the excellence of its result.
It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from Wagner to us. Today, physical violence in musical training is unacceptable. But its legacy, the association of pain with achievement, lives on.
The first time I was told that someone was harassing me because they liked me, I was in first grade. Mark Larson used to pick up the big, round earthworms that crawled up out of the ground on rainy days and force them down my shirt at recess, usually chasing me and pinning me down to do it. “Sounds like somebody wants your attention!” said the playground aide, smiling at me like lucky girl, and I tried to reconcile this with the way it made me feel. At the age of six, I already knew that not being chased was worse than earthworms down your shirt.
Music school had less actual soil involved, but a schmutzy patriarchal through line ran from the playground to the studio.
He’s only that hard on the people he likes. She wouldn’t yell at you if she didn’t take you seriously.
I came into my first real opera house job just a few years after the death of a long-time music director, a man of immense musical and managerial skill who was also famous for his ability to wither anything on the vine with a single vinegar-laden sentence. I never knew him, but my colleagues who had would often get into a kind of competition, exchanging stories of the worst public insults they had each endured.
See how much he thought of me. Look at the attention he gave.
It was better than not being chased, we told each other.
Like I’ve written before, this whole mindset isn’t just a matter of gaslighting.
Art life is collaborative. We learn about ourselves from our environment, which includes the fellow humans around us. Rhythm, pitch, melody - forget esoteric stuff like style, the basic building blocks of language and music are the result of collaboration, of information shared. We discover who we are through these interactions. We mold, change, and name one other.
When a human decides to dig into a creative, athletic, and/or expressive practice, they will confront so much along the way. They won’t see themselves clearly. They will consider giving up. They will get bored. They will wonder how to proceed. They will seek mentorship. Those mentors will have to discern whether to encourage, cheerlead, or criticize. There will be disagreement and discord, gratitude and grace. Failure and frustration are part of the road to the medal, the book, the concert - no matter how you slice it, no matter the “level” of the artist, no matter who is mentoring or how.
Now apply all of the above to the trajectory of a competitive career, one with a relatively short shelf life to begin with, amped up even further by #capitalism and a culture that provides little support for creatives outside of the one percent. Suddenly who’s doing the molding, changing and naming becomes, as the kids say, a thing. The aspiring apprentice needs to nail an ever narrowing series of professional steps in order to have a chance at the most exclusive and lucrative opportunities. The molders/changers/namers have to keep nailing it, too (see #capitalism).
It’s not surprising that so many leaders in the arts leave Sachsian memories of slaps alongside christenings. It’s also not surprising that we who have gone through the existing artistic systems imagine that one must exist alongside the other, pain and achievement inextricably linked.
The problem comes when we make the mistake of thinking, well, this hurts, so it must be leading somewhere good.
As our industry tries to envision a different path, there’s a fair amount of concern bubbling up about aspirants not being resilient enough. Certainly, in a new age of equity and accountability, we don’t have common pathways built yet that will support us all, mentors and mentees, in navigating the waters of failure, criticism, and revision. So how do we step out of the old punishment/reward model?
Peer mentorship is an established practice in many fields, but a relatively new idea in artistic spaces. Mentorship from peer to peer, or from younger professionals to older, could make the experience of mentorship feel more spacious and potentially safe. Some of the biggest problems many of us carry into artistic study are the wounds from our own families (it’s often these wounds that drive us into artistic exploration in the first place). It can be very difficult for people to navigate the master/apprentice model of mentorship without bringing a lot of parent/child baggage or expectations into the relationship. Modeling more ways of mentorship could be like moving from a nuclear family to a multi-generational setting, reducing the pressure on individual relationships and expanding everyone’s opportunities for support.
It will be hard to step away from shooting for the top, however, if “the top” is the only place to find a viable and meaningful artistic life. America’s artistic ecosystem is in dire need of renewal. Funders and artists need to commit to regrowing opportunities and audiences in the enormous, starved landscape between Kindermusik and the Met. An important step toward that renewal might be a step back in Hans Sachs’ direction, toward a life that allows an embrace of trades both practical and artistic. That would require a working life that leaves enough time to make art, and a view of making art that respects the artistic middle class. And all of that would require a view of training that transcends our current zero-sum view of education as a commodity.
That feels like a lot, but it also feels understandable, like something we could get started on if we were so inclined. Yes?
I love the German word for training, Ausbildung. At its heart stands the word Bild, meaning “picture.” In Ausbildung I hear an image, an imagining of what the future might be. Bild-ing someone aus sounds like fleshing out a picture, like Bob Ross with his clouds (talk about a respected middle class artist! We need some Bob Ross energy!). It feels improvisatory, expansive, correctable - so much wider and more generous than a journey up a narrowing pyramid, so much more than being chosen or chased.
I’d like to close with a moment of compassion for the mentors who made us kneel, who slapped us even as they handed out rewards.
Don’t misunderstand. I feel no nostalgia about this. This is not a “times were different then” post. Humans have sucked and still suck at authority. We have every reason to speak truthfully from our own individual experiences, critiquing and seeking accountability from inequitable, harmful systems.
But then we gotta make new ones.
Kinder, macht neues - children, make something new. Richard Wagner said that (I know, right? Hans Sachs had nothing on that mutterfracker).
And that will mean giving some things up, all of us. Maybe it’s status, or money, or just some long-held idea about who’s up and who’s down, or that there should be up and down in the first place. No matter what, things will have to change if a change is gonna come. I find so much energy in excavating the past, not because it makes me angry - it does - but because it makes my heart swell with compassion. We’re having such a hard time getting life right, we humans, so dumb and self-involved and afraid. Maybe if we can truly name this, we can find the connection and confidence to move forward.
That’s the only direction we’ve got.
I’m in. If you kneel with me, let it be to get our hands dirty doing the work. Just, please, if you find an earthworm, don’t put it down my shirt. Been there, done that.
This one is dedicated to Mark Larson, wherever you are.
Thank you, O thought+full one!