Staging Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Germany, and especially at Bayreuth, has been a challenge since World War II ended. Its unbridled celebration of German art and culture has been thorny for those who could not see past the “German.” And, increasingly, even the concepts of art and culture, in the Western European sense, have faced headwinds from those who should surely be its staunchest advocates. As a result, Die Meistersinger – a work dedicated to art and to a nation where it flowered – has suffered more than most of the great works of the Western canon from directorial embarrassment, discomfort, and the overweening desire to signal virtue. The urge to profess some kind of ideology, usually but not always political, that distanced the director from the work’s seemingly distasteful elements has proved inescapable.
Enter Matthias Davids, a stage director known for his work in musicals, proposing to treat the work as a “colossal comedy.” A completely different approach, at last, even if Barrie Kosky’s complex and inventive 2017 staging was not without its moments of comedy.
Things began quite well. The curtain stayed down during the Prelude, at last allowing the audience to listen to the music without distraction. I won’t mention that the orchestra started playing before everyone was seated, and that conversations in the audience continued for at least two minutes into the Prelude amidst even louder shushing from those trying to get everyone to be quiet. I’ve never ever witnessed the like at Bayreuth.
The curtain rose to a giant and steep staircase. Atop rested a tiny Lutheran church. At the end of the service, the congregation carefully makes its way down the endless staircase. They are dressed in outfits that span the 16th through the 21st century, a mix of costumes throughout. Maybe to suggest that the opera is timeless? More puzzling is the distinct group of smartly dressed Japanese people who stand at the front of the stage. Are they tourists or a delegation?
During all this, we meet Eva and Walther. Eva is traditionally dressed, but the costume is unappealing. She’s kind of jumpy and immature. Walther has a man bun; he moves aimlessly about the stage, his costume indistinct. Why exactly are they attracted to each other? It’s unclear. Maybe we should ask the Japanese delegation. So far, I haven’t found anything much to laugh about.
Things get interesting as we transition to the guild meeting. The stage turns to reveal an interior space, reminiscent of the Festspielhaus auditorium: the same lights, the raked seating, the identical folding seats. The steep staircase is still visible and atop still rests the church. To me this represented the idea that art and religion are united in their pursuit of the highest.
After David’s extensive lecture on mastersong, perfectly delivered by Matthias Stier, Veit Pogner and Beckmesser enter, the latter played straight by Michael Nagy. No caricature, no exaggeration, nothing anti-Semitic. Exactly the right approach. Wagner’s text and music take care of everything else. That’s the genius of it. Next in is Hans Sachs, sung by Georg Zeppenfeld. Over the course of the evening, Sachs turns out to be rather irritable and bad tempered…why is Eva smitten with him? At this point, Beckmesser is way more sympathetic than either Sachs or Walther.
The Masters are a weird lot, and many of them have odd tics. They are dressed in the style of the Schlaraffia, a 19th-century men’s society. If you didn’t read the program notes, there is no way you would understand the reference.
Walther unsuccessfully tries to sing his way into the group, and it all descends into chaos at the end of the first act, which culminates with a detonation at the top of the stairs causing the church to lurch off its foundation and tilt menacingly to the side. What does this shocking and not at all funny moment mean?
The second act set suggests a Nuremberg street with buildings built of children’s building blocks. Colorful. The series of duets proceeded relatively straight-forwardly. The third act was a circular dais representing Sachs’s workshop. The program notes that each act represented a basic shape: triangle, quadrangle, circle, though with no explanation.
It was in this act that Sachs’s bad mood became most evident. He was mightily annoyed when David suggested he get remarried. And he lost it completely after Walther’s improvisation of the third bar of the Preislied upon seeing Eva. Sachs has a meltdown, throwing furniture around and banging his hands on the table. Quite shocking. The music certainly shows emotion, but calm down, Hans. Finally, we get to the quintet. You know it’s a bad director, when they simply can’t leave well enough alone. Everything was fine at first: time really did seem to stop, as it should for that sublime moment. But then Beckmesser appears in the background, fidgeting and trying to memorize the song he stole. Sadly, our attention is also stolen. But even this misstep by Davids was not as hideous as Katharina Wagner’s version in 2008, when she staged the quintet as a family photo where one of the kids can’t hold still because he needs to go pee.
Which gets us to the Festwiese: a gaudy, brightly lit set reminiscent of a game show, with an inflated cow upside down above the stage, its legs splayed and its udders projecting skywards. The cow is a reference to “Laughing Cow,” the French cheese, which in French is “La Vache qui rit” which is a pastiche on “Val-ky-rie.” It came about in WWI as a way for the French to mock the Germans. At least the cow was laughing.
Eva appears, trapped inside a cocoon made of flowers. When she emerges from the flowers, she is wearing a modern casual outfit, which is completely different from the dress she wears in Sachs’ workshop earlier in the act, where she is apparently dressed for the Festwiese. The Festwiese was celebratory, and Davids was probably at his best choreographing the various groups of guilds. It did look a bit like a musical, but in this context, that worked all the way through the Preislied.
Then came the ending, which has proven the greatest challenge in recent times. Sachs’s closing exhortation to Walther was when his bad mood delivery actually worked. I’ve never seen it sung so aggressively, but it was convincing. He was pissed off that Walther refused the medal and was passionate in his defense of German art. I was happy. But midway through Sachs’s monologue, Beckmesser comes to the front of the stage and, with much effort, manages to unplug a huge cable. As soon as Sachs is done singing his monologue, he rushes to the front of the stage and plugs the cable back in. Slowly the cow reinflates.
It gets worse. At the conclusion of Sachs’s monologue, Eva strides to Walther and grabs the medal out of his hand, goes straight back to her father, Pogner, and shoves it back into his hands. Then she returns to Walther, takes his hand, and walks with him off stage. Meanwhile Sachs and Beckmesser engage in friendly banter and walk together slowly towards the back of the stage while the chorus sings “Heil Heil.” So, Sachs’s exhortation was all in vain? And is it Eva who disdains him, after passionately sharing her feelings for him in the previous scene? Could someone explain the logic to me.
Musically, there were extreme highs and lows. Daniele Gatti’s conducting was occasionally chaotic and demonstrated a loss of control. During Pogner’s aria, singer and orchestra drifted apart and even the orchestra had trouble keeping themselves together. Things collapsed completely at the conclusion of the second act riot scene, as if chorus and orchestra were in two different time zones. That scene is notoriously difficult to stage and perform, but I have never experienced anything quite this disastrous at a theater the caliber of Bayreuth. On the Festival Meadow the offstage band was a good half second out of sync with the orchestra in the pit. How is this possible? That particular organizational problem was conclusively solved over 50 years ago.
But Gatti also delivered moments of heart-stopping sublimity. He achieved an ebb and flow that brought movement and grace to the music, and a lightness of touch perfectly in tune with Wagner’s score that moves so effortlessly from one moment to the next: what a miracle that score is. Occasionally, there were balance problems in instrument voicing, but often enough, Gatti got it just right and the sound was glorious.
Overall, the singing was outstanding. The strongest performance was Christina Nilsson’s Eva. Her bright voice is ideal: she was at times lyrical, spunky, gentle, loving. Her heart-wrenching outbursts in Sachs’s workshop filled the hall like no other singer that night. Michael Spyres provided a Walther to match Eva nicely. His voice carried without having that piercing metallic quality of Klaus Florian Vogt that many adore but I find off-putting. Matthias Stier put in a strong performance as David, as did Christa Mayer as Magdalena, and Jongmin Park did a solid Pogner. Michael Nagy’s Beckmesser was a good match for Zeppenfeld’s Hans Sachs. Both of them were under-powered for the orchestra and the space. I did not care for Zeppenfeld’s rendition of Sachs: it lacked lyricism, humor, wit. In recent times, Michael Volle’s Sachs is hard to top: the clarity of his diction, the attention to the nuances of the text, delivered with his velvety yet powerful voice. Zeppenfeld did not even come close.
In sum: Davids indeed presented Meistersinger freed from overt politics. However, absent politics and ideology, there was not much substance left. What a disappointment; an opportunity squandered. Meistersinger at Bayreuth evidently still has a way to go. I hope one day to see a production that unashamedly embraces the opera that Wagner wrote, an opera that celebrates art and culture, an opera rooted in the spirit of Bach, of Sachs and Dürer and, by extension, Luther and Gutenberg, Germans who ended the middle ages and made possible the modernity we enjoy today. Yes, Meistersinger celebrates Germany – the nation that would come to unleash unspeakable horror upon the world, but also a nation that has given the world undreamed-of riches that inspire and nourish, a gift for which I am eternally grateful.