This week – all week (Monday 31st to Sunday 6 Sept) – Glyndebourne screens their 2011 production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Trailer here. Details and play from here.
Die Meistersinger is labelled Wagner’s ‘only comedy’ and ‘most popular opera’. It's also the one Hitler reputedly saw 200 times. It’s not very comic, and its popularity is not due to hummable tunes, but it's very different from Wagner's other work - more intimate, human, and about community rather than gods - and the music is extraordinary.
Its anti-semitism is overt and the Jew Beckmesser is portrayed in the libretto and music abominably, an inescapable role confronting to both singers and producers. Kosky, at Bayreuth in 2017 produced the opera openly as an attack on Wagner's antisemitism. (New to Wagner? Our intro is here.)
So what does David McVicar, in the Glyndebourne production, offer? No controversy here, but emphasis on the two great strengths of the opera.
Firstly, part of the fascination of Die Meistersinger is its story about tradition and art, and particularly German art, and humanism (never mind the anti-Semitism.)
On the Nürnberg myth, take time to read this chapter, ‘Nuremberg Used and Abused’, from Littlejohn's The Ultimate Art.
And secondly, the opera also fascinates for its story of music, how it happens and the ways tradition and rules support but constrain creativity.
This production succeeded, for both those reasons. There’s meticulous attention to displaying tradition including the portrayal of community, with detail of costume and set and lighting. And there’s baritone Gerald Finley playing the complex, conflicted Hans Sachs, a character central to the themes Wagner wove into this opera, and thereby also to the controversy surrounding it.
Wagner was fascinated by the many meanings of madness – he named his villa in Bayreuth Wahnfried (Wahn for delusion and madness and Fried for peace and freedom.
Here’s Finley talking about the role.
And an interesting piece from Glyndebourne and McVicar about their production.
No, it’s not a perfect production. Most reviewers were unimpressed by the other singers – Here’s NYTimes.
Well that’s farewell to Glyndebourne for us livestreaming fans. As we sadly end the generous weeklong screenings Glyndebourne has provided, here’s a glimpse into putting on this epic scale opera from Director David McVicar, and designers. May 2011.
Thankyou, Glyndebourne.
The other elephant in this room
Glyndebourne and McVicar dodged the antisemitism in this opera, but also, like pretty much every production I know of, passed by the issue of a woman’s being offered as a prize. How many operas can you think of where a woman is the reward for a victor, or a bargaining factor in a trade? Sure, in most such operas she finally gets the one she loves (or escapes her fate by dying first), but few directors question the taken for granted premise that she should be so offered.
Kasper Holten did, in his final project as Director of Opera at Royal Opera House Covent Garden. That production came to Melbourne with Opera Australia in 2018. It was set in a gentlemen’s club, another version of the exclusive male society of master singers, with rules, privileges and pageantry. Antisemitism of course (Warwick Fyfe played a brilliant Beckmesser.) And sexism and chauvinism everywhere. Women are ushered to another room during business, and naturally offered as a prize for competition.
If Eva were a woman of character, what could she, and would she do?
Holten gave this formidable production a shock ending ‘that turns centuries of operatic and fairy tale story telling on its head’.
Lyn: 27/8/20