Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg is the longest opera in the repertoire. Depending upon tempi and staging, the show clocks in at about four hours and forty-five minutes of music. The opera requires an immense chorus, a large orchestra, and, unlike Wagner's other mature works, even indulges in a ballet, therefore requiring a corps of dancers. Further, the opera's subject matter is a bit rebarbative -- do you really want to spend about five hours in the company of a guild of contentious renaissance musicians led by the redoubtable cobbler and master-singer, Hans Sachs? Although billed as a comedy, the opera isn't really funny and the action pauses from time to time for elaborate discourses on art, madness, and the authority of German art. You're not likely to see the Meistersinger staged by any regional opera companies; only the largest venues can afford to produce this show. I've been able to avoid this opera for most of my life -- in my seventieth year, I decided to watch the Meistersinger in an elaborate (and highly controversial) production presented (and effectively filmed) at the Wagner's Festpielhaus in Bayreuth, German. It's a venue sacred to Wagner fans, a theater designed and built by Wagner himself and said to be uniquely uncomfortable -- the great man didn't want audience members snoozing during the presentation of his shows and, so, he built the pew-like seats and the fan-shaped auditorium around a very deep, if somewhat narrow stage, expressly to accommodate his repertoire of operas, subjecting viewers to purgatorial conditions as they endured the onslaught of his music. On opening night 2017, German celebrities gathered; Angela Merkel was in attendance and some versions of the opera show the chancellor on the Bayreuth equivalent of the "red carpet."
Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg is a vast continent in itself -- it has mountain ranges, great lakes, teeming cities, and its own musical climate. Wagner's operas, in general, are very loquacious -- there are extended colloquies and dialogue scenes that would not be out of place in an Ibsen play or something by George Bernard Shaw. Even when the subject matter is supposed to be jovial and light (as in the Meistersinger), the shows are serious, portentous and grave -- they proceed in deadly earnest and invite productions that are "thought-provoking" and sententious. The Bayreuth 2017 production Die Meistersinger is elaborately staged, presenting a series of "high-concept" interpretations of the Wagner work. The influence of Hans-Juergen Syberberg is evident in the production. Syberberg is one of the most famous Wagnerians in the last sixty years and invokes the composer repeatedly in his films, particularly Ludwig- Requiem for a Mad King and Hitler - a Film from Germany. (Syberberg's movies involve much puppetry, ornate tableaux full of drifting banks of fog, Victorian-era opera sets, and surreal devices dramatizing Wagner's overwhelming, if often malign, influence on German culture -- Hitler's regime is imagined as a perverse outcome of Wagner's nationalistic romanticism; Syberberg stages his film-version of Parsifal in the nooks and crannies of a barn-size death mask of Richard Wagner and made a five-hour documentary about Winifried Wagner, an English woman and Nazi sympathizer married to one of the Master's grandchildren.) Following Syberberg's lead, the 2017 Bayreuth production insists that the Meistersinger is, at least in part, a representation and reimagining of Wagner's family life and his marriage to Franz Liszt's daughter, Cosima. The show puts Wagner's anti-Semitism front and center and the opera's last act (more than two hours long) is staged in the courtroom in Nuremberg where the War Crimes Tribunal convened to try military and political figures involved in the Hitler regime. The political implications of this staging are a bit garbled -- it's not clear whether the show is celebrating anti-Semitism or denouncing it. There are caricatures in the show that don't merely verge on the offensive -- in fact, they are intended to be offensive and to trigger outrage. The huge size of the opera and its inordinate length, however, does act to dilute some of the more aggressively confrontational aspects of the production and, of course, the music is splendid in a monotonous sort of way.
In the broadest terms, Die Meistersinger involves a contest between candidates who seek admission to the Nuremberg guild of professional musicians. The prize in this contest in not merely entry to the prestigious guild but, also, marriage to the beautiful daughter, Eva, of one of the Meistersinger. A bold young knight, Walther von Stolzing -- a Junker as he is called -- contends for the prize with an older, more pompous member of the society, a man named Beckmesser. Beckmesser has been a vexed character in the Wagnerian ouevre -- it's often claimed that the figure, a pompous and pretentious middle-aged man (he serves as the "marker" or judge in singing contests in the first part of th opera) is imagined to be Jewish and given characteristics with anti-Semitic implications (It should be observed that it's equally often asserted that Beckmesser, an ardent if incompetent lover -- he wishes to win Eva's hand -- is primarily based on comedia dell-arte figures of old men in love with young girls and, also, derived from Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; like the poor Puritan, Malvolio, Beckmesser is sadistically harassed and bullied throughout the opera, physically beaten, and misused to the point that the audience is almost tempted to sympathize with him.) Complicating the situation is the fact that the widower Hans Sachs, the leader of the guild and its most acclaimed member, is in love with Eva and, perhaps, desires her as his wife. In the course of the opera, Sachs will disavow his desire for Eva as inappropriate and unseemly to a man his age. Invoking the cuckolded King Mark in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the music from that opera cited in the score, Sachs relinquishes his claims to Eva to the Junker Walther von Stolzing. Eva, the daughter of a Meistersinger called Pogner, seems quite content in her role as prize in the contest between the men -- she doesn't show a whole lot of agency in the opera and seems to be a good sport about being the laurel awarded the winning Meistersinger. There's a subplot involving some other young lovers and a scene in which poor Beckmesser is tricked into wooing a woman that he thinks is Eva, but, in fact, is someone else. This leads to a riot -- the people of Nuremberg are highly excitable -- in which the singer gets a finger broken and his shoulder dislocated; he has to perform the climactic contest in a sling. The score contains triumphal marches, love arias, fanfares, and church hymns. Several of the highly stylized songs made by the professional Meistersinger are performed complete with intricate commentary -- the songs have to comply with various rhyme schemes, chord progressions, and other rigorous rules of composition. (In one of these scenes, Sachs, who is also a shoemaker, beats out of his critique of a song on his cobbler's last.) Somehow, Sachs, who is the main character in the show, tricks Beckmesser into singing verses that have been garbled so as to result in weirdly surrealistic imagery -- "two bosoms" are "fuming" and releasing steam and the young lover ends up hanging himself in a tree. Wagner has ingeniously contrived the surreal verses to contain puns and homonyms that can be transformed into a conventional love song complete with singing birds, flowering trees, and the perfume of flowers. Walther von Stolzing wins the prize and Eva's hand in marriage. Poor, injured Beckmesser loses and just drifts out of sight. At the end, Hans Sachs steps into a pulpit and lectures the audience about the obligations of the German artist to the German Volk -- it's a virulently nationalist harangue, although phrased in noble cadences, invoking continuities in German music that will survive the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. Obviously, Wagner is placing his own art firmly within this tradition and defending it to the public. On this note, the vast opera concludes. (For part of my viewing of this opera -- it took me four days watching the show every morning from 6:30 to 7:30 am -- I lost the English subtitles and had to watch the piece assisted by German subtitles. From those subtitles, I understand that the opera is written in short lines of rhyming doggerel. Apparently, Wagner devised the plot and libretto and the show is not really based on any predecessor work of literature or musical theater.)
During my lifetime, operas in the classical canon or repertoire are generally staged in ways that impose the director and production designer's ideological sensibilities on the text. Such stagings constitute a critique or commentary on the work, pretending to find in the music drama themes and motifs that will resonate with modern audiences. It is very rare to see an opera staged in a manner consistent with the intentions of its composer and librettist --in other words, "straight" stagings of operas are very rare and, when this occurs, it has a high-concept element as well. An opera staged in accord with the conventions that ruled at the time of its origins is itself an avant-garde gesture, like playing Bach on original instruments. (This is true of Shakespeare plays as well.) Part of the fun of attending an opera is seeing the perverse "spin" put on the materials by the director and, often, deriding the folly and pretentiousness of that interpretation.
Bayreuth 2017 begins Die Meistersinger at Wagner's manor near the Festspielhaus, Wahnfried. It's a family gathering at the Wagner house, a lavishly appointed Biedermeier drawing room with a grand piano and various portraits on the wall, including Duerer's famous painting of himself as Christ. Franz Liszt is in attendance along with Cosima, his daughter, who is suffering a migraine. (There are surtitles projected on the scrim in front of the stage telling us about Cosima Wagner's headache and announcing the temperature outside and weather conditions.) Wagner sails around the room in his black beret and dark smoking jacket. A Jewish conductor named Hermann Levi is in attendance. When a hymn is sung, everyone drops to their knees, and poor Levi, who hesitates, is bullied into kneeling as well. (Levi will appear as Beckmesser as the show progresses.) Five or six little Wagners, all identically dressed in beret and smoking jacket climb out of the grand piano which seems to open into a cellar below the room. When a song is judged by the "marker", that judge stands in a box built from famous and familiar portraits of Cosima Wagner and the maestro himself. Wagner is played by the singer who will act the part of Hans Sachs. Cosima is played by the young woman who will be cast as Eva. The point is to devise an equation between Wagner's domestic situation and the later action of the play -- the contention over Eva by the rivals Beckmesser and Walther von Stolzing is imagined to be similar to the way that Wagner won the hand of Cosima Liszt (who was married to one of Wagner's loyal conductors Hans von Buelow at the time of their courtship.) As critics of this production have pointed out, the similarities between the plot of the opera and Wagner's family drama are badly garbled and really don't make sense. A courtship scene takes place on a grassy lawn that now occupies the center of the stage between the dark paneled walls of the sitting room. (These dark paneled walls in deep recession seem to invoke some paintings by Anselm Kiefer on German history -- Kiefer's idea is that the German wood becomes a kind of feasting hall with heavy, wood-grained walls. Some parts of the opera adopt this notion.) When Beckmesser tries to woo Eva (he's actually singing to someone else), a huge inflatable Jew with forelocks, black cap, and an immense hooked nose suddenly appears tall as a house at the front of the stage. Beckmesser's double, another caricatured Jew (who looks like something out of Der Stuermer) appears. There is a riot in the dark and Beckmesser gets beaten up. The lengthy last act of the play takes place in a courtroom designed to imitate the trial premises for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Somehow, the trial of songs between the rivals has become the War Crimes trial complete with white-helmeted guards and a harpist who sits like a court-reporter or stenographer next to the witness box. The flags of the victorious allies line the back of the courtroom. This thematic imposition on the opera is also very hard to make sense of. The contest between singers is very unlike a war crimes trial and, although the comparison between the two proceedings is thought-provoking, the notion really doesn't make sense. In the final scene in which Sachs preaches to the audience, he stands in the witness docket facing out from the stage. At one point in the show, pygmy Jews scurry around the stage, figures in black wearing grotesque anti-Semitic masks. At the curtain call, the diminutive Jews are revealed to be eight or nine-year old children who appear for their applause cradling the horrid masks under their arms.
I'm told that the singing featured in this production is splendid. Of course, the music surges and foams like an immense turbulent ocean.
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