Bayreuth Festival (3) - Der fliegende Holländer, 29 July 2026

Festspielhaus

Daland – Mika Kares
Senta – Elisabeth Teige
Erik – Benjamin Bruns
Mary – Nadine Weissmann
Steersman – Kieran Carrel
The Dutchman – Nicholas Brownlee

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov

Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filshtinsky
Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint),
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Oksana Lyniv (conductor)

Images: (c) Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrather

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Dutchman and Dutchman return, still ship-less, to their small town of still smaller horizons for what may or may not be the last time. They have had a good run by recent Bayreuth standards, rightly so, and are not scheduled for next season. (Minus Tristan, all dramas from Rienzi onwards are scheduled either for this season or next.) Whilst there was naturally immense relief all round at an actual theatrical experience amidst the torture-debris of the ‘AI’-Ring debacle, things were looking a little tired, at least until a third act that continues to pack quite a punch. I doubt this was really the fault of anyone concerned, although Tcherniakov presumably did not return to direct this revival, since there was no production team present for curtain calls. Indeed, what we saw had very much the air of a repertory house revival, somewhat at odds with what is held to be the ethos of ‘Werkstatt Bayreuth’, if infinitesimally so when compared to the horrors that had unfolded the previous two nights. (I shall deal with Die Walküre in a single ‘rest of the Ring’ review following its much-awaited Götterdämmerung.)

Providing, as ever, his own set designs, Tcherniakov presents in the Prelude a pantomime in which the young ‘H.’ (Holländer, we presume) sees his mother hanging lifeless from a house window, shamed by a hypocritical, Peter Grimes-like community that had her yield – perhaps as sex worker – to Daland’s advances, only to be cast aside when no longer of use. His adult return is no seven-year ritual in search of an impossible love, but rather pursuit of revenge against the man and more broadly the community that did this. His whole life, one senses, has explicitly led up to this, as he is welcomed by the venal Daland – maybe he continues to run up such expenses? – and later his wife Mary, acted with palpable compassion by Nadine Weismann, as well as by Senta. Invited to dinner, his plan falls into place when, following interesting initial reluctance that has her decline even to come inside, Senta falls for him. The third act shows the community at large, in mirthless corporate celebration for which the Dutchman’s crew (or whatever they be) notably fail to participate. Shots are fired, Daland falling before his daughter, who nonetheless continues to hold faith in H., to be cruelly tossed aside—as surplus to his requirements as his mother had to Senta’s father’s. Daland’s house and wealth ablaze, the entire claustrophobic Nordic townscape at risk, Mary returns to kill the Dutchman. Senta’s highly disconcerting, hysterical turn between grief and celebration is ultimately transformed into compassion for the woman who has long cared for her. Perhaps, then, as we hear the 1860 post-Tristan ‘redemptive’ ending, there is a form of feminist redemption after all. Men have created and perpetuated this world and its revenge saga; if women survive, they can hardly do worse and might, just might, do better.

Oksana Liniv’s conducting remained the weakest link in the evening’s proceedings (from when I last heard it in 2024). It is a pity she could not have been replaced with someone more able and willing to respond to such a dramatic conception, or indeed any other, of the work. If the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra played well enough, it rarely sounded inspired, and one could hardly blame it. Lyniv’s alternation between pressing too hard and listlessly meandering, the latter especially apparent in a second act that seemed much longer than it was, offered a reversion to number opera seemingly not from aesthetic conviction, but because a more music-drama-focused performance could not be sustained. A sudden change of gear to breakneck speed at the close of the spinning chorus had pit and stage fall apart for several bars, the chorus compelled to find its own way back into sync, quite unaided by the conductor. 

A further sadness lay in the sound offered by a now reduced chorus,  especially at the beginning of the third act. The Festival’s decision to take an axe to what should be one of its crown jewels has regrettably had consequences, notwithstanding the musicianship of those remaining and their new director. In the title role, Nicholas Brownlee had an awkward beginning, intonation surprisingly, repeatedly awry in the first act. He grew into his own, though, to offer a compelling performance later on. Having sung two other challenging roles (Fasolt and Hunding) on two immediately preceding evenings, Mika Kares was undaunted by prospect or reality of Daland, outsinging the Dutchman in the first act and continuing to impress thereafter. Benjamin Bruns and Elisabeth Teige offered an aural, if not necessarily dramatic, glimpse of what a future Siegfried and Brünnhilde might sound like, Bruns impassioned and vocally fearless as Erik, Teige taking all in her musicodramatic stride in a role notorious for its demands. It was heartening too to welcome a fresh-voiced Kieran Carrel from Berlin’s Deutsche Oper to the Green Hill as the Steersman; let us hope this intelligent portrayal will prove neither his last visit nor role here. If I had certain reservations, then, this revival nonetheless proved quite a tonic after the anti-human production horrors of the two preceding evenings.

Salzburg Easter Festival (1): BPO/Petrenko - Mahler, 3 April 2026

Grosses Festspielhaus

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Symphony no.8 in E-flat major

Jacquelyn Wagner, Sarah Wegener, Liv Redpath (sopranos)

Beth Taylor, Fleur Barron (mezzo-sopranos)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

Gihoon Kim (baritone)

Le Bu (bass)

Berlin Radio Chorus (director: Justus Barleben)

Salzburg Bach Choir (director: Michael Schneider)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (directors: Wolfgang Götz and Regina Sgier)

Tölz Boys’ Choir (director: Marco Barbon)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

If it initially felt more than a little strange, even heretical, to hear Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on Good Friday, this outstanding Salzburg Easter Festival performance from assembled soloists, choirs, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Kirill Petrenko swept all before it, doubts included—or perhaps better, incorporating such theological doubts into the experience of those listening 115 years on from the work’s premiere. A little under four years from the outbreak of the First World War, that age may seem, simultaneously, both strangely close to and increasingly distant from the insanity of the world’s current predicaments. Mahler was no aestheticist; this rightly offered no refuge. But nor did it hold up anything so predictable as a mere mirror. No audience member will have experienced it in quite the same way, but all will surely have been edified, exhilarated, and far more besides. The indifference, at best, in which so many contemporary Mahler performances proceed was never an option here. Petrenko’s way with the work was often surprising, yet never arbitrarily so. It was, as is typical of this artist, a deeply thought-out reading that challenged, confounded, and ultimately, dare I say, came close to that thing we may still, hope against hope, consider to be transcendence.

Beth Taylor (standing), Jacquelyn Wagner and Fleur Barron on either side

I shall admit to having had my doubts earlyish on in the First Part. The organ sound was far from ideal. More fundamentally, I wondered quite where the performance was heading, with highly contrasting blocks of material: a brisk and lithe choral section seeming almost underwhelming, followed by spacious, operatic solo singing that seemed perhaps closer to Berlioz or Verdi than Mahler. Unity of soloists and chorus intriguingly suggested something akin to the world of nineteenth-century oratorio – Dvořák’s Stabat Mater came to mind – but I began to ask myself: where is the symphonism in this? I should have known better, since Petrenko had taken a highly original view that yet proved compelling both in the moment and in retrospect. Chamber-music playing – yes, in this movement – suggested an affinity with the Berlin Philharmonic Wagner of Herbert von Karajan, reminding us of the roots of this festival, revisited this year in a new Ring, but more importantly offering a fascinating new perspective (for me, at least) on music I had thought I knew well.

Liv Redpath (Mater gloriosa)

It goes without saying, yet doubtless should not, that the Berlin Philharmonic’s chamber playing, just as much as any titanic, surround-sound barnstorming, proved superlative and indeed enlightening. When Petrenko whipped up a storm, he truly did so; when the choirs sang, seating arrangements only enhanced a musical understanding that reached back to the antiphonies of ancient polyphony. (I thought, perhaps idiosyncratically, of Wagner’s Palm Sunday Palestrina.) Where, though, was the Mahler, I might perhaps have asked earlier on. It was increasingly clear, again both in the moment and in retrospect. Ghosts from his earlier symphonies increasingly haunted the music: liminal passages from the Rückert symphonies, ecstasy from the Second and Third, and more than a little Wunderhorn later on. And when the moment of return arrived, any idea that this conception was not, among other things, symphonic through and through was dispelled once and for all. If there was something disturbing about hearing those cries of ‘Gloria!’ on this of all days, there was something utterly thrilling to it too: a tribute to Mahler’s syncretic vision, itself reimagined in further syncretism, rather than any banal blasphemy. All came together, as it must, yet in at least the last two performances I have heard of this symphony, it utterly failed to do so; moreover, it came together in a display of long-range thinking that made complete sense of the progression we had heard so far, also anticipating that to come.

The introduction to the Second Part is, of course, one of the most extraordinary musical landscapes in the entire canon. In that, it follows Goethe and, for some of us, even goes beyond him. Bar prolonged electronic interference from what I assume was a malfunctioning hearing aid, this wanted nothing. Here, Petrenko and the Berliners offered their very own – rather, Mahler’s – rite of spring, initially cold yet melting, suggestive of the snow one can still view here on the Alpine landscape visible from all quarters in the city, yet in its translucency also partaking in a further liminality already hinting at the very different heights to come. At that moment when they must, strings dug in, in a way one fancies they must have for Mahler in 1910 Munich, yet probably did not. It was, at any rate, both expertly and movingly shaped. When choir and echo entered, it was likewise as if we heard chamber choirs writ large, that translucency extended not only to song but to words and verse themselves.

 

As other persons had their say, we recognised them both as of old and quite anew, classical yet contemporary: the ideal for any performance, as Daniel Barenboim (who surely would have had the measure of this work he never conducted) might have told us—and Pierre Boulez, who certainly did on both counts, very much did tell us, both in words and music. The early stages of the rest of this part truly imparted a sense of ascent both physical and metaphysical, as if partaking in a musical-cosmological demonstration of the mediaeval Great Chain of Being. Gihoon Kim’s excellent Pater ecstaticus was, yes, ecstatic, but also clearly heartfelt, presaging the deep (in every sense) love extolled and embodied by the Pater profundus of Le Bu. The word ‘Kettenschmerz’, towards the close of his first solo, he almost spat out, without slightest sacrifice to beauty of tone or deeper meaning. This is clearly a rare talent: an artist new to me but whom I hope to hear much more from. Beth Taylor’s Mulier Samaritana revealed a fine, Erda-like contralto-like mezzo, equally at home with the alchemy that turns words into something approaching music drama. Jacquelyn Wagner offered a thrillingly, operatic turn for Magna peccatrix. First among an extraordinary team of equals in the First Part, Sarah Wagener sounded here, quite rightly, more oratorio-like in the part of Una poenitentium, without in any sense refusing the inheritance from her composer namesake. Speaking of whom, the Siegfried-like Doctor Marianus of Benjamin Bruns, rang out in uncommon harmony with the orchestra. All soloists, as well as all choirs, contributed to the greater whole in outstanding fashion, whether the Third Symphony’s Bimm-Bamm sublimation in our corps of younger angels, Fleur Barron’s imploring, inwardly strong Maria Aegyptiaca, or the pre- and post-Parsifalian voice from above, Mater gloriosa, of Liv Redpath, both necessary response and necessarily sweet.

 

All the while, Petrenko proved, after Mahler, our (pen-)ultimate guide. There was no more a weak link in the symphonic logic of this vast structure than there was in the playing of the Berlin Philharmonic or the singing of our onstage cosmogony. All took its place with a Wagnerian inevitability that belied the elements of crowd control, however unseen and unheard, which must always inform a performance of this symphony. When, heralded by a clarion-like yet tender return for Doctor Marianus, the Chorus mysticus entered, it was with a magic that seemed to lie somewhere between Mozart and Nono. Disbelief in the celebrated and/or notorious last line of Goethe could be suspended, because one felt one actually believed; perhaps even in the old canard, credo quia absurdum. There was, though, nothing absurd to a coronation of queens and princes of heaven alike, even on Good Friday. Whether or no this were the beyond we glimpsed, none could doubt that we felt we had.

 

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Le grand macabre, 4 July 2023

Nationaltheater

Images: © Wilfried Hösl

  

Gepopo, Venus – Sarah Aristidou
Amanda – Seonwoo Lee
Amando – Avery Amereau
Prince Go-Go – John Holiday
Astradamors – Sam Carl
Mescalina – Lindsay Ammann
Piet vom Fass – Benjamin Bruns
Nekrotzar – Michael Nagy
Ruffiack – Andrew Hamilton
Schobiack – Thomas Mole
Schabernack – Nikita Volkov
White Minister – Kevin Conners
Black Minister: Bálint Szabó
Refugees – Isabel Becker, Sabine Heckmann, Saeyong Park, Sang-Eun Shim

Director – Krzysztof Warlikowski
Set designs – Małgorzata Szczęśniak
Lighting – Felice Ross
Video – Kamil Polak
Choreography – Claude Bardouil
Dramaturgy - Christian Longchamp, Olaf Roth

Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (director: Christoph Heil)
Bavarian State Orchestra

Kent Nagano (conductor)

The Fourth of July has obvious political meaning in the United States. This year, it also offered the date of the long-awaited British General Election: a curious event, strangely without drama given the near-certainty of its result, in strong contrast to others over the past two decades, yet with deeply ominous hints at what might be come, as well as the occasional moment of hope. Ligeti’s apocalyptic anti-anti-opera Le grand macabre could add a little piquancy to the date, its activity, and its commemoration—and certainly did, in what, perhaps surprisingly, is its Munich premiere production. The end of the world, after all, seems no less nigh than it will have done at the 1978 Stockholm world premiere and, rightly or wrongly, rather more so than at the first performance of Ligeti’s 1996 revision, at the Salzburg Festival in 1997 (from whose post-Chernobyl production, by Peter Sellars, the composer angrily dissociated himself). 

Many now appear to find it dated, at least dramatically. Hand on heart, much of its humour – post-Dadaist if you will, but often plain silly – is not mine, though it arguably comes closer to that strange beast ‘German humour’. I can see how the ‘naughty schoolboy’ shouting of ‘rude’ words, the fart jokes, and so on would irritate, but for me it is probably better to see this as part and parcel of an absurdism that may well be the only way we can face the incomprehensible insanity of an impending nuclear holocaust. Beckett’s – and Kurtág’s – Fin de partie may come closer to our taste, but taste is at best a matter purely for the individual, and Ligeti’s work is rightly admired to the skies by Kurtág, as by many of the rest of us. The Haydnesque riot of musical invention is at least as much the thing, if one cares to listen—and why on earth, or, as at the close, beyond it, would one not? 

Leading the Bayerische Staatsorchester, Kent Nagano offered a worthy conspectus of the array of musical strategies on offer, from the brilliant car-horn reinvention of the opening Toccata to Monteverdi’s Orfeo (surely a nod to Agon there too) to the inevitable – in dramaturgy and musical nature – closing passacaglia. The orchestra was on outstanding form, keenly responding to Nagano’s direction. I did wonder at times whether he might have opened things up a little, both in terms of greater dramatic sweep, but would I then have complained that too little attention was paid to the character of individual, closed forms? And if the silliness was not underlined, surely that is in any case the last thing it needs. Again, this is probably more a matter of taste than of anything else. I found it for the most part engrossing, and a salutary reminder of where the work’s greatest merits lie, as well as the (productive) aesthetic crisis that followed. In more than one way, this is an end-of-the-road work. 

Astradamors (Sam Carl), Mescalina (Lindsay Ammann)

In this sort of work, it is rare for vocal performances to disappoint. You do not really sing (nor, for that matter, play) Ligeti if you are not well equipped to do so, though there are always exceptions. Moreover, the sort of singers who do are unlikely to put ‘star’ behaviour over the needs of the ensemble. The work in any case gives them plenty of character behaviour in which to shine, which pretty much everyone did. Benjamin Bruns’s Piet vom Fass proved an excellent everyman, framing and participating our visit to Breughelland as required; he worked well with Sam Carl’s Astradamors, much in the same vein, albeit properly different too. Michael Nagy’s rich-toned Nekrotzar suggested a very human weakness at the heart of his caprice. Sarah Aristidou’s Venus, perhaps surprisingly, grabbed my attention more than her Gepopo; not that I could put my finger on why, so that was perhaps just me (or the production). John Holiday’s Prince Go-Go and Lindsay Ammann's Mescalina were very well drawn, dramatically and vocally. The soldiers, post-apocalypse, made a fine impression. I even found the copulating duo Amanda (Seonwoo Lee) and Amando (Avery Amereau) relatively non-irritating. 

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production for the most part did its job, but at times seemed a bit ‘phoned in’. One had the impression the singers were providing their own Personenregie, the production simply offering a chance to wander around the large stage. Warlikowski’s ideas were promising enough: refugees watching the events from a bureaucratic reception centre (probably a converted school gymnasium). Computer activity doubtless made decisions that hastened the end, whilst properly banal in immediate nature. Animal masks added an air of mystery later on, though it was somewhat unclear what, beyond the general kink scene, motivated their appearance. One might, I suppose, argue that wider issues were suggested rather than hammered home; that would perhaps, though, be unduly charitable, for what ultimately came across as a half-hearted engagement. 

Piet vom Fass (Benjamin Bruns), Nekrotzar (Michael Nagy)

As now seems to be his wont, Warlikowski showed us some silent film clips (David Wark Griffith’s Intolerance and Abel Gance’s Napoléon). In the case of historical collapse of civilisations, the association was reasonably obvious, even if the reasoning remained a little obscure. Most of us at least think we oppose intolerance; outside France, few of us are fervent Bonapartists either. The contribution made by pictures of Ligeti, both as a child and in more familiar guise, along with quotations such as one outlining his belief that he would grow up to be a prize-winning scientist, was less clear: more suited to the programme book, perhaps, or a pre-performance talk? The music, though, was undoubtedly the thing—and that, perhaps, is not the worst message for an anti-anti-opera.

RIAS Choir/Kammerakademie Potsdam/Doyle - Mendelssohn, Hensel, and Bach, 14 March 2024

Kammermusiksaal

Mendelssohn: Psalm 115, ‘Nicht unserm Namen, Herr’, MWV A 9
Fanny Hensel: Hiob
Mendelssohn: Ave Maria, op.23 no.2, MWV B 19
Mendelssohn: Hör mein Bitten, MWV B 49
Bach: Cantata, ‘Die Elenden sollen essen’, BWV 75: Sinfonia to the second part
Mendelssohn: Psalm 114, ‘Da Israel aus Ägypten zog,’ op.51

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

Ludwig Mittelhammer (bass)

RIAS Chamber Choir

Kammerakademie Potsdam

Justin Doyle (conductor)

A delightful and enlightening concert from the RIAS Chamber Choir, Kammerakademie Potsdam, Justin Doyle, and an excellent trio of vocal soloists: focusing on Mendelssohn, but also including a cantata by his sister Fanny Hensel and a sinfonia by the family’s musical house god, Johann Sebastian Bach. Mendelssohn’s setting of verses from the 115^th Psalm was the first of five such large-scale settings he made for soloists, chorus, and orchestra between 1829 and 1844. It revealed almost equally strong influence from Bach and Handel, the latter in particular occasionally Mozartified. Here, as throughout, the RIAS Chamber Choir proved admirable in every respect: warm, clear, faultless in pitch and diction. The second of its three movements, a duet with chorus, whilst not un-Handelian in its way of duetting, was less obviously ‘Baroque’ on the surface. Anna Prohaska and Benjamin Bruns offered a mellifluous performance, bassoons and more generally orchestral wind pleasingly audible. The ensuing bass arioso was, similarly, beautifully taken by Ludwig Mittelhammer, with a closing chorus, its opening a cappella, confirming all preceding choral and orchestral virtues. 

Hensel’s 1831 cantata Hiob (‘Job’) sets three pairs of verses from the Book of Job. Three trumpets, timpani, and an excellent mezzo from the choir joined the orchestra and soloists on stage. Here, especially in the opening chorus, Bach’s influence was still stronger: in woodwind writing, figuration, harmony, chromatic lines, and more. It is not pastiche: there were pleasing instances to be heard of nineteenth-century colour and, again, Mozartian mediation (perhaps, in the final chorus, the Haydn of The Creation too). But Hensel had certainly learned her Bachian lessons well, as well indeed as her brother. The central arioso, ‘Warum verbirgest du dein Anlitz’ employs all four soloists, the mezzo’s opening question responded to by the other three, followed by a brief reprise of the former. A third, choral movement once again revealed highly accomplished harmony and counterpoint, the assembled forces under Doyle’s wise leadership performing this – and the rest – with relish and understanding. 

Mendelssohn’s responsorial Ave Maria for tenor, chorus, and orchestra (here two clarinets, two bassoons, three cellos, and two double basses) from 1827 seems to me less inspired. I am not sure Marian devotion was really his thing, though this is of course also a very early work (if later than the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and the Octet). Its central, choral section struck me as more interesting, nimble cello pizzicato offering an uncanny presentiment of the second movement processional from the Italian Symphony. It was, in any case, interesting to hear the piece. 

In the second half, we were in different territory altogether, with far more characteristic Mendelssohn. In the 1844 Hör mein Bitten (or ‘Hear my Prayer’, as most English-speaking listeners will know it), Prohaska brought a welcome sense of drama: not ‘operatic’, but certainly drawing on her rich and varied operatic experience. There were some truly magical passages, not least her sinuous duet with clarinet (partly set against cello pizzicato). With a larger choir and orchestra than one generally hears, as well as increasingly dramatic delivery – overall conception well-shaped indeed – this was worlds away from English cathedral music; it certainly evinced more biting consonants and accompanying verbal meaning. Both have their place, of course, but, closer to a miniature Lobgesang and even to Wagner, here was a splendidly Romantic Mendelssohn, the composer of Elijah and St Paul. 

The Sinfonia to the second part of Bach’s Cantata ‘Die Elenden sollen essen’ received what struck me as a near-ideal performance: warm, cultivated, and welcoming, My only regret was that that was all we heard of the piece. No matter: in Mendelssohn’s 1839 setting of verses from the 114^th Psalm, we had a perfect crown to the concert, surveying in each of its four stanzas a different aspect to the composer’s craft. The integration of Handelian antecedents and the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the second proved a joy, but then so did the simpler questioning homophony of the third, and the glorious jubilation (and struggles) of the fourth. ‘Da Israel aus Ägypten zog’ was always likely to bring echoes of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, but Bach remained as strong a guide. Doyle once again led a fine performance, colourful and directed, in which every word as well as every note told.

Kelly/BPO/Rattle - Strauss and Beethoven, 5 March 2020

Philharmonie

Strauss: Oboe Concerto in D major

Beethoven: Christus am Ölberge, op.85

Jonathan Kelly (oboe)

Iwona Sobotka (soprano)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

David Soar (bass)

Berlin Radio Choir (chorus director: Simon Halsey)

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Not all conductors make for excellent accompanists, but such has long struck me as a particular strength of Simon Rattle. At any rate, so it was on this occasion, Rattle leading the Berlin Philharmonic in Strauss’s Oboe Concerto: beautifully shaped, yet never unduly moulded; full of telling chiaroscuro. Jonathan Kelly’s account of the solo part perfectly complemented such playing, offering a true sense of having risen from within the orchestra’s ranks – empirically true in this case too! – to spin a magical line both vocal in quality and beyond the capabilities of the voice. Orchestral woodwind echoing and shadowing the soloist heightened such magic, in a detailed performance that was yet quite without indulgence. The first movement offered greater variation of mood than one often hears, much to its expressive, formal advantage. Transitions between movements were expertly handled, first by Rattle, then by Kelly, Strauss’s Goethian conception of metamorphosis vividly, meaningfully apparent. A songful slow movement, never exaggerated, led to a finale of Elysian lightness. Who, after all, could resist Kelly’s duetting with Emmanuel Pahud, or such cultivated string playing? And why would anyone wish to try? Imbued with all the melancholic cheer of an Indian summer, this was as fine a performance of the work as I have heard.

A true rarity followed: Beethoven’s oratorio, Christus am Ölberge. Rattle has been touring the work with the LSO, so perhaps a recording is in the offing. On the evidence of this performance, it would prove a welcome addition. The opening Introduzione struck me as especially well judged: not unduly ‘symphonic’, but rather an opening to something one might have guessed to be a vocal work if one did not know. The chamber orchestra employed for Strauss had been somewhat expanded; Haydn’s presence was discernible, yet neither here nor elsewhere was this music simply to be reduced to influence from forebears. Already, as throughout, there were distinct flashes of something closer to Fidelio. Benjamin Bruns’s opening, unaccompanied recitative, sweet-toned and lyrical, suggested an inspired choice of casting, a suggestion furthered as the work progressed. Like Beethoven, one must endure a dated and at best mediocre libretto, very much run-of-the mill Aufklärung, but when the orchestra re-entered, it prepared psychological advances such as those mere – often very ‘mere’ – words could never have anticipated. The post-Mozartian agitation of Christus’s following aria speaks in somewhat generalised terms: Idomeneo without the focus, one might say. That said, Bruns not only brought an extraordinary command of colour – the wanness of ‘nahen Grab’, for instance – but also, alongside the Berlin woodwind, a growing sense of that most indispensable Beethovenian quality, hope.

Iwona Sobotka’s recitative and aria as Seraph travelled with ease between truly hochdramatisch delivery and greater intimacy: operatic, then, in the best sense. Her coloratura glittered yet never for its own sake, put to excellent musico-dramatic use. Echoes of The Creation, long a favourite Rattle work, were clear; so too, I think, was an affinity in the aria’s central stanza with The Magic Flute. In both cases, there are decidedly worse models to follow. Once the first-rate Berlin Radio Choir had entered, the number became ever more developmental, Beethoven’s symphonic inclinations here, as in later numbers, offering intriguing, individual, and for the most part highly convincing formal solutions. Such was certainly the case in the ensuing duet between Christus and Seraph and the choruses following, the dated libretto if anything heightening the sense of formal innovation. Again, Fidelio, or at least Leonore, beckoned. There were times when I felt the music would have benefited from being taken less hurriedly, but I should not exaggerate; other tempi were more judiciously chosen.

David Soar’s human Petrus, consoled by a Christus palpably increasing in strength and resolve, heralded a delightful return from Sobotka’s Seraph. An heroic last hurrah from Bruns’s Christus, ready to brave and vanquish Hell, proved just the herald for a closing chorus strikingly reminiscent both of Mozart (La clemenza di Tito) and Haydn (The Seasons). Once more, Beethoven and his performers chose their models well, finding inspiration rather than constraint in them.

Salzburg Festival (11) - BPO/Petrenko - Berg and Beethoven, 25 August 2019

Grosses Festspielhaus

Berg: Lulu-Suite

Beethoven: Symphony no.9 in D minor, op.125

Marlis Petersen (soprano)

Elisabeth Kulman (contralto)

Benjamin Bruns (tenor)

Kwangchul Youn (bass)

Berlin Radio Chorus (chorus director: Gijs Leenaars)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Image: Salzburger Festspele / Marco Borrelli

Leave aside recorded comparisons, at least for now. If I have heard a better Berg Lulu-Suite in the concert hall, then I have momentarily forgotten it, which seems unlikely. The first time I heard Kirill Petrenko was in 2006, at Covent Garden, conducting a Schoenberg-Bartók double-bill (Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle). He greatly impressed me then; he impressed me just as greatly in Berg here. Beethoven, as in last year’s Seventh Symphony, again with the Berlin Philharmonic, was considerably more mixed – at least for me, though the Salzburg audience once again reacted with great enthusiasm, indeed a standing ovation.

Petrenko’s emphasis on line, or rather on lines, was what struck me most of all in the first movement. Thinking of his Berlin predecessors, I imagined both Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado, in their very different ways, appreciating this (not that others would not have done). Its flow seemed ideal, but so too did its translucency. There was less to the bass line than I imagine in my head, but this is surely a work, surely a composer, in which one performance can give only a taste of the possibilities inherent. Workings were certainly clear, without pedantry. Not that it was anti-Romantic, or un-Romantic: how could it be? It was loved, clearly, without being smothered. In the ‘Hymne’ section, serial processes seemed to become all the clearer, vertical and horizontal more equal. Had this been a deliberate strategy, to help the audience orient its ears? Who knows? I suspect it helped, anyway.

The second movement offered contrast that was riotous yet related, with an unmistakeable, highly welcome, whiff of Weimar to it. If the first movement seemed to have edged closer to Boulez as time had gone on, this went closer still, making me wonder whether Petrenko would continue the orchestra’s tradition in Boulez’s own music, whether from the composer himself or Simon Rattle. Let us hope so. Wonderful liminal passages as phantasmagorical as anything in Strauss prepared the way for Marlis Petersen’s entrance. Petersen’s uncommonly verbal approach – with no discernible loss, at least to me, of accuracy of coloratura – enabled a shift in balance and thus character for the ‘Lied der Lulu’. A slinky fourth movement seemed especially to relish the tonal implications of Berg’s music, whilst remaining very much in the line of what had preceded. An evocative musical wasteland duly moved for the final movement’s opening: third-act Parsifal in Whitechapel? Yet as the wasteland become more overtly urban, I speculated as to Petrenko’s Varèse as much as his Weill. How Berg’s phrases were turned, moreover: with meaning, never mannerism. Mahler (at last?) came to mind, the Mahler of the Tenth Symphony, in that chord and its aftermath. The music – music ‘itself’ – stopped with a wondrous, Wozzeck-like chill.

D minor was always a special key for the Second Viennese School. It was hardly less special for Beethoven, nor indeed for Mozart before him. I should love to hear a brazenly modernistic Ninth, but have yet to hear one; even Michael Gielen, so refreshing, so inspiring, in the other Beethoven symphonies seemed to lose his way here. It is surely not impossible, however much we may theorise and fantasise about a certain Romantic resistance. If truth be told, almost no one seems able to bring it off; the only living conductor I have heard do so is Daniel Barenboim, though Bernard Haitink has also come close. There was much of interest in what we heard from Petrenko, but it was doubtless asking too much, too soon.

It was striking how non-mysterious the opening of the first movement sounded, though it was not without defiance: materialism rather than metaphysics, then? Perhaps, there was certainly plenty of Berlin precision. It was very different from how I imagine the music, but that is no bad thing: I was intrigued enough to want to hear more. (Just as well, at that point!) At its best, this perhaps came closest to Abbado’s ‘designer Beethoven’; it has its admirers, I know, though his Vienna Beethoven from earlier decades has always seemed to me more convincing. I tried, and, as I said, found much to admire, but ultimately Beethoven, still less the Ninth, without meaning – and that may ‘mean’ all matter of things, verbal, musical, or otherwise – does not seem to me really to be Beethoven at all. Much was skated over, however great the clarity and rhythmic definition. The coda was magnificent, but where had it come from? It was as if an unexpected ocean-liner had sailed in.

The scherzo, however, was much more like it: clear, driven (not too hard, and transparent. Conductor and strings alike relished Beethoven’s antiphonal play, here refreshingly ludic. The problem was more coming after a first movement such as that; again, where had it come from, and where was it going? The trio, alas, veered dangerously close to the glib; a little relaxation, and a great deal more stress on harmony, would have been of benefit. Likewise, of course far more so, in the slow movement. It opened with genuine, almost Schubertian sadness, but its depths went resolutely unplumbed. Sometimes cheerful, even amiable, often pretty and sometimes beautiful, it again felt quite bereft of meaning. If Beethoven trying to be Mendelssohn and not really getting there is your thing, you would probably have liked it more than I did.

The finale, taken attacca, opened with fury, Beethoven’s ensuing cello and bass recitative marked by a depth of tone previously missing, even if wind sounded at times merely petulant. Ghosts of earlier movements were vividly apparent; indeed, they often seemed more ‘real’ than the ‘real thing’ had been. Petrenko’s basic tempo for the main theme was very much on the swift side, but such is his prerogative; if only he had not driven it so hard, however beautiful the playing of the BPO. Again, harmony seemed weirdly minimised; thank goodness it had not been in the Berg. Kwangchul Youn set the scene for other soloists and indeed the chorus, in eminently musicianly singing that yet rarely ventured – the excellent Benjamin Bruns a striking exception – beyond the precise and pleasant. Taken in isolation, a good part of what we heard might have moved in a different, more consequent performance; here it beguiled yet ultimately baffled. A jubilant close delighted many. Where had it come from, though, and what did it mean?

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Bavarian State Opera, 22 May 2016

Walther (Jonas Kaufmann) centre stage, with the Chorus, the Mastersingers, and Eva (Sara Jakubiak) looking down adoringly from her platform
Images: © Bayerische Staatsoper/Wilfried Hösl

Nationaltheater, Munich

Hans Sachs – Wolfgang Koch

Veit Pogner – Christof Fischesser
Kunz Vogelgsang – Kevin Conners
Konrad Nachtigall – Christian Rieger
Sixtus Beckmesser – Markus Eiche
Fritz Kothner – Eike Wilm Schulte
Balthasar Zorn – Ulrich Reß
Ulrich Eißlinger – Stefan Heibach
Augustin Moser – Thorsten Scharnke
Hermann Ortel – Friedemann Röhlig
Hans Schwarz – Peter Lobert
Hans Foltz – Christoph Stephinger
Walther von Stolzing – Jonas Kaufmann
David – Benjamin Bruns
Eva – Sara Jakubiak
Magdalene – Okka von der Damerau
Night Watchman – Tareq Nazmi

David Bösch (director)

Patrick Bannwart (set designs)
Meentje Nielsen (costumes)
Falko Herold (video)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)

Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Die Meistersinger at the theatre in which it was premiered, on Wagner’s birthday: an inviting prospect by any standards, still more so given the director, conductor, and cast, still more so given the opportunity to see three different productions within little more than a couple of months). Glyndebourne would come only four days later; my principal point of – inevitable – comparison would therefore be with Stefan Herheim’s staging, first seen in Salzburg, but later (this March) in Paris. Herheim’s production is, unsurprisingly, one for the ages. I have no doubt that it will reveal more upon every subsequent encounter. It comes, perhaps, closer to Wagner’s reconciliations. However, any good Adornian – is there such a thing? Are we not, necessarily, all at best bad Adornians? – will warn you of the dangers of such positive Hegelianisms. David Bösch’s staging gradually reveals itself to be quite the necessary negative indictment, with respect above all to two particular (related) aspects of the work: violence and gender. If less all-encompassing than Herheim’s staging – what is not? – then it lays claim to be the first Meistersinger production in my experience to address the work from a feminist standpoint. It also arguably offers the most intriguing treatment – I shall not say ‘solution’, for surely there is none – to the ‘Beckmesser problem’. Katharina Wagner’s notorious Bayreuth staging might have given it a run for its money, had only the competence of her craft matched the provocative thinking of her dramaturge, Robert Sollich. Above all, though, this proved to be great musical drama: everyone committed to something far greater than the sum of its parts, and that includes ‘parts’ such as Jonas Kaufmann and Kirill Petrenko.

Walther arriving in Nuremberg

Let us start, however, with Bösch’s staging, with excellent designs by Patrick Bannwart and Meentje Nielsen. We are in the 1950s. What could be more apt? And no, I am not being sarcastic. This is a work concerned with reconstruction, set in a city which, more than most, has had to be concerned with reconstruction. Wagner, I suppose I should reiterate for the nth time, was in no sense concerned to present a historical Nuremberg; the ever-present – well, nearly – spirit of Bach makes that abundantly clear. And did not the 1950s see ‘New Bayreuth’, in particularly Wieland Wagner’s Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg? As John Deathridge once acidly commented,  when Wieland spoke of “the clearing away of old lumber” (Entrümpelung), … [he produced] stage pictures bereft of their “reactionary” ethos — and, as sceptics were prone to add, most of their content as well.’ Indeed, and if many in the audience had more to hide even than Wieland, he had his own reasons too. The relationship between provincialism and the dreadful reconstructionalism of the 1950s is complicated yet undeniable. Lest we forget, 1955 was the year in which the West German Army was (re)founded, denying its origins in what had gone before; this was also the period of increasingly prevalent terraced dynamics and sewing-machine geometries of Bach performances by minor German chamber orchestras, performances that would soon metamorphose into ‘authenticke’ claims, deluded and cynically deluding, to ‘restore’ Baroque practice. ‘They say Bach, [but] mean Telemann,’ as Adorno unforgettably put it. Wagner meant – and means Bach, and vice versa. There is nastiness as well as homeliness in provincialism; Bösch draws out the former, in a useful corrective to the norm.

 

David (Benjamin Bruns) and Walther

 

What might seem a nostalgia for the period and its ‘popular culture’ – similarly in Bösch’s Munich L’Orfeo – is revealed to be far more complicated than that. For one thing, what does ‘popular culture’ mean? Such is a problem at the heart of the opera, at the heart of relationships between the Masters and the populace, and Sachs’s suggestion of testing the rules. And such has arguably become still more so given the rise of what some of us are old-fashioned enough still to regard with, the Frankfurt School, as the Culture Industry. If resistance is to come, it will be more likely to come from Helmut Lachenmann than from the world of commercial music, successfully masquerading as ‘of the people’. And so, when microphones and various other paraphernalia of the recording industry – ‘Classical’ in the deadly marketing-speak of that world, then as well as now – are put in place, we sense, amongst many other things, an act of domination such has been inflicted upon works by Bach, now more or less unperformable, and upon every other aspect of our ‘administered’ world and lives. Although the Personenregie of Bösch’s staging is always detailed, interesting, telling, it is only – as in the work itself – towards the end of the third act, in the Singschule, that things come closer into conceptual focus. It is, as always in the bourgeois state, with violence that that is accomplished. David has already, most intriguingly, seemed a nastier, vainer, and yes, more interesting character than usual, with the strong implication that his penchant for small-scale violent behaviour is owed in part not only to his provincialism but also to his inability truly to create. Walther has tried to defend David when the apprentices, at the beginning of the scene, attacked him, but he will have none of it; outsiders are not to be welcomed, perhaps not even for Magdalene’s sake. Will David prove a second Beckmesser? We shall see; it is, at least at this stage, the first Beckmesser who provides the shock – literally.

The electric shocks administered to Walther, forcibly restrained in his chair, by the Marker are the work of what Gudrun Esslin would soon call the Auschwitz generation; and as Ennslin went on, there is of course no arguing with them. That, despite, or perhaps because, of Beckmesser’s – and Pogner’s – relative attractiveness (relative to how we usually see them, and indeed to the definitely older-school Kothner). Who, after all, has not occasionally found something of attraction in the discipline of fascism, especially when (s)he has been emboldened by readily available bottles of Meisterbräu? Guilds had never been as stable as nostalgia suggested; that is surely part of Wagner’s meaning here. But Bösch brings already-existing divisions to the foreground. Some Masters look – costumes crucial here – and act with greater modernity, or at least in greater fashion than others. If the Guild is keeping things together – and such, of course, was the crux of nineteenth-century Romantic and Hegelian defences in the face of liberal attacks upon them – then it is not clear whether it will succeed for much longer. ‘Reconstruction’ tends to incite – as any Stolzing, Ensslin, or Lachenmann would tell you.

Beckmesser (Markus Eiche) and Hans Sachs
(Wolfgang Koch)

 

Sachs’s van – ‘Sachs’ says the neon, definitely not of Fifth Avenue – captures our attention at the beginning of the second act. There is no doubt that the mise-en-scene is of a grimmer 1950s: doubtless necessary in some ways given the cost of war, but this is not a suburb of joy. It is not the Munich we see in the second Heimat; nor is it the Nuremberg the tourist will see. But it is there. Beckmesser’s virtuosity comes to the fore. He is not a fraud, although he may be unimaginative; he has craft, even if he does not have art; he is, moreover, certainly not a mere figure of fun. His piccolo guitar to Walther’s full-size version invites a number of reflections. Yet his song works, in its way: perhaps of another age, another age that most likely never was, but such is reconstruction. Eva seems even more girlish than usual, almost Barbie-like; I asked myself whether we should ever see a feminist production that would address the monstrous nature of her treatment. The violence of the Prügel-Fuge’s staging eclipses any I have seen. Too often, we forget that there is real violence involved. (Perhaps Wagner did so too; if so, he stands as much in need of correction as anyone else.) Here, David’s deeds with baseball bat mark him out as every inch the neo-fascist; Pegida would welcome him with open arms. We then begin to wonder: what will the guild become in the hands of his generation. Is Sachs the last hope, rather than the harbinger? Likewise, how will Walther turn out? For ever Tariq Ali, think how many Blairs, or would-be-Blairs there have been. At the close, the Night Watchman (in modern policeman’s garb) is dealt with by the remaining small gang of young townsfolk. They take him back to his car and send him on his way, but it is made clear that he has no choice; this is their manor. Crossing themselves beforehand, they have mimicked the (deliberately?) incongruous procession at the opening; they know how to use traditional forms when it serves their purpose. The final punishment beating takes place as the curtain – and one of the thugs’ baseball bats – falls.

 

Beckmesser dragged to his beating

‘Sachs’ has lost its first and almost its second ‘s’ when we catch up, the morning after the night before. Make of that what you will. Walther has spent his night in the van. Beckmesser, when he hobbles back, is suicidal – quite understandably. It is discovery of the poem that turns his mood (just enough) around. Sachs is not the only one so to suffer, although Beckmesser would never have the imagination, nor the understanding, to come up with the Wahn monologue. Still, the ubiquity of Wahn is more than usually, atmospherically present. Yes, as Michael Tanner has pointed out, the work is about ‘coping’; and coping is difficult in a world such as this, which is one reason why we indulge in deluded and deluding reconstruction in the first place. Walther is too young, too callow really to understand; he and Eva are unable to keep their hands off each other, on top of the van, as Sachs confronts a further bout of depression. The violence of Wolfgang Koch’s – and the Bavarian State Orchestra’s – outburst here, the former occasionally edging towards Sprechgesang, even towards Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, was especially telling, and complemented, extended the production memorably, indeed frighteningly. But Walther eventually appreciates his selfishness, and comes down to help: a touching moment, especially in light of such darkness all around.

Let us leave the staging as some would doubtless like the work to be left, before the Festwiese. Unlike them, those who misunderstand the Quintet and do not appreciate that its moment of ‘beauty’ is quite deliberately foreshortened, we shall return, but I should rather deal with Bösch’s final scene at the end. (Think of this, perhaps, as a rupture to the account of the staging, just as Peter Konwitschny once ruptured the aura of this allegedly problematical scene, in order, controversially, to put it mildly, to deal with the allegations, most of them unfounded.)

I have never heard the work conducted better ‘live’ than by Kirill Petrenko. I was less convinced by his Bayreuth Ring performances than many were; perhaps I did not hear him at his best. This, however, was Wagner conducting – in a work in which I have heard even Daniel Barenboim and Daniele Gatti struggle to reach their highest standards – to speak of in the same breath as that of Bernard Haitink (my first). Petrenko’s command of the Wagnerian melos, assisted by, indeed expressed in, the outstanding playing of the Bavarian State Orchestra, was outstanding at every level. There was no doubting the overall structure, but that structure was formed by the needs of the moment, by the Schoenbergian working-out of the material, rather than imposed, Alfred Lorenz-like, upon it. This was not a David; this was a young Sachs. He could, indeed, hold back or press on when the singer seemed to be suggesting it, playing the orchestra like his own piano, albeit without the slightest hint of shallow virtuosity, for this was no Beckmesser either. But it would not jar; indeed, performance and work seemed to form one another, which, in this of all works, is surely the point. The orchestra had nothing to fear from the most exalted of comparisons; rather, those with whom it might have been compared, should fear them. Likewise the chorus, whether in terms of vocal heft and colour, of clarity of line, or of stage movement. The dialectic between individual and society (and changing conceptions thereof) was brought vividly to life here and elsewhere.

I took a little while to settle down to Koch’s Hans Sachs. That is partly personal, I think; to my ears – and indeed to my eyes – he somehow seems more to be an Alberich. That I found disconcerting, but it was my problem, really. There was no doubting the intelligence of his portrayal, and in the third act, my reservations evaporated. Here, there seemed to be a perfect marriage of Wort and Ton, of Oper and Drama. (And yes, I know that is not quite what Wagner meant in the latter case, but it is considerably closer than it might initially seem.) He took us through Sachs’s struggles, and took us through some more. There was no false reconciliation of ‘mere’ geniality, although manipulation of Wahn might prescribe it, successfully or otherwise, if as a palliative rather than as a cure.

Kaufmann’s Walther avoided the drawback of his first performance in the role (I think), in concert at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival. There, it was an astonishing performance, in which Kaufmann tired a little towards the end. Here, he was perhaps less golden of vocal tone, more baritonal, but that is an observation rather than an æsthetic judgement. There was no problem whatsoever with his pacing. And my goodness, he could act! The puppyish enthusiasm of the first acts, the inspiration Walther drew from Eva, whilst showing off to her, not unlike a tennis player at Wimbledon with his girlfriend in the crowd, the mixture of enforced, societal chivalry and the arousal of deeper, or at least more primal, urges: those and many more acutely observed moments denied the manufactured boundary between ‘musical performance’ and ‘acting’. If we are to talk of ‘Wagner’s intentions’, let it be in that manner.

Benjamin Bruns had a difficult time of it. This, after all, was anything but the typical David, but Bruns had us believe in the ‘new’ – or should that be ‘restored’ – character, his impotent (often, at least) rage as chilling as the ‘purely’ vocal delivery was thoughtful and indeed often beautiful. Sara Jakubiak really took to the demands of her role (on which more below). Visually and vocally striking, this was an Eva both at home in and estranged from her Nuremberg. Okka von der Damerau’s Magdalene brought a deeper, luxuriant vocal colour to the stage, again with clear ‘dramatic’ as well as vocal commitment. Tareq Nazmi’s Night Watchman was deep and dark of tone: just what the doctor has always ordered.

Pogner (Christof Fischesser) and
Kothner (Eike Wilm Schulte)

 

Of the other Masters, Christof Fischesser was definitely first among equals: handsomely, even suavely sung, a Pogner of ambition in which he was likely to succeed, rather than someone entering his twilight years. Kothner was played movingly by Eike Wilm Schulte, with the relative stiffness of his delivery, particularly striking in the first act, a move to distinguish this ‘old-school’ Master from the next generation(s). Markus Eiche’s Beckmesser was of the first class: more plausible a suitor than most, intelligently, often beautifully, sung, with a fine marriage of dignity and, increasingly, desperation.

 

Back, then, to the Festwiese. Who owns the guild, or at least its products? A corporation, albeit in the modern rather than the archaic sense: Pognervision. Privilege, be it of class, of gender, of other varieties, is always likely to emerge victorious. The early televisual variety show we see might seem ‘popular’ but it is deeply – and indeed shallowly – manipulative. (Admittedly, Bösch has nothing on ‘real life’, in this country at least, Tory Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt appointing his friend, the creator of Big Brother, Peter Bazalgette, to chair the Arts Council, etc.) Falko Herold’s video work provides ‘titles’ for each Master (‘individual’ or styled to be corporate?) as he enters the scene, just ‘like on the television’. There is, of course, something for all the family – within strict limits. David and his camp dancers suggest what the real view of ‘deviance’ is: perhaps it will be tolerated as a harmless joke, but as for any serious attack on patriarchy… David is not in on the joke, anyway, and his humiliated by them: again, a proto-Beckmesser. When forced (‘peer pressure’ is like that) to drink too many shots, to prove his ‘real’ masculinity, he falls paralytic, unable to perform his functions (doubtless in any sense).

Magdalene (Okka von der Damerau), Beckmesser, and Eva, as the town clerk would claim his unwilling 'prize'

 

The cruelty meted out to Beckmesser will be even worse - although we should remember, and we are minded, that he too would essentially buy Eva, our bartered bride, and he makes clear his desire to possess her, even against her will, so is no 'victim' at all in that very important sense. Bedecked in gaudy ‘variety’ gold, in which he is clearly anything but comfortable, Beckmesser has been set up to fail. ‘Entertainment’ is the name of the game, and we are reminded of the cruelty of a work in which the comedy, in the common sense at least, is within, is of characters laughing at another; it is comedy, then, at which we should feel uncomfortable, and we do. Eva, who has learned a great deal during the course of the work, is increasingly disgusted by what she sees. Kothner is ‘marketed’ as celebrating his fiftieth year in office; even a ‘tribute’, indeed perhaps especially a tribute, must bear the ‘ratings’ in mind. (The relative stiffness of his delivery in the first act, via-à-vis that of Pogner and Beckmesser, thus falls into greater relief.) When Eva thinks that Sachs has fallen in with her father’s sell-off – for surely this ‘show’, with related ‘philanthropy’, is as much for business as anything else – she cannot bear to look at him any more. Whilst the crowd, manipulated by the ‘event’, sings his praises, she not only turns away; from her balcony, she haplessly throws the contents of her glass in his direction. No one notices; on stage, that is, for we do.

Sachs on stage, receiving the crowd's acclamation, before Eva (above with Pogner) turns her back in disgust

Yet Sachs is wiser than most, as we have always known. He realises that all has gone awry at the moment when most – whether on stage or in the typical audience – think it has been resolved. Has Walther joined the guild? It is not clear (deliberately so, I presume). In a more fundamental sense, however, Sachs is deeply troubled rather than triumphant. Beckmesser returns. Out of desperation, he tries to shoot dead the presumed author of his misfortunes, but falls before being able to carry out his punishment. The idea, we presume, was to let the poison, or whatever it was, do its work following the shooting. That may or may not be metaphorical. Of course, it does not work out as intended. It never did for Beckmesser; it never does for reconstruction. Well, not unless you are Wagner – or Herheim, and then you acknowledge that it is not what most people think it is. And even then…