Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Deutsche Oper, 3 December 2023

Hans Sachs – Johan Reuter
Veit Pogner – Albert Pesendorfer
Kunz Vogelgesang – Gideon Poppe
Konrad Nachtigall – Marek Reichert
Sixtus Beckmesser – Philipp Jekal
Fritz Kothner – Thomas Lehman
Balthasar Zorn – Jörg Schörner
Ulrich Eißlinger – Patrick Vogel
Augustin Moser – Paul Kaufmann
Hermann Ortel – Stephen Bronk
Hans Schwarz – Tobias Kehrer
Hans Foltz – Byung Gil Kim
Walther von Stolzing – Magnus Vigilius
David – Ya-Chung Huang
Eva – Elena Tsallagova
Magdalena – Kathrin Göring
Night Watchman – Tobias Kehrer
Apprentices – Agata Kornaga, Freya Müller, Kangyoon Shine Lee, Yehui Jeong, Oleksandra Diachenko, Natalie Jurk, Jongwoo Hong, Thoma Jaron-Wutz, Leon Juurlink, Kyoungloul Kim, Sotiris Charalampous, Simon Grindberg

Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, Sergio Morabito (directors)
Torsten Köpf (co-set designer)
Charlotte Pistorius (co-costume designer)
Olaf Freese (lighting)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (chorus director: Jeremy Bines)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, premiere am 12.6.2022 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin, copyright: Thomas Aurin. (Some roles were taken by different singers.)

In the depths of the coronavirus Great Silence, I mused that its horror would be over, musically speaking, when I had once again heard live three works: Gurrelieder, a large scale work by Richard Strauss, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Why not, say, Les Troyens, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or Moses und Aron, I am unsure, though the difficulty of hearing Moses anywhere at any time presents its own challenge. It was not so much about individual as representative works, though, so as to be indicative of some sort of resumption of ‘normal’ musical life, rather than tailoring performances to pandemic circumstances. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony I heard surprisingly early on, though I am tempted to say I should still wait for a Frau ohne Schatten (all being well, next year); Gurrelieder came a little over a year ago. Alas, neither was a very good performance, though I felt relief and gratitude nevertheless. Now, at last, came Die Meistersinger, my first opportunity to see the Deutsche Oper’s current production, new last year, from Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, and Sergio Morabito. 

There are good ideas, here: often, if not always, well achieved. That the most overt and complex instance of cultural nationalism in Wagner’s dramatic œuvre should, in the wake of subsequent German history, be a site of controversy, even of discomfort, should not itself be controversial. It is the least of the debts we must continually settle in the wake of Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’. That this might yet be controversial in ultra-reactionary circles need not detain us. No, of course, Meister does not mean Herr, and anyone claiming Hans Sachs’s call to honour your German masters is concerned with political domination should be taken no more seriously than the Nazis on this; nonetheless, rightly or wrongly – for me, it would be some of the former, and considerably more of the latter – Die Meistersinger has, like so much else, been tarnished by the ‘catastrophe’ and we cannot simply pretend it has not happened. And so, to frame the action with the wood-panelling of a music school that more than hints at a certain conservatoire on Munich’s Arcisstraße, reminds us, for the most part beneficially, of our historical and cultural duty.

 

The Hochschule für Musik and Theater – if that be what it is – is as prestigious a school of advanced musical instruction as can be found. The building in which it now stands was built between 1933 and 1937 as the Führerbau; if you walk past today, you will see a plaque acknowledging the Munich Agreement, signed there in 1938. What you will not see inside are the Stolpersteine laid down earlier this century; the city of Munich removed them as an alleged fire hazard. The interior may also be familiar – again, I suspect far from coincidentally – to those who have watched Edgar Reitz’s Heimat 2. This is where Hermann and others received their musical instruction and gave many of their performances. Encircling 1968, the hopes it engendered and its bitter aftermath, Reitz’s films inhabit a similar world to that shown here, fashions suggesting (to me) the later 60s or early 70s. Hans Sachs is, of course, in some ways a harbinger of les évènements, though with a healthy does of Schopenhauerian reflection and interpretation that might have given them greater staying power. The hand of historical discomfort is present, then, though it is really up to us, for most of the performance, how much we feel that.

There are shades of Katharina Wagner’s Bayreuth Meistersinger. Not only is this set in a music school and hers an art school; there is some throwing around of shoes, if not so much as at Bayreuth. In this case, that seems, somewhat awkwardly, to be consequent to a realisation that the new setting does not readily permit Sachs to be a cobbler too, yet something at some point must be done with shoes. There are a few other cases where what we see sits awkwardly with what we hear, without proving a productive contradiction. It seems strange, for instance, to have Walther and Eva copulate in two corners of the hall during the chorale, only for him immediately after to apologise, seemingly without irony, ‘Fraulein! Verzeiht der Sitte Bruch!’ Sachs running off with Eva a little while afterwards, having creepily approached her from behind, is at best a bit silly, more Carry On Nuremberg than anything else. The point of gender imbalance and, frankly, violence inherent in the work is better made elsewhere, with female students/apprentices having to resist or endure Magisterial advances, often in full view. Alas, we know only too well now the wrong sort of ‘permissive’ culture that has been nurtured and protected in conservatoire education.

 

The position of the apprentices and chorus deserves further attention. Since there is no town of Nuremberg here – a different sort of Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg from that of Wieland Wagner – some other solution for the latter needs to be presented. At the close, this, reasonably enough, is the audience for what appear to be final recitals of sharply contrasting quality from Beckmesser and Walther. Earlier on, in place of the guilds, we have what seems to be David’s nightmare, in which the clock (a little too crassly) goes back to 19:33, whose horror is inadequately characterised by ghostly dancing. Likewise, the orgy (free love?) in which the apprentices indulge at the beginning of the second act, though to begin with intriguingly balletic, goes on a bit so as to become frankly tedious. No wonder they slope off in dribs and drabs. Perhaps that is the point, though I am not sure I believe that. More disturbingly, Sachs’s final peroration oscillates between one-sided condemnation and further silliness. His transformation into threatening, at least proto- (or post-)fascist mob leader receives little or no adequate preparation, unless that is why the ceiling lights having been moving around for the entire scene. (It suggests sea-sickness, but I do not think we have moved to the Titanic.) A recurrence of still greater ill-matched dancing may suggest the crowd having fallen under his sway, a warning, but it seems more suggestive of an inability to conclude. This, for me, would benefit from rethinking, as would some loose ends elsewhere.

 

For the nationalist underpinning and final turn are only one aspect of a multivalent work, whose humanity – yes, one can hear it, and should be unashamed of saying so – ultimately exceeds however one wishes to characterise the above. The idea that a father should seek to award his daughter as a prize in a song contest, even if she may refuse, is of course monstrous, even when we allow for historical difference. But the point, ultimately, is that he does not, and that is Wagner’s doing. We can dispute many issues of gender here; with which nineteenth-century artwork can we not? Yet the pain Sachs and, to an extent, Eva must suffer, and the joy of requited love between Eva and Walther are real and of dramatic consequence. Both, whatever my misgivings concerning surrounding details, are present here. I am not sure the unmistakable sexual element of the former relationship is especially helpful, since its dramatic import is blurred by warnings of abuse elsewhere, but the chemistry between Magnus Vigilius’s Walther and Elena Tsallagova’s Eva is stronger, more all-enveloping, and in its way victorious. That the two elope and do not take part in the concluding minutes, whatever it might mean, seems to me important. Beckmesser does not return either: a relief, for it has surely become too much of a cliché and would have been out of place here. 

Vigilius and Tsallagova both gave strong performances throughout. The former, new to me, is shaping up to be a fine Heldentenor indeed. Golden yet far from unvarying of tone, he also displayed verbal sensitivity and stage presence in equal measure. Tsallagova, whom I cannot recall hearing in Wagner before, proved similarly spirited and adaptable. If there were, understandably, times when Johan Reuter tired a little as Sachs, he soon recovered, and offered a properly complex reading of the character, both for work and production. Philipp Jekal trod the difficult lines of Beckmesserian performance, neither too absurd, nor too dignified, with aplomb: another reading with acute attention to the alchemy of words, music, and gesture. Albert Pesendorfer rarely, if ever, disappoints, and certainly did not here in a big-hearted (bartering the bride notwithstanding) Pogner of great presence. Ya-Chung Huang’s David made much of the uncomfortable bullying and bashfulness his character suffered in this reading, offering fine musical virtues too. Kathrin Göring’s Magdalena was well sung and characterised, as were all of the smaller roles, this group of Masters no mere collective but rather replete with individual voices and temperaments.

After an underwhelming, oddly balanced Overture, thin and dragging, the orchestra under Ulf Schirmer soon got into its swing, all the more impressive in the second and third acts. Without wishing to make any obvious points, Schirmer directed the players (and, more generally, the singers on stage) with inobtrusive understanding and wisdom. If there were inevitably, in a performance of this length, occasional cases of stage and pit falling apart – one unfortunately so in the Quintet – they were soon remedied. Far more noteworthy were a lack of awkward corners and an abundance of musical continuity, very much in the spirit of the work. The chorus was excellent throughout.

A qualified welcome, then, to the first revival of this Meistersinger. Its predecessor was, I think, the last of Götz Friedrich’s Wagner productions to be replaced here in Charlottenburg. I saw it in 2010 and recognise both loss and gain in its replacement. As the work reminds us, though, nothing is for ever and certainly not in art. There was enough here, not least in fine sung performances, to remind me of my love for Die Meistersinger – I shall admit to having shed the odd tear, in the Quintet and in both the Trial Song and Prize Song – and quite how much I have missed it. Work, production, and performances invited us to reflect that we never simply return; nor can or should we ever shed our past. The myth of a Year Zero is as unwelcome as it is chimerical.

Wagner and Constantin Frantz

(This article appeared originally in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi)

Frantz, (Gustav Adolph) Constantin (b. Börnecke, 12 Sep. 1817; d. Blasewitz, 2 May 1891), historian and political theorist. Prussian civil servant, from 1862 a full-time writer. Initially Hegelian, Schelling’s influence turned him rightward. Like many contemporaries, Frantz addressed the “German question:” how to reconcile cultural nationhood with German Kleinstaaterei (petty-statism). This he described, with typical national modesty, as the most obscure, most involved, and most comprehensive problem in all of modern history. Note the German conflation between national and universal, also present in Wagner’s and others’ writings.

Critical of liberal, instrumentalist conceptions of state and monarchy, which he viewed in natural, organic terms, Frantz opposed both the National Liberals (associated with Jewish hegemony) and Bismarck’s kleindeutsch policy, meaning unification as a Prusso-German nation state, excluding Austria. Instead, Frantz advocated particularism within a pacifistic confederation to include Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Austria and Prussia would act from within rather than as would-be great powers. This federal model for Europe as a whole would defend against French and Russian expansionism, and protect traditional Western Christendom. Latterly claimed as a forerunner of the European ideal, Frantz was Romantically nostalgic for the Holy Roman Empire: not a state, but a set of legal institutions, through which sovereign entities, ranging from electorates to Imperial knights, might thrive, as much culturally as politically. It was Germany’s particular privilege and calling, Frantz believed, to form a living connection between state and international law in the development of continental Europe. German unification (1871), he believed, ignored German historical development, transplanting foreign constitutional forms in the name of a national principle.

Frantz may have influenced a surprisingly rare expression of blatant nationalism in Wagner’s dramatic oeuvre: Hans Sachs’s peroration in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Even if the Empire fell to a French (welsch) threat, Sachs exclaims, “holy German art” would endure. Wagner had encountered Frantz’s work during the 1860s, dedicating the second edition of Opera and Drama to him and proposing to Ludwig II in 1866 that he assume leadership of the German Confederation. Cosima records: “R. says, ‘Who suffered more than I did under the drawbacks of life in Germany? Indeed, I even got to the stage of wishing to see the whole nation dissolved, but always in the hope of building something new, something more in line with the German spirit. It was a great joy to me to get a glimpse through Constantin Frantz of the German Empire; and who cannot feel at least some hope, now that the Germans have shown such strength?’” (CWD, 14 Feb. 1871). When Wagner’s initial enthusiasm for Bismarck’s Reich faltered, this almost metaphysical Reich remained an alternative.

In 1878, Wagner republished “What is German?” requesting Frantz’s response. Frantz’s Open Letter to Richard Wagner (June 1878) also published in the Bayreuther Blätter, argued that the new Reich was as un-German as could be. Importantly, he distinguishes between (German) “metapolitics” and conventional politics (analogously with metaphysics and physics). Metapolitics must have a higher aim than mere political ends, a privileging characteristic in the idealism of the later Bayreuth Circle.

Wagner and German History

(Article on 'German History' first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encylopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

1. Napoleon, France, and the Wars of Liberation
2. Saxony and Germany
3. Wagner, Bismarck, and German unification
4. Wagner’s Writings on German History
5. Wagner and German History after 1883



As with many of Wagner’s ideas, it is all too easy to present, selectively or unwittingly, an assemblage of quotations “proving” a certain line, whereas one might just as readily demonstrate the contrary. Was Wagner “nationalist” or “universalist”? Does he properly belong to “the Right” or to “the Left”? The answer has often been formulated beforehand in essentialist terms, dependent on whether one wishes to convict a monster or absolve a genius. The twentieth-century “German catastrophe” (Friedrich Meinecke) looms ominously over such decisions, not just in sensationalist popular treatments, but in the work of Theodor Adorno – just as in more general controversies concerning nineteenth-century German history, above all the claim of a Sonderweg, or “special [German historical] path,” at its most extreme, viewing the Second Reich merely as a prelude to the Third. Unsurprisingly, Wagner’s attitudes towards a German nation, which, for most of his life, lacked concrete political unity except in the past, proved mixed, complex, and subject to development. However, one thread running through his ideas remained historical: the state of the German nation was in many respects to be attributed towards its particular history, which remained very much an ongoing tale, awaiting resolution.


1. Napoleon, France, and the Wars of Liberation

Battle of Leipzig: Johann Nepomuk Hoechle and Franz Wolf  (1835)

Thomas Nipperdey opened his history of nineteenth-century Germany with the words, “In the beginning was Napoleon.” They might also hold the secret to Wagner’s history of nineteenth-century Germany. 1813 was the year of the Battle of Leipzig and also the year of Wagner’s birth in Leipzig. Napoleon’s defeat, following his retreat from Russia, hastened the collapse of the First Empire, and pushed back French forces from German soil. Those German states allied to France now joined the opposing coalition. The legend of the Wars of Liberation, in which free Germans rather than their princes vanquished the French foe, began to be told and re-told, memorialized in popular rather than official monuments across a “nation,” a concept given new life by the French Revolution, still ruled over by those compromised princes. One can trace back Franco-German enmity as far back as one wishes, but the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) and subsequent French political and cultural hegemony cast lengthy shadows. Eighteenth-century princes might imitate Versailles, but national aspirations pointed away from civilized court and salon to a truer, more honest culture, grounded, for instance, in the forests of the Brothers Grimm – or that from which untainted Siegfried emerges.

“Germany” often had truer existence as an opposing cultural force to France than as a political entity, not least during the 1840 Rhine crisis. Wagner’s miserable, homesick sojourn in Paris (1839-42) sharpened that tendency in his case. If meretricious entertainment (Meyerbeer) were French, then true art might be German. A performance of the German Romantic opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz, made a huge impression at this time: “It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian Woods themselves” (SSD 1:212).

2. Saxony and Germany

Crucial to understanding Wagner, though often overlooked, are his birth and childhood in the Saxon cities of Leipzig and Dresden. Transformed by Napoleon from an electorate into a useful allied kingdom in 1806, Saxony had the misfortune to emerge from the Battle of Leipzig on the losing side. Most Saxon troops defected to the allied forces; King Frederick Augustus I was imprisoned; the state itself seemed imperiled, Saxony proving the great loser from the German states at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Though Prussia failed to absorb her entirely, the remnant of the Wettin kingdom held but three-quarters of the territory of the new Prussian province of Saxony.

Congress of Vienna: August Friedrich Andreas Campe

As Germans, looking askance at recent French cultural and political domination, increasingly wished for some form of national unification, questions arose: in what form and under whose aegis? A German Confederation formed part of the post-war settlement. Would this safeguard individual states’ rights, or furnish a battleground upon which Austria and Prussia would fight for supremacy? Would there be popular unification founded upon a national movement, as desired by many of the 1848-9 revolutionaries, Wagner included, or a traditional power-political aggrandizement by one or both of the two great German powers? And where would this leave other German states, members of the so-called “third Germany,” such as Saxony and Bavaria? Nineteenth-century history did not lead inevitably to Bismarck’s German Empire which, by excluding Austria, divided rather than unified the German nation. Until the Battle of Königgrätz (1866), there was everything to play for, and the French enemy, now under Napoleon III, remained to be defeated.


When Wagner, then, came to advise Ludwig II, earlier experience informed his judgment. Wagner remained at best ambivalent concerning the other German princes, yet suspicion of Prussia, a “barracks state” for many other Germans, always formed a crucial part of his outlook. Bismarck secretly made indirect contact with Wagner, attempting unsuccessfully to have him secure Bavaria’s neutrality between Prussia and Austria (Salmi, 197-99). The contrast, however exaggerated, between Prussian militarism and other states’ – Bavarian, Saxon, etc. – cultural achievement was a mainstay of discourse within those states. “Nationalism” involved many competing strands.


Moreover, though one does not necessarily associate Wagner later in life with Saxony, we find him in Leipzig, publicly and otherwise, more often than we might suspect. Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Erwin Rohde, of attempts to effect a first encounter: Wagner was staying with relatives in Leipzig, unbeknown to the press. When they met, Nietzsche was enchanted by Wagner’s reading from Mein Leben a scene from his Leipzig student days and observed, not for the last time, Wagner’s fondness for the local dialect (Letter of 9 Nov. 1868).


3. Wagner, Bismarck, and German unification

Saxon and Prussian troops in the Dresden Neumarkt, Saxon uprising 1849 (painter unknown)

Wagner and Bismarck were both Germans; neither would have denied that, nor wished to do so. However, particular and particularist identities – both Protestant, but in many respects opposed – counted too. Wagner, on account of his role in the Dresden uprising, was barred for eleven years even from entering the German Confederation. It would take longer still before he would be permitted to return to Saxony. The grudging nature of the Saxon king’s initial concession was mirrored in Wagner’s claim – irrespective of whether one believes him – that he felt no emotion upon his return to German soil (12 August 1860). During exile, Wagner had been a German outcast, indeed outlaw, just like Die Walküre’s revolutionary Siegmund: “I was always outlawed.”

When German unification, such as it was, came from above, through Prussian aggrandizement, it is therefore unsurprising that Wagner’s initial approbation – again, one should not neglect the power of anti-French sentiment in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, witnessed in Eine Kapitulation – soon turned sour. Admiration for the Chancellor’s achievement – “an honest Prussian who succeeded in carrying out a diplomatic coup: ‘At that time he still knew nothing about the German swindle, he was a complete Prussian’.” – is more than balanced a fortnight later by: “That is why I curse Bismarck – for dealing with all these very important problems like a Pomeranian Junker.” “Curse” was obliterated by an unknown hand and replaced by “deplore,” testimony to family sensitivities concerning Wagnerian German identity (CWD, 31 Oct. 1882 and 14 Nov. 1882). Karl Marx could not have been further from the truth, political as well as aesthetic, when answering, at the time of the opening Bayreuth Festival, the persistent question, “What do you think of Wagner?” with the dismissal: highly characteristic of the “New German-Prussian empire-musicians” (Letter to Jenny Marx, August/September 1876).

4. Wagner’s Writings on German History

Wagner’s writings expressed such ambivalence and ambiguities. Die deutsche Oper (1834), his first published piece, expresses the wish that German opera were more open to French and Italian influences. However, during his “revolutionary” period, it becomes clear that the universal artwork of the future will transcend mere national style not so much through synthesis as by development of largely Teutonic art. An intriguing and often confusing companion to the aesthetically-inclined essays is Die Wibelungen. A conflation of history and myth presents correspondences between, for instance, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Siegfried, not only as historical-mythological figures but as revolutionary inspirations. It is hoped that these German heroes, asleep in the Kyffhäuser Mountains, might return, though an original (1848) exhortation for such an awakening was omitted in a subsequent published version, indicative perhaps of Wagner’s disillusionment concerning national revolution. Whoever Barbarossa and Siegfried may have been, they were not Prussians.

Subsequent interest in German history tended, in the spirit of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, to extol German art at the expense of German politics. A collection of essays written for Ludwig II was published in 1867, its title, Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik, reflecting this shift, likewise the contemporary essay, Was ist deutsch? (unpublished until 1878) asking, “what is German?” Influence and regard of Constantin Frantz are marked. Just as Hans Sachs proclaims that holy German art will endure no matter what political calamity might befall the Holy Roman Empire, so Wagner now chooses the forlornly French-periwigged Bach as epitome of the German spirit, his music triumphing despite both his wretched, unrecognized existence as choirmaster and organist, and Germany’s catastrophic political fortunes. (Lutheran-Bachian chorales loom large in the Meistersinger score, likewise neo-Bachian counterpoint.) Even when the Germans subsequently attempted democracy and revolution, they merely aped the French; German achievement lay with Goethe and Schiller. Enemies within were as much to blame as those without; what remained of the German spirit was imperiled by an alliterative trinity of J’s: jurists, Junkers, and Jews, elsewhere joined by Jesuits and journalists (SSD 10:61).





5. Wagner and German History after 1883


Subsequent generations have often striven to dissolve these ambiguities, or simply failed to notice them. National Socialism provides perhaps the most flagrant example, but it is far from alone. When Thomas Mann challenged hardening nationalist orthodoxy by presenting a more interesting, complex Wagner in a 1933 address, Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners (“Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner”), he was rebuked in an indignant “Protest by the Richard Wagner City Munich,” which spoke on behalf of a “national restoration of Germany … [having] taken on definite form.” Though signatories, including Richard Strauss, Hans Knappertsbusch, and Hans Pfitzner, were not all National Socialists, this was one example of an effort to dissolve the ambiguities sketched above, or a failure to notice them. Such elision of Wagner with Nazi goals has continued to haunt Wagner scholarship and reception into the twenty-first century. The anti-Reich Wagner of Was ist deutsch?, let alone more universalist writings, would surely have objected.





However, performance may herald a degree of hope. Some stage directors, such as Stefan Herheim and Peter Konwitschny – notably both musicians themselves, able to confront Wagner’s dramas musically – have grappled more seriously with the multi-faceted view of German history evinced by Wagner and his role within it. Exemplary in this respect was Herheim’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, simultaneously re-telling Wagner’s story of Parsifal and the work’s reception story. Electrifying was the unfurling of swastikas, long absent from the Festival, as Weimar-artiste Klingsor cast his spear, but still more of a challenge to New Bayreuth orthodoxy was the reproduction on stage in the third act of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner’s 1951 claim that politics had no place in such a festival. German history always was more interesting than that, as Herheim’s contradiction bravely demonstrated.



Thomas Mann, “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1976): 307-71.
Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters,  trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 3 vols., vol. 1, “1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat” (Munich: Beck, 1998).
“Protest der Richard-Wagner-Stadt München,” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 16/17 April 1933, repr. and trans. in Sven Friedrich, “Ambivalenz der Leidenschaft – Thomas Mann und Richard Wagner. Zum 125. Geburtstag Thomas Manns,” in: Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele (2000).
Hannu Salmi, Die schriftstellerische und politische Tätigkeit Richard Wagners (Turku: Turun yliposito, 1993).
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Oxford, Berg: 1997).

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 10 August 2019

Festspielhaus

Hans Sachs – Michael Volle

Veit Pogner – Günther Groissböck

Kunz Vogelgsang – Tansel Akzeybek

Konrad Nachtigall – Armin Kolarczyk

Sixtus Beckmesser – Johannes Martin Kränzle

Fritz Kothner – Daniel Schmutzhard

Balthasar Zorn – Paul Kaufmann

Ulrich Eißlinger – Christopher Kaplan

Augustin Moser – Stefan Heibach

Hermann Ortel – Raimund Nolte

Hans Schwarz – Andreas Hörl

Hans Foltz – Timo Riihonen

Walther von Stolzing – Klaus Florian Vogt

David – Daniel Behle

Eva – Camilla Nylund

Magdalena – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Night Watchman – Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Helga Beckmesser (Harpist) – Ruth-Alice Marino

Barrie Kosky (director)

Rebecca Ringst (set designs)

Klaus Bruns (costumes)

Franck Evin (lighting)

Regine Freise (video)

Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Philippe Jordan (conductor)

As a Wagner scholar, one becomes wearily accustomed to the most arrant nonsense being spoken and written about him and his work. The so-called ‘popular imagination’ – usually nothing of the sort, instead a carefully manufactured commercial view – will stop at literally nothing in its hunt for grievances. The actual problems Wagner’s work presents us with are far more important, far more interesting, but no matter. Perhaps worst of all is the pseudo-– very pseudo- – ‘literature’ that has been the bane of discourse concerning Wagner since at least the 1850s. It sells books, makes its way into newspapers; alas, it now makes its way onstage too. If only Barrie Kosky had been given a Wagner reading list by someone who knew what (s)he was talking about. Presumably his dramaturge, Ulrich Lenz, should bear some responsibility here; if his programme note is anything to go by, he surely does. Moreover, when we reach Kosky’s own note, we read the following extravagant claim, swiftly moving from the tendentious to the Ken-Russell-fantastical: ‘Wagner transforms medieval blood libel and reinvents it into 19^th[-]century music libel. Jews used to drink the blood of Christian children but now they drink the blood of German culture. And for this crime, for this act of “Crimes against Culture”, Beckmesser must be expelled from Nuremberg. Rather like those little Jewish figures in the anti-Semitic 1930’s [sic] board game “Juden raus!”’ 

Where to start? Where does Wagner say that Beckmesser is expelled from Nuremberg? Wagner’s stage direction reads ‘Er [Beckmesser] stürzt wütend fort und verliert sich unter dem Volke.’  He dashes off in fury, then, and disappears into the crowd. He has been humiliated, yes, in a fashion that may contain disturbing traces of anti-Semitism but which ultimately owes more to Shakespeare’s Malvolio and to Wagner’s earlier comedic villain in Das Liebesverbot: Friedrich, hypocritical German viceroy of Sicily, permitted likewise to lose himself during that work’s carnival finale. He has certainly not been expelled, let alone on the grounds of drinking blood, metaphorical or otherwise. No, let us not bother: it is not worth it. No one ever listens; it is always easier – ironically, as in the case of anti-Semitism, Wagner’s own certainly included – to blame the ‘other’, in this case a manufactured Wagner of lies, half-truths, and the odd fact taken out of context. In any case, whatever the misunderstandings – let us try to be charitable here – presented in such talk, it is always possible that something dramatically engaging might result.

Does it? Alas not. Familiarity may have blunted somewhat the offence of this Meistersinger (first reviewed here) onstage, but that is the best one can say for it. Whether that offence spring from ignorance or dishonesty is arguably beside the point. So, however, are the production and its underlying ideology. Moreover, it remains irredeemably glib, surely a very odd standpoint if one actually believes the things Kosky claims to, punctuated as it is by reams of slapstick and trademark silly dances. (And no, Chaplin is not a helpful comparison here: not even slightly.) Still, notwithstanding a few boos for Kosky on a surprise curtain call, most of the audience seemed to love the ‘entertainment’ placed before it. Interpolation of all-too-predictable campery will usually elicit wild applause from a good few. Doubtless others will flatter themselves that they were made to think. I doubt, though, that they could tell us how.

Once more, then to Wahnfried. It is not an original idea, but many things are not. What is ‘original’ – some might prefer ‘disingenuous’, ‘misleading’, or perhaps something stronger – is to present Die Meistersinger as somehow having originated there, in 1873, as part of an invented incident from Wagner’s life when he supposedly bullied Hermann Levi into kneeling and genuflecting. Wagner sometimes treated Levi appallingly, quite inexcusably; sometimes he treated him otherwise. What on earth that has to do with Die Meistersinger I do not know, given that he completed it in 1867. So all the alleged documentary evidence beamed onstage – including a temperature for the day, which some in the audience found side-splittingly hilarious – is untrue. It is not quite presented as ‘true’, of course, or at least it might be argued that it is not; it is difficult, however, to avoid the implication that it is so even then, still less when the production later becomes explicitly an attempt to put Wagner in the dock, on trial. No evidence for permitted: only (largely) manufactured evidence against.

A weird play of confused, confusing identities ensue, in which not only does Wagner become both Hans Sachs and Walther – in a sense, of course, that is fair enough, if a little restricting – but Liszt becomes Pogner, giving away his daughter, Cosima/Eva. Why, then, is Levi/Beckmesser – yes, I am afraid so – also wooing Cosima? Hans von Bülow, maybe, even Nietzsche, but Levi? The Masters have to be made to loathe Beckmesser from the start, although the words and music tell us quite differently. Why? Because, in the typical circularity of so much writing on Wagner and anti-Semitism, Beckmesser is an unattractive character, doing unattractive things, and therefore must be… well, you know the rest. He therefore ends up the victim of a pogrom at the close of the second act, replete with gigantic, horrifying, Völkische Beobachter caricature of a Jew. None of it makes any sense, because none of it ever seems either to have been thought through or properly prepared. At the moment any difficult question arises, one can always have another silly dance, or zoom in on a Nuremberg courtroom in, you guessed it, 1945. Even better, do both. Why choose?

Goodness only knows who ‘Helga Beckmesser’, onstage harpist for Beckmesser’s attempted rendition of the Prize Song, is supposed to be. She can hardly be his wife, given that he is attempting to woo Eva, or Cosima, or whomever the poor woman is supposed to be; unless, that is, Beckmesser nurses aspirations to bigamy, which seems an eccentric way to work towards his rehabilitation. ‘Helga’ seems actually to be dressed like Helga from the 1980s BBC sitcom, ’Allo, ’Allo! but perhaps that is just a coincidence. I hope it is, at any rate. At least much of the second act is played out with greater theatrical awareness than last time, Wahnfried clutter providing a backdrop, rather than Sachs and Beckmesser simply sitting in a green space inside a courtroom. That is a definite improvement, but the concept, if we may call it that, remains beyond questionable.

Musically, there was much to admire. Philippe Jordan’s conducting was fluent and inobtrusive (the opposite of the production, one might say). He handled the massive orchestral and choral forces with great skill; they responded with all the excellence one should expect from Bayreuth. This was probably the best Wagner I have heard from him, perhaps because he responded so keenly to the affinities with Mozart. I was put in mind of Georg Solti, shortly before his death, speaking of recognition that much in this work should be conducted as if it were Così fan tutte. Michael Volle’s Sachs was as magisterial as ever: word, tone, and gesture an object lesson to all. So too, in different vein, was Johannes Martin Kränzle’s keenly observed Beckmesser. Their chemistry was a wonder to behold. Klaus Florian Vogt’s assured Walther and Camilla Nylund’s lively Eva were beautifully complemented by similarly excellent, yet contrasting, performances from Daniel Behle as David and Wiebke Lehmkuhl as Magdalena. The relationship between the two couples might justly have been described, in line with Jordan’s conducting, as Mozartian. Günther Groissböck’s Pogner was similar impressive, the guild at whose head he stood cast from commendable depth.

As for the production, Wagner and his works will survive; they survive worse most days. It does not follow that they should have to.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 27 July 2019

Nationaltheater

Images: Wilfried Hösl
Hans Sachs (Wolfgang Koch)

Hans Sachs – Wolfgang Koch

Veit Pogner – Christof Fischesser
Kunz Vogelgsang – Kevin Conners
Konrad Nachtigall – Christian Rieger
Sixtus Beckmesser – Martin Gantner
Fritz Kothner – Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Balthasar Zorn – Ulrich Reß
Ulrich Eißlinger – Dean Power
Augustin Moser – Thorsten Scharnke
Hermann Ortel – Levente Páll
Hans Schwarz – Peter Lobert
Hans Foltz – Roman Astakhov
Walther von Stolzing –  Daniel Kirch
David – Allan Clayton
Eva – Sara Jakubiak
Magdalena – Okka von der Damerau
Night Watchman – Milan Siljanov
 

David Bösch (director)

Patrick Bannwart (set designs)
Meentje Nielsen (costumes)
Falko Herold (video)
Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)
Theresa Schlichtherle (revival director)
 

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

Bavarian State Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Beckmesser (Martin Gantner) and Sachs

‘Es klang so neu und war doch ein bißchen alt’? A little more than three years after first seeing David Bösch’s (then new) production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, I looked forward to making its reacquaintance. It struck me then as being, alongside Stefan Herheim’s staging (seen in both Salzburg and Paris), one of the most significant additions to the repertory. There has not, frankly, been much in the way of competition, offerings from Barrie Kosky and Andrea Moses in particular having proved well-nigh disastrous. How did Bösch’s staging measure up now? In some ways, well. It is certainly more coherent than either of the last too named. However, a good deal of what had made it distinctive, and had decided me to include it in this essay, had disappeared, presumably a casualty of the lack of rehearsal for a brief festival revival. Two at least of its most distinguishing characteristics, the violence at the heart of a reconstructed, provincial ‘community’, and a welcome feminist conception of Eva, had respectively been toned down (more likely, perhaps, unknowingly omitted) and jettisoned. A great pity, that, though perhaps not unlikely in the circumstances: a reminder, at least, that what we see in June and July is not always so very close to what was originally envisaged (and seen).

 

Walther (Daniel Kirch) and Eva (Sara Jakubiak)

I shall try, though, not to dwell unduly on what might have been, on what had been: anyone interested in the 2016 first performances, including Jonas Kaufmann, may consult the initial review. The importance of (multi-)media in transmission of music, art more generally, and indeed life, such as it is, more generally, continues to register, for instance in video footage of plans, instructions, flowcharts, and sketches: there is a thin line, perhaps, between the nerd and the pedant. Press coverage of the mastersong competition flicks through, also on video, when the masters first enter, an important point the centenary 1868-1968 (the first year, of course, the work’s premiere, the second year not an unimportant year in the history of the Left), in which Veit Pogner had claimed the prize. That generation has a great deal to answer for, many of us would argue; at least we were spared the sight of Antony Charles Lynton Blair et al. strutting their wares ‘just more one time’. At any rate, this contest for a bartered bride, as much sport as art, and heavily sponsored by ‘Meister Bräu’’, sums things up nicely. Sport, of course, always gets off lightly, entwining nationalism (and/or localism) and toxic masculinity, as it does. No one dare accuse it, though, given the media interests at stake. (Consider British liberals’ obsession with the appalling 2012 Olympics.) Contrast that with the laudable attempts at self-criticism of most important artistic production since the Second World War. That contrast certainly seems implicit here, although the shock violence initially administered by Beckmesser as Marker to Walther now seems ‘mere’ entertainment: a flashing of lights rather than electric shock. Perhaps, though, as everything becomes more mediated, as Trump, Johnson, and other fascists star in their own game show, impervious to political criticism and activity, there is something to be said for such a degeneration too.

 

The moment of revolt – or is it further repression – comes through more fitfully in the second act than previously. Can one make a Marcusian case for the apprentices’ thuggery? Probably. Should one? Difficult to say. (One might say the same for Andreas Baader, after all, or the original, far more lethal, RAF.) But the chemistry between Sachs and Eva, the plausibility of their romance, has struck earlier on a very different note. What often seems dramaturgically unconvincing, even odd, here seems quite natural, for want of a better word. Whether that were the case in 2016, I cannot remember, although the artists, Wolfgang Koch and Sara Jakubiak, were the same. Their performances all round were outstanding. If the extremely powerful moment of Eva’s rejection – of the contest – in the third act now seemed to be missing, Jakubiak offered intelligent, vocally alluring singing, as well as accomplished acting. So too did Koch, of course, with a wisdom born of experience not only as Sachs but in many other roles.

 

Sachs and Beckmesser

Let us return, however, to the production, to the third act. Sachs’s neon-lit van having lost two of its letters, now sighs, in Schopenhauerian style, ‘ACH’. More might have been made of that implication, especially in light of loss of the provincial violence that initially made this act so threatening, so disconcerting. There remain hints, perhaps most notably in the apprentices’ behaviour towards David, homophobic bullying still, I think, implicit. But they are only hints, and would perhaps mostly be noticed by those who had seen the production before. Beckmesser’s return at the very close, to shoot himself, makes far less sense in the absence of such build-up. A pity, as I said, although perhaps there is something to be salvaged in reflection upon continuing degeneration into entertainment.

 

Walther and Beckmesser

Musically, standards remained high: very high indeed in the case of Kirill Petrenko, the orchestra, and chorus. Of Wagner’s works, this seems very much Petrenko’s best, at least in my experience. Formidable technical challenges – simply marshalling those forces, in a far from simple staging – never seemed to register, however great the art in concealing that art (a Meistersinger virtue in itself). Wagner’s score flowed with all the inevitability of a mighty river. That is never, though, at the expense of detail, overt contrapuntal (and other) virtuosity in which the composer sometimes revels portrayed lovingly, comprehendingly, without degenerating into mere virtuosity itself. It was, moreover, not only in the counterpoint and chorales that Wagner’s Bachian debt was repaid. Wagner’s writing for oboes in particular, played as superlatively as it was here, gave pause to all manner of thoughts concerning connection with Bach’s sacred music too. (Now might we hear a St Matthew Passion or B minor Mass from Petrenko? Even some of the cantatas? Too much to hope? If so, it is surely a victimless crime.)

 

Eva, Walther, and Magdalena (Okka von der Damerau)

Kaufmann had withdrawn earlier in the week, replaced at very short notice as Walther by Daniel Kirch. There was considerable promise in his performance, although he tired towards the end. At his best in the second act, Kirch showed himself capable of a detailed, variegated performance, both verbally and musically. Earlier on, perhaps still finding his way around the Nationaltheater, he had a tendency to force his voice somewhat, almost as if a Siegfried. There remained, though, much to admire. Martin Gantner’s Beckmesser was first-rate: a sung Malvolio of the highest quality. Allan Clayton’s David proved equally detailed and finely sung, well matched to Okka von der Damerau’s spirited Magdalena. Christof Fischesser made for an uncommonly youthful, virile Pogner, and Milan Siljanov’s Night Watchman suggested a singer from whom we shall be hearing much more soon. More than enough, then, to be going on with until the full revival Bösch’s production unquestionably merits.