Fidelio, Staatsoper Berlin, 28 October 2016

Images: Bernd Uhlig
Rocco (Matti Salminen) and Marzelline (Evelin Novak)

Schillertheater

Don Fernando – Roman Trekel

Don Pizarro – Falk Struckmann
Florestan – Andreas Schager

Leonore – Camilla Nylund

Rocco – Matti Salminen
Marzelline – Evelin Novak
Jaquino – Florian Hoffmann

 

Harry Kupfer (director)
Derek Gimpel (assistant director)
Hans Schavernoch (set designs)
Yan Tax (costumes)
Olaf Freese (lighting)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

What to do with Fidelio? It seems to be a question exercising everyone staging – and performing – it, which, in one, very obvious sense, is fair enough, even a necessity. On the other hand, the desire to ‘do’ something with it, whether musically, scenically, or both, will sometimes lead us down decidedly peculiar alleys. I have been sent down stranger, far less convincing ways than that of Harry Kupfer. Indeed a signal strength of his new production for the Berlin State Opera is that it seems to suggest – or at least can be understood to do so – that the desire to do things different musically, the jadedness that gave birth to the fashion-victim wing of ‘authenticity’ can be at least as injurious to Beethoven as Mahler’s ‘tradition’ as Schlamperei. Both the comfortable, too-smoothly-connected Beethoven of regular, all-too-regular performances at the Musikverein – seen at beginning and end, in a strangely convincing trompe l’œil backdrop – and a reductive, anti-metaphysical, post-Stravinskian inability to cope with him, his music, and his message, to connect anything, be it phrase or idea, with anything else, stand accused. Or at least they did for me. Kupfer is not always the most open of directors, but here, I think he offers the potential for different readings, according to one’s own needs as well as inclinations. Whether that has come at the expense of the directoral boldness we know from the Kupfer of old, whether there is a tiredness, as well as an accusation of tiredness, remains an awkward, nagging doubt.  

 

Kupfer, aided by Hans Schavernoch’s excellent designs, presents a Beethoven hemmed in by routine. His bust stands on the piano; that is what busts, especially of Beethoven, do. Performance directions, director’s notes, multilingual key words drive us up the walls. The day-to-day routine of an opera house or concert hall, even when well run, well thought through – having studied, for instance, at some of Kupfer’s notes for his Dresden Moses und Aron, I can attest that he thinks, certainly thought, things through – can militate against great artistry. No one, I am sure, would claim otherwise. Such, in a sense, is the world of the first scene of Fidelio, of Jacquino and Marzelline, or Rocco’s ‘gold’ aria. It would be an odd thing if the most memorable thing about a Fidelio were the ironing, but ironing is necessary, as are the non-heroic characters in general. Does it seep through too much, though? Are the prisoners as imprisoned by their Peters scores – which, mysteriously, they rarely if ever open, although I think Jacquino does his – as by something more objectively brutal? Is that an important question to ask, or is it gravely insulting to those who actually are physically imprisoned? Kupfer seems to invite us to ask such questions; I have thought a good deal about them since, and am still doing so.

Don Pizarro (Falk Struckmann), Leonore, and Florestan (Andreas Schager)

 

There are big moments, of course. They still shine through. Is the director perhaps telling us to simplify, to focus upon them? He might be, but I am not entirely sure. Perhaps that is as it should be. At any rate, the events in the dungeon retain a straightforward power of their own, as surely they must. Or must they? I know that many in the audience felt too much left to their own devices, and wonder whether some on stage did too. I am far from unsympathetic to them, yet at the same time, the contrast between the ambiguity of direction (and even, if non-direction it were, of non-direction) and the certainty of the musical performance was not, for me, entirely unproductive.

 

Florestan

For it was ultimately the contribution, unsurprisingly, of the Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim that made this Fidelio – well, Fidelio. That is not intended as any disrespect to the generally excellent singers, but Fidelio begins and ends with its symphonism – even when, perhaps even particularly when, it is aspirant symphonism. The oddity of opening with the second Leonore Overture aside – was even Barenboim joining in the game of ‘difference’? – not a foot was put wrong. That is not enough, of course: not nearly enough. More to the point, everything, even if there were multiple alternatives, felt right, felt necessary. Hearing the work from beginning to end, Barenboim built it intriguingly from Klemperian foundations to a blazing, almost incredibly Furtwänglerian final chorus. (The interplay between those two tendencies, living influences, has recently been a particular theme in his conducting of Beethoven symphonies.) The orchestra, as transparent as it was weighty, as dramatically incisive as it was metaphysically wise, stood quite beyond the realm of the quotidian. It played with greater ‘tradition’ than the unforgettable West-Eastern Divan under Barenboim, but this was a tradition, unlike that of some, that was constantly rethought, recreated. Much the same could, and should, be said of the magnificent choral singing. Barenboim’s Fidelio is not the same as it was, nor should it be. Is it better? Who cares? It is what it is now, and it is something special indeed.

 

Andreas Schager’s Florestan was also special. Too few singers who essay the role can actually sing it. Unsurprisingly, there was no such problem in Schager’s case: he is unquestionably the finest Heldentenor, as conventionally understood, of our time. (Jonas Kaufmann, a superlative exponent of the role, is something quite different again.) There was an appealing, rather straightforward sincerity to his portrayal, which is arguably just what it needs. And in a dialectical situation such as set up by Kupfer, straightforwardness will never ‘just’ be straightforwardness. Camilla Nylund’s Leonore was very similar. The near-impossible things Beethoven asks of her held no (vocal) fear. They were never despatched routinely, though; they mattered. The trajectory traced by Matti Salminen’s Rocco, from (relative) darkness to light, was very much that of the work; it moved immensely, the artistry undeniable, yet worn (in a different sense) lightly. Evelin Novak and Florian Hoffmann shone, in their own ways, as the ‘other’ couple, capable of excellent things indeed vocally, content in their non-heroic station dramatically. If Roman Trekel’s Don Fernando were a little dry, that should not be exaggerated. And if Falk Struckmann’s Don Pizarro could not quite create the malevolence the role seems to require, very few assumptions do. (In fact, do any?)

 

To return to where we began, then: what to do with Fidelio? The answer may seem obvious, but it is not trite, for Beethoven can never be trite. Whilst Guantánamo Bay remains open, whilst Palestine, Tibet, so many other parts of the world remain under brutal occupation, whilst, above all, Aleppo remains under siege, do we not know actually know very well what it is about? Are we not hiding, imprisoning ourselves and others, if we fail to acknowledge that, to let Beethoven’s music inspire us, and to let performances such as these do likewise? We need Beethoven most when he seems furthest from us. A Calixto Bieito will always be able to make us think differently, to reconsider a work such as this – or rather, this work, for there is not really any other work like it. Kupfer does, too, I think, if less clearly. However, a straightforward presentation, performed with burning conviction, may be all it needs. There is no harm, however, in pausing from time to time to question such apparent certainty. Does Fidelio mean Fidelio?

 

Salzburg Festival (7) - Der Rosenkavalier, 17 August 2014

Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

 

Grosses Festspielhaus

Die Feldmarschallin Fürstin Werdenberg – Krassimira Stoyanova

Der Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau – Günther Groissböck
Octavian – Sophie Koch
Herr von Faninal – Adrian Erőd
Sophie – Mojca Erdmann
Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin – Silvana Dussmann
Valzacchi – Rudolf Schasching
Annina – Wiebke Lehmkuhl
Police Officer – Tobias Kehrer
The Marschallin’s Major-domo – Franz Supper
Faninal’s Major-domo – Martin Piskorski
A Notary – Dirk Aleschus
A Landlord – Roman Sadnik
A Singer – Stefan Pop
A Milliner – Alexandra Flood
A Vendor of Pets – Franz Gürtelschmied
Leopold – Rupert Grössinger
Lackeys/Waiters – Won Cheol Song, Franz Gruber, Friedrich Springer, Jens Musger
Lerchenauischen – Florian Boberski, Kiril Chobanov, Manuel Grabner, Helmut Höllriegl, Boris Lichtenberger, Christian Schläpfer
House Servant (Mohammed) – Liviu Burz 

Harry Kupfer (director)

Hans Schavernoch (set designs)
Yan Tax (costumes)
Jürgen Hoffmann (lighting)
Thomas Reimer (video design)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Wolfgang Götz)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst (conductor)

 



Sophie (Mojca Erdmann) and Octavian (Sophie Koch)

Harry Kupfer’s production of Der Rosenkavalier is without a doubt the most thought-provoking of the stagings I saw at this year’s Salzburg Festival. It intrigued me during the first act, though I was not really sure how I felt about it; it grew on me during the second, and had won me over by the third. That seems to be a deliberate strategy, conducted in tandem with a gradual blossoming of colour from the severe near-monochrome of the early twentieth-century (time of composition) Marschallin’s palace to the more colourful inn of the third act, with certain carefully colour making its point in between. All around, photographs – untrustworthy memories – of celebrated Viennese landmarks from the Kunsthistorisches Musuem to the Prater make their point concerning recollection and reimagination. What I felt was missing was a further layering from an imaginary eighteenth century in which Hofmannsthal – if not necessarily Strauss – so painstakingly sets the action, but I learned to live with that, and again, by the time of the third act, had quite forgotten about it. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there too.

 

For pretty much all of the action one would (rightly?) expect is present and correct, except not necessarily quite as one might initially have expected it, not the least of this opera’s lessons. A particular strength of Kupfer’s production is its light insistence upon the work’s metatheatricality, less overt than, say, Ariadne auf Naxos or Capriccio, but still important to its layering. One certainly has a good sense of the Marschallin as director, and indeed as fallible narrator/director. Are the snapshots hers, as might be suggested by the arrival of her extraordinarily – deliberately so – car at the end of the third act? What are the implications for agency here? Is she still in control? And what might that mean for Octavian and Sophie, here directed – and played – as a much stronger woman than one generally experiences?

 

The Marschallin (Krassimira Stoyanova)

 

The case of Sophie is especially interesting, since I admit that, in purely vocal terms, I did not find Mojca Erdmann’s portrayal especially inviting, hearing more of an Olympia than a Sophie, a strangely mechanical rendering at times. Yet, somehow, it worked, and the strength of character came across more strongly than I can recall. For once, it was quite possible to understand why Octavian might have made the choice he did. Sophie Koch’s portrayal of the role is well-known and did not disappoint on this occasion, the opera’s play with gender as captivating as ever. Krassimira Stoyanova presented a dignified Marschallin: no vulgar playing on the heart-strings here, and probably all the more moving for it. Moreover, her careful attention to the words could usefully be aped by certain more fêted exponents of the role. Günther Groissböck worked hard to present a less caricatured Ochs than one often suffers. What remained of caricature was probably ineradicable: a pity, but there is only so much one can do with the part. Groissböck’s was an uncommonly subtle reading, though, again born of laudable attention to the text. (It is perhaps a pity, though, that Kupfer seems to want to have Sophie having made up her mind against him from the very start; a little more contest and development would not necessarily go amiss.) To start with, I thought Adrian Erőd’s Faninal a little dry in tone, but that soon ceased to trouble me; perhaps I was just imagining it. The supporting cast was not always of the highest quality, but then there is a huge amount to cast here, and much, by the same token, was impressive. Rudolf Schasching’s coarsely sung Valzacchi was a rare true disappointment; Wiebke Lehmkuhl’s Annina was much more characterful. Roman Sadnik’s Landlord – intriguingly, though probably coincidentally, dressed and even very much looking like the owner of Triangel, the restaurant outside the house – offered a particularly vivid portrayal, whilst Rupert Grössinger (and Kupfer) made considerably more of Leopold, Ochs’s son, than is generally the case.

 

 

Ochs (Günther Groissböck)

The performances were originally to have been conducted by Zubin Mehta, who had to withdraw on medical grounds. Franz Welser-Möst was a generally efficient, if not exactly inspiring, replacement, the exception to efficiency lying in an inordinately drawn out close to the first act. (I thought it was never going to end, and I am rarely opposed to slower tempi.) It was certainly not a warm reading, but that to an extent married well with the production, especially earlier on. A little more whipped cream would not necessarily have done any harm, and there were perhaps a few more discrepancies between pit and stage than one might have expected. Still, there was much to savour, and to think about, both from production and from the performances on stage.

 

Berlin Festtage (5) - Tristan und Isolde, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 5 April 2010

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Tristan – Peter Seiffert
King Marke – René Pape
Isolde – Waltraud Meier
Kurwenal – Roman Trekel
Melot – Reiner Goldberg
Brangäne – Ekaterina Gubanova
Shepherd/Young Sailor – Florian Hoffmann
Steersman – Arttu Kataja

Harry Kupfer (director)
Hans Schavernoch (designs)
Buki Schiff (costumes)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

To direct Tristan und Isolde must be one of the most difficult tasks in the operatic world, though not of course so difficult as to perform it. Wagner, notoriously yet surely correctly, fretted about its power, writing to Mathilde Wesendonck, ‘I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance –: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ If a ‘perfectly good’ performance in the strictest sense remained elusive – has anyone other than Furtwängler accomplished that? – this was, in terms of staging and performance, probably the best overall that I have seen and heard. No one in my theatrical experience has matched the conducting of Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden, and he too was blessed by a good, albeit generally uncomprehended production, that of the late Herbert Wernicke, but the startling, indeed staggering, vocal inadequacy of the Tristans conductor and audience had to suffer could not, alas, be entirely overlooked. Moreover, of the three Tristans in the theatre I have heard conducted by Daniel Barenboim, this was surely the best, above all in as searing a first act as I have ever heard, reminiscent of Karl Böhm at Bayreuth.

But let us return first to the matter of directing Tristan. The difficulty seems largely to centre upon the necessity to do very little, not something that comes easily to many directors. And by saying ‘do very little,’ I do not suggest reliance upon a superficial, empty minimalism, for, at the same time, something must be done. A concert performance could certainly work, up to a point, and would be vastly preferable to most of what is put before us, but staging nevertheless makes all the difference. Perhaps it is because, in Tristan, Wagner came closest to the Attic tragedy he so revered, that straightforwardness seems the only viable course here. (A production with masks might be an ‘idea’ with potential.) There is no point in suggesting that Tristan is ‘about’ anything other than what it is about, which might sound tautological and probably is, but it is certainly the case that some productions, profoundly unfaithful to a work, can succeed in turning it into something else. This does not seem to be the case with Tristan.

It needs, then, an intelligent director with the humility to recognise these difficult truths. In this resurrection of Harry Kupfer’s 2000 production, its thirty-second performance, the drama found just that. (About the intervening production, which I saw twice here at the Linden opera house, the less said the better, or at least the more deferred until another occasion the better. Covent Garden’s recent mishap with Christof Loy was considerably worse.) Kupfer is not a director averse to ‘intervention’, but here he shows an awareness of when not to intervene. To transform Wagner’s metaphysics into bourgeois drama might tempt some – though I cannot imagine why – but Kupfer and his team (Hans Schavernoch and Buki Schiff) avoid that trap. Non-specificity seems to suit this particular myth best, and that is what we saw here. The work is no more ‘about’ Cornwall than it is ‘about’ whatever directorial conceit one often must suffer. Nor is it in a straightforward sense ‘about’ the time at which Wagner wrote it, though considered references as opposed to wholesale relocation will probably do no harm. So we have a mix of the timeless and vaguely nineteenth-century costume, neither fetishised, both at the service of the drama. And likewise we have as the centrepiece of each act a fallen angel, with a Victorian touch of ‘bad nineteenth-century,’ such as Thomas Mann would surely have appreciated, but more importantly, a revolving space for the true, inner action, and an ever-present reminder of the fallen human condition. If Schopenhauer had understood, he would have approved.

Barenboim’s musical direction was equally fine. I have already mentioned the outstanding first act, heard as if in one breath, and with a dramatic surge such as one might fear one would never hear again. The following two acts were perhaps not quite pitched at the same level, but nor did they fall far short. And the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin, whose praises I have often had cause to sing, was simply magnificent. The depth and tone of the strings were such that one could have mistaken them for Bayreuth of a certain vintage: no Philharmonic-style internationalisation here. The woodwind solos – not just that bass clarinet – were, aided by Barenboim’s balancing, dramatically telling and radically prophetic of Wagner’s successors, from Debussy to Schoenberg and beyond. One of Barenboim’s strengths in Wagner has been his awareness of a certain degree of ‘French’ style that can work here, whilst remaining fundamentally true to Furtwänglerian inspiration. This orchestra truly sounded as if it were representing the Schopenhauerian Will and the Greek chorus, twin poles of Wagner’s orchestral æsthetics.

It may come as no surprise to hear that Waltraud Meier turned in a superlative performance as Isolde, but it still must be said. She lives the role like no one else alive and perhaps offers a more rounded, nuanced portrayal than many of her revered predecessors. Commanding the attention through vocal and stage presence, she was so much more suited to this production than to that in Paris. And, crucially, the production permitted her dignity, assumed as to the manor, or rather to the crown, born. My accompanying friend, whom I had doubtless bored to tears by previous raving, now understood why I had tested her patience so. René Pape must likewise surely be today’s Marke of choice. It is a role in which many succeed, as grateful as that of Tristan is not. But to ally dignity and forbearance with quite such beauty of tone is a rare gift indeed. Roman Trekel had a surprisingly shaky start as Kurwenal, sounding tired, but this was soon overcome by a searching, moving account. Amongst the smaller roles, Florian Hoffmann proved as sweet a toned Shepherd as I can recall, marrying to that vocal allure a deeply considered account of the words. And then, there is the role that is anything but ‘small’. Peter Seiffert attempted the impossible and came off with credit. So many singers are so unequal to the task that one steels oneself the moment a Tristan comes on stage, but Seiffert had the stamina and, by and large, the technical resources. It was a somewhat generalised portrayal, but within its own parameters it worked. What was odd, though, was the number of verbal lapses, when Seiffert sang words that perhaps rhymed with what they should have been or bore some other similarity. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – I cannot recall precise examples, but there was too much violence to verbal meaning for comfort, let alone for Wagner’s ‘perfectly good’ performance. Yet, in many other respects, the present performance came close. What a wonderful conclusion to the Staatsoper’s 2010 Festtage!

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 19 March 2008

Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin

Hans Sachs – James Morris
Veit Pogner – René Pape
Kunz Vogelgesang – Paul O’Neill
Konrad Nachtigall – Arttu Kataja
Sixtus Beckmesser – Roman Trekel
Fritz Kothner – Hanno Müller-Brachmann
Balthasar Zorn – Peter-Jürgen Schmidt
Ulrich Eisslinger – Patrick Vogel
Augustin Moser – Peter Menzel
Hermann Ortel – Yi Yang
Hans Schwarz – Bernd Zettisch
Hans Foltz – Andreas Bauer
Walther von Stolzing – Burkhard Fritz
David – Florian Hoffmann
Eva – Dorothea Röschmann
Magdalene – Katharina Kammerloher
Ein Nachtwächter – Alexander Vinogradov

Staatskapelle Berlin
Staatsopern Chor Berlin
Eberhard Friedrich (chorus master)
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Harry Kupfer (producer)
Hans Schavernoch (designs)
Buki Schiff (costumes)
Franz Peter David (lighting)
Roland Giertz (choreography)

This was a frustrating Meistersinger: in many ways good, but it could easily have been better. The Prelude to Act I surprised me and did not augur well. It combined a somewhat uninflected smoothness of line with a surprisingly hard-driven quality. The combination put me in mind of Karajan on an off-day, a comparison which annoyingly continued to suggest itself to me throughout the performance, especially the first two acts. Like Karajan even at his most unappealing – and I speak as an admirer in general – Daniel Barenboim would not have been capable of allowing the performance to fall below a certain level. There was, for instance, no doubt that he had command of the work’s structure. (If only one could have said that of the conductor during the Royal Opera’s Ring.) But the trick, if one can call it that, of Wagner conducting is to combine over the drama’s vast span a Furtwänglerian Fernhören with attention to detail, so that command of both short- and long-range aspects – and the reality is far more complex than this, involving numerous intermediate stages – dialectically heightens the effect of the other. One can look more synchronically at both score and performance, and see an equally important, related but distinct, problem for the conductor to address. Wagner, as Pierre Boulez has written, ‘refused to sacrifice expressiveness to polyphony, endowing each part in the polyphonic web with such expressive power that there is almost a conflict of interest: everything sings and sings “unendingly”’. Not only balancing but in a sense also heightening that conflict is the conductor’s task. This requires an almost superhuman attention to Boulez’s ‘everything’.

As so often with Barenboim, perhaps drawing upon his expertise in both French music and Mozart, there was some beautiful highlighting of woodwind detail. There were times, however, when Barenboim and his orchestra simply sounded careless. Anyone can make mistakes, but there were more than one would have expected, perhaps most glaringly from one of the horns just before the Trial Song. More seriously, there were times when Barenboim sounded insensitive not only towards the singers, but towards the stage events as such. (With regard to the former, surtitles would doubtless have mitigated the problem, but, whilst I have seen them here in Parsifal and Tristan, there were none on this occasion, for an opera whose conversational exchanges are far more rapid.) Pierre Monteux once referred so tellingly to ‘the indifference of mezzo forte’; here, especially during the second act, there was too much indifference of harsh orchestral forte. Whilst there were moments when the Staatskapelle Berlin sounded its usual, burnished self, there were too many when it did not. Indeed, the moments when the performance moved up a gear brought into heightened relief what had been missing, for instance when we heard the ’cellos' rich mahogany of the Prelude to Act III, itself beautifully paced, and subsequently the conjuring up of an appositely Tristan-esque ecstasy in the triangle between Sachs, Eva, and Walther. Perhaps conductor and orchestra had allotted more time to rehearsal of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, the new opera for these Berlin Festtage. This may be understandable, but Die Meistersinger does not play itself.

René Pape had originally been slated to play Hans Sachs. His attention to text and line was exemplary as Pogner, but I cannot have been the only member of the audience wishing that he had taken on the greater role. James Morris was therefore in something of an invidious position. He was strongest in the third act, but for much of the second act, he surprisingly seemed to struggle to establish the force of personality that must be clear by this stage. It is here, not in the final act, that Sachs comes into his own. Company stalwarts, Roman Trekel and Hanno Müller-Brachmann shone as Beckmesser and Kothner, offering more rounded portrayals than is generally the case. In this, they were certainly assisted by Harry Kupfer’s production. Beckmesser rightly emerged early on as an impressive if limited figure, his subsequent ridiculousness brought on by hubris rather than intrinsic. Kupfer brought an interesting ambiguity to Kothner: insisting upon the Tabulatur, but visibly on the side – in terms of stage placement as well as inclination – of Pogner and Sachs during the Trial Song, watching and listening, even if he did not quite understand. This was characteristic of a laudable characterisation and differentiation granted to the Mastersingers as a whole. Their corporate identity did not preclude individual personality, a fine example of this being Peter Menzel’s keenly observed Augustin Moser. Moreover, their reactions developed. The sense of fear was palpable as Walther began to sing; they were uncomprehending and threatened, but only later vicious, once Beckmesser’s marking had encouraged them. Choral contributions were good, if not at the outstanding level I have heard before in this house.

Burkhard Fritz sang well enough as Walther, with an appropriately baritonish Heldentenor, but there was something a little too generalised about his enthusiasm and boisterousness, which did not always tie in with the events portrayed. He was a little too much the spoilt child when things did not go his way at the end of Act I. Stolzing, one must not forget, is a Junker, not a young Siegfried. His clothes, however, justly marked him as an outsider, the latest in Wagner’s long line of flawed charismatic heroes. As his intended, Dorothea Röschmann often sang beautifully, but audibly struggled at times. It is difficult to surmise what she thought she was doing at the climax of the Quintet, when suddenly she forced her voice to stand out from the blend of the others, so as to conclude with a cadence more suited to Puccini than to Wagner. The effect jarred, to put it mildly. Her Magdalene, Katharina Kammerloher, shone at her first appearance. Again, Kupfer should receive some of the credit for this portrayal as far more than the usual crone. This was a girl with a sense of fun, visibly – and audibly – attracted to David. It is a pity that her subsequent appearances were more anonymous. There was no such problem with Florian Hoffmann’s wonderful David, who both looked and sounded the boyish part. He was bright within appropriate limits, ardent without cloying, and evinced an attention to the verbal and musical text that far exceeded some more senior members of the cast.

A guiding principle of the production, although not obsessively emphasised, was that of conflict between old and new – and the shades of grey in between, as I have already commented with regard to Kothner. Boulez once remarked, concerning the only Wagner music drama he has never conducted:

… the Romantics rediscovered the Gothic style. At the end of the nineteenth century there were Gothic churches in profusion. This was the most striking example of stylistic reference. On the other hand, although in The Mastersingers there is no end of references to the Minnesänger and to the forms of sixteenth and – even more so – fifteenth century music, Wagner’s music actually has nothing to do with the historical truth about the town of Nuremberg. This is why I feel really ill at ease when people try to depict the historical town on the stage when it is absent from the music.

Kupfer did not go so far as to present a Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg. Indeed, Nuremberg was present throughout, replete with Cranach, stained glass, and banners (including King David and his harp), although never with quite such exuberant delight as, say, in Graham Vick’s Breughelesque production for Covent Garden. What instead we had, which perhaps better served Boulez’s general point than the absence of the historical town he himself advocated, was a staired centrepiece, serving, subtly altered in different guises as the Katharinenkirche – today, of course, Katharinenruine – as the balcony of Act Two, as a staircase to Sachs’s workshop, and so forth. The shape of this centrepiece suggested to me a ruined tower, perhaps even Berlin’s own celebrated image of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, and thereby seemed to allude to the devastation of the ‘German catastrophe’. This may, however, have been my imagination rather than the director’s intention; it does not really matter. A sense of the modern city was superimposed, by virtue of the skyscraper backdrop to the second act and first part of the third. This cleverly suggested, rather like an affectionate Adorno – if that can be imagined – the tension between Wagner’s thoroughgoing adoption of modern technical and technological means and his harking back to a pre-modern age of guilds, corporations, an age prior to excessive division of labour. Sachs, it will be recalled, is both poet and shoemaker. The utopian quality to this lost age, if it ever existed, was gently suggested by the joy of the Festwiese scene and its processions, giant figure of Death, flamethrowers, acrobats, and all.

To be utopian, however, cuts both ways, for a utopia cannot exist. Kupfer did not travel very far down the deconstructionist route, but the presentation was finely nuanced. There was a nice touch to the inability of Sachs to find someone on whom to bestow the Festwiese garland, following Walther’s refusal. Eventually, he placed it on the floor. A sentimental path would have been to give it to Beckmesser, but this would have been to rehabilitate him unduly. Instead, and with considerable poignancy, the defeated town clerk walked over to it and looked at what might have been, excluded from the general rejoicing without being ostracised. Indeed, during Walther’s singing of the Prize Song, Beckmesser had occasionally displayed grudging approval, taking note and even nodding, without the banal prospect of a wholesale conversion. It was a pity that the musical performances did not always match the production, for had they done so, this could truly have been a Meistersinger to cherish.