Salome, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 4 December 2019

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Oscar Wilde (Christian Natter), Salome (Aušrine Stundytė)

Herod – Vincent Wolfsteiner

Herodias – Marina Prudenskaya

Salome – Aušrine Stundytė

Jochanaan – Thomas J. Mayer

Narraboth – Peter Sonn

Herodias’s Page – Annika Schlicht

Jews – Ziad Nehme, Michael Smallwood, Matthew Peña, Andrés Moreno Garcia, David Oštrek

Nazarenes – Adam Kutny, Ulf Dirk Mädler

Soldiers – Arttu Kataja, Erik Rosenius

A Cappadocian – David Oštrek

A Slave – Ireene Ollino

Oscar Wilde – Christian Natter

Guards – Ernesto Amico, Allen Boxer, Nikos Fragkou, Jonathan Heck, Maximilian Reisinger, Tom-Veit Weber

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Philipp Lossau (assistant director)

Reinhard von der Thannen (designs)

Kathrin Hauer (assistant stage designer)

Sommer Ulrickson (choreography)

Stefan Bolliger (lighting)

Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Manipulation lies at the heart of Richard Strauss’s art. One might argue that it lies at the heart of all art; there would be a strong case to be made for that. However, there is something particular about Straussian manipulation. In some ways not dissimilar to that of Puccini—both composers are expert at pressing particular emotional buttons and having many listeners enjoy such manipulation in full knowledge that they are being manipulated—it differs in the extraordinary level of technical sophistication and, often if not always, in the nested levels of knowing reflexion-in-contrivance. Artifice is good, then: perhaps, after Nietzsche, more in opposition to ‘bad’ than to ‘evil’. For Strauss, as Salome makes abundantly clear, is no more a Christian, perhaps even less willing to admit of metaphysical transcendence, than Nietzsche, of whom he had been an avid and discerning reader.

Salome and Wilde

Manipulation lies at the heart of Salome too; it lies also at the heart of Hans Neuenfels’s production, which, having seen when new last year, I was keen to see again. What I think came across still more strongly than last time—this may just have been me—was the central character’s awakening to that manipulation and, concomitantly, to her ability to manipulate. Such was a signal achievement for Aušrine Stundytė, showing herself every inch a singing actress, throwing everything into a performance that, rightly, was not always pretty, not always to be kept within bounds, very much a force of nature: trying, testing, both winning and losing. Working with Neuenfels’s staging—for which we should also understand Reinhard von der Thannen’s striking designs, Sommer Ulrickson’s choreography, and Henry Arnold’s thoughtful and provocative dramaturgy—we saw and heard from Stundytė a Salome led to self-discovery and ultimately to tragedy not only by Strauss but verbally and visibly by Oscar Wilde himself.

The latter’s advent, first foretold in neon lights (‘Wilde is coming’) and then portrayed, offered intriguing counterpoint to Jochanaan’s foretelling of another leader (and, if you like, divine manipulator)—and was once more acted and danced in a mesmerising fashion perhaps more readily associated with Salome herself by Christian Natter. And is not the Christ of whom this John the Baptist speaks his and his alone, a product of the imagination and repressed desires of a religious fanatic, incarcerated within—visible, throughout—phallic cistern. Was not Christianity always thus: recall Nietzsche’s ‘there was only one Christian and he died on the Cross’. Other religions are, true enough to the opera, treated no more favourably. Their claims, voiced exclusively by men, seem no more plausible and, perhaps more to the point, no more relevant to the story unfolding and to human flourishing beyond that particular story, than a horoscope. Strauss’s failure to conjure up music of more than empty ‘gravity’ for references to Christ tell their own story. Who manipulates whom, and to what end?

Salome looks elsewhere, to those who might actually know her: first, yes, to Jochanaan, but ultimately, more productively, to Wilde—and thus to art, to a game that is aesthetic as much as it is sado-masochistic. The two can hardly be distinguished, and why would one try? Weimar-expressionist cabaret beckons from Wildean decadence; Wilde learns from Strauss and Salome too, ultimately adopting a leather harness in her/his/their service. Such blurring of pronouns may be read in various ways—and probably should. In art, perhaps, the mightier the plagiarism, the mightier the achievement. When Jochanaan and the eunuch Wilde seem partially liberated by adopting the corset and bustle that had once constricted the now queerer, pant-suited Princess Salome, who manipulates whom? And yet, gender as play, as game, remains a deadly one. Salome dies; Salome is killed. Patriarchy—an imperialist, orientalist patriarchy at that—wins to fight another day, to slay another woman, another queer voice and body too. Does it not always? And yet, her smashing of one—only one, yet nevertheless one—of  the Jochanaan busts, an aesthetic representations with which Wilde has incited her, remains: as powerful a moment onstage as that of her murder at the command of a tyrant-abuser.

Wilde and Jochanaan (Thomas J. Mayer)

Herod’s upholding of patriarchal norms, decadent, hypocritical subversion of them notwithstanding, was expertly conveyed in a wheedling, beyond-Mime performance from Vincent Wolfsteiner. Marina Prudenskaya’s Herodias, haughty, contemptuous, impressively controlled in her channelling of sex and gender alike, proved the perfect foil—or, better, manipulator. Thomas J. Mayer likewise offered, in post-Wagnerian marriage of word, tone, and gesture, a Jochanaan for this production, no hint—costume aside—of the ready-to-wear. Peter Sonn proved a worthy successor to Nikolai Schukoff as Narraboth. At times heart-breakingly beautiful of tone, his longing was as aesthetically exquisite as it was therefore doomed. All smaller roles were very well taken indeed, yet also formed part of a greater whole. If I single out Adam Kutny’s First Nazarene and Annika Schlicht’s Page as having made the greatest impression, that is doubtless little more than a highly merited personal reaction.

Conducting the outstanding Staatskapelle Berlin, then as now, was Thomas Guggeis. Then he made headlines by standing in at short notice for Christoph von Dohnányi. Now the field was his own and it sounded as much. From this bubbling, post-Wagnerian cauldron, anything might spill, unless someone could tame it; the battle was vividly, meaningfully rare, rather than effortlessly aestheticised after, say, Karajan.  This was not a tone-poem with words; or was it? Unleashing the fabled darkness of this orchestra’s tone to ends in keeping with and in relationship to the vision on stage, yet in no sense constricted by them, Guggeis showed, as in his recent Katya Kabanova here, a keen ear for harmony, line, and orchestral musicodramatic eloquence. Crucially, he commanded the authority to have them speak in the theatre, in the dramatic here-and-now. This is not Elektra; it is not so single-minded, so monomaniacal. There are sideways glances; aesthetic contemplation shading into sexual frustration, if rarely fulfilment; hints at alternative futures; and so on. Such were rendered dramatically—often vividly— immanent, without throwing us from Strauss and Wilde’s central trail. Or so it seemed, for in the absence of any greater metaphysical authority, how could we know?  Aesthetically the answer seemed clear, yet how could it not? Who, then, had manipulated whom?

Der Freischütz, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 September 2018

Images: Katrin Ribbe

Ottokar – Roman Trekel

Kuno – Wolfgang Schöne

Agathe – Anna Samuil

Ännchen – Anna Prohaska

Kaspar – Falk Struckmann

Max – Peter Sonn

Hermit – Jan Martiník

Kilian – Adam Kutny

Samiel – Peter Moltzen

Bridesmaids – Verena Allertz, Regina Emersleben-Motz, Konstanze Löwe, Julia Mencke, Claudia Tuch

Michael Thalheimer (director)

Caroline Staunton (revival director)

Olaf Altmann (set designs)

Katrin Lea Tag (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Where it all began: well, not quite, but almost. It was in the newly opened Schauspielhaus no more than five minutes’ walk away on the Gendarmenmarkt that Der Freischütz received its 1821 premiere. Now Schinkel’s theatre serves as the Konzerthaus. Opera, however, continues to be the business of the older Linden house, which, following a somewhat bumpy reopening a year ago, seems now properly to have found its stride once again. Recent highlights for me have included Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Tristan and a revival of Claus Guth’s Frau ohne Schatten, of which I saw the dress rehearsal earlier in September, under the excellent – I should probably say ‘outstanding’ – revival direction of Caroline Staunton. This revival of Michael Thalheimer’s Freischütz stood also in her more than capable hands. Since this was my first viewing of this production, I cannot comment on any changes that might – or might not – have taken place. It stood very well indeed, however, on its own terms: a highly accomplished company performance.

In contrast, say, to Christian von Götz’s production for Leipzig, whose premiere I saw last year, this staging does not seem especially interested in the status of Weber’s opera as icon of German Romanticism. There is, whether we like it or no, darkness aplenty in such a concept for audiences today, just as there would be for this work’s lovechild, Siegfried, yet such is not the only possibility of darkness. This is more psychoanalytical – and again one can hardly help but think of the implications for that and many other of Wagner’s dramas. For, as Wagner, miserable, lonely, and close to starvation in Paris, wrote on seeing Der Freischütz there, the work ‘seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’

Here the action and those ‘woods themselves’ are seen and framed through the barrel of a gun. Sometimes, perhaps, a gun might just be a gun; it is certainly not here, no more than a forest is just a forest. Man, even men, are isolated; so too are woman and women. We look, as if the wrong way through a telescope to some source of light, perhaps even of life; or is it a nightmare? Nightmares certainly emerge from it; do they not always? Is this concerned with fear of or oppression of women? The either/or is irrelevant; we see, as the tale of a more or less bartered bride progresses, how it is both. We also see how her virginal white, hypocritically valued yet brutally blooded, is both ‘the story’ and anything but. Who dreams up Samiel, who plays a far more important role than usual, here? Wagner saw the work with Berlioz’s recitatives. Here the usual dialogue is rejected or modified in a different way, Thalheimer providing his own – convincing, I think, on its terms – to further and indeed to provoke the enhanced role of this ‘daemonic power’ (in Wagner’s words). Absurd – in a context of realism – stage directions, which seem quite to have confounded that first Berlin production, could therefore be reimagined, the forest and its spirit giving birth to a bestial array of animals without having a Wild Hunt embarrassingly traipse across stage.

Thomas Guggeis impressed me greatly this spring, standing in at the very last minute to make his house debut in Salome – and rightly receiving plaudits for having done so. On this occasion, it seems, he had a little longer if not so very long to prepare to replace another indisposed conductor. This was perhaps the sterner test, since he was more of a known quality and less of a hero of the moment. Whatever the truth of that, he once again emerged with great credit. For one so young – for one of any age – he seems instinctively, however much craft such ‘instinct’ might hide, to know how to ‘play’ this great orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin. It obliged with its statutory dark, ‘old German’ sound, apparently untouched by the ravages of Western orchestral homogenisation. It might have been the orchestra that played for Furtwängler – or, indeed, that does for Barenboim. There was no stiffness to Guggeis’s direction: quite the contrary. Difficult balances were always well struck: between the Romantically ‘organic’ and the needs of the number opera, of the moment too, between Mozartian inheritance  and Wagnerian future – clarinet solos standing out as much as horn calls – and between ‘French’ and ‘German’. We should never forget, however often German nationalists may have wished to do so, that the Huntsmen’s Chorus is based upon an eighteenth-century French street song, ‘Malbrouk [Marlborough] s’en va t’en guerre’.

Moreover, the grandeur and ambition of work, production, and orchestral performance notwithstanding, not to forget the work of the excellent chorus, there was something winningly intimate, in the opéra comique tradition to what we saw and heard from the singers on stage. That is not to suggest a lack of vocal scale, but simply to point to their convincing performances as characters on stage. If Roman Trekel and Wolfgang Schöne both proved somewhat dry and stiff, the rest of the cast more than compensated. Peter Sonn’s Max was fresh toned, enthusiastic, vulnerable, Falk Struckmann’s Kasper very much his dark, virile antagonist (even, in this context, alter ego?) Anna Samuil gave perhaps the strongest performance I have heard from her as Agathe, exhibiting a fine sense, scenic and vocal, of tragic catastrophe before the last. Anna Prohaska’s more colourful, spirited Ännchen, despatched words and coloratura not only with ease but with intent and meaning. Performed in this new ‘version’ without an interval, the work emerged, Goldilocks-like, just right: neither too short nor too long. That, however, should remain a dark fairy-tale for another day.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Die schweigsame Frau, Bavarian State Opera, 5 July 2015

Nationaltheater, Munich

Sir Morosus – Franz Hawlata

Housekeeper – Okka von der Damerau
Barber – Nikolay Borchev
Henry Morosus – Peter Sonn
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Elsa Benoit
Carlotta – Tara Erraught
Morbio – Christian Rieger
Vanuzzi – Christoph Stephinger
Farfallo – Tareq Nazmi
Papagei – Airton Feuchter-Dantas

Barrie Kosky (director)

Esther Bialas (designs)
Benedikt Zehm (lighting)
Olaf A. Schmitt (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Pedro Halffter (conductor)

If Strauss’s operas of the 1920s receive far too little performing attention, especially in the Anglosphere, those of the 1930s seem to fare worse still. Quite why is anyone’s guess; no one, I assume, would declare Die schweigsame Frau a greater work than Elektra, but it is clearly a better work than so many that continue to hold the stage. German theatres are different, of course, not least those associated with Strauss personally, so to see Strauss’s collaboration with Stefan Zweig and, at one remove, Ben Jonson, a visit to the Munich Opera Festival seemed like a good idea.

And so it was. One could not reasonably have hoped to hear Strauss in better hands. Not only could I find no grounds to fault Bavarian State Orchestra – not that, in imitation of the third act’s divorce proceedings, I was attempting to find such grounds – the orchestra reaffirmed its credentials as a Strauss orchestra to be spoken of in the same breath as Dresden and Vienna, and arguably more reliable than either, certainly more so than the latter. Precision and warmth – though not too much – were very much the hallmark of this performance, wisely guided by Pedro Halffter, who seemed keen to impart to his account a sense of, if not quite Neue Sachlichkeit, then at least of something that made Strauss’s writing here particular rather than generalised. Pacing was impeccable, quasi-autonomous musical structures coming fruitfully into contact with verbal demands: the sort of thing one longs for, generally in vain, in Rossini. The Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria is never far away, of course, but there is perhaps less overt dazzle in much of the score than in, say, Rosenkavalier or Elektra; Halffter and the orchestra appreciated its subtleties and responded to them in equally subtle yet undoubtedly sure fashion.  

I doubt that Brenda Rae’s Aminta could be bettered in any theatre today (although how would one know?) Just as sure of note and line as the orchestra and with greater, contrasting warmth, especially at those wonderful revelations, through the disguise of Timidia, of the fundamental humanity of Aminta, this was a performance to savour. Much the same could be said of her partner in crime – and love – Peter Sonn’s splendidly lyrical, often imploring Henry. Franz Hawlata’s Morosus was very much a character portrayal: too many notes, as it were, lacked a little when it came to the demands of intonation. But such was Hawlata’s identification with and communication of the role, it would be churlish to complain unduly; the audience responded warmly, and it was right to have done so. The quicksilver vocal and dramatic qualities of Nikolay Borchev’s Barber – despite the hideous green tracksuit he initially had to wear – were rightly appreciated by the Munich audience too. Okka von der Damerau captured to near-perfection the disapproving, ultimately amusing qualities of the Housekeeper. There was depth in the casting too: splendid rivalry to Timidia came from Tara Erraught (with, insofar as I could tell, a fine line in Bavarian dialect) and Elsa Benoit. There was indeed an excellent sense of company: no one disappointed and almost everyone shone.

Barrie Kosky’s production: well, it was considerably better than his Berlin Figaro. But I cannot help but think that his matching of high camp – the tasteless pink designs of the first part of the third act, splendidly realised on their own terms by Esther Bialas – and custard-pie slapstick is not really a match for Strauss, or for Zweig. The subtle, even sometimes not-so-subtle, æstheticism of both artists may well benefit from deconstruction. But might not a production that takes to heart the circumstances of the opera’s composition – this, after all, was the opera occasioning Strauss’s fateful letter to Zweig, intercepted by the Gestapo, which led to Goebbels having the composer resign from Presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer – offer a more fruitful, deeper (yes, I know, how Teutonic of me!) mode of questioning?  There is no doubting the skill with which Kosky and his production team accomplish their vision; I wish, though, that I could discern more in the vision itself. According to Kosky, quoted in the programme, ‘We have placed our protagonist in a world which swings [schwankt] uncertainly between Mel Brooks, the Muppets, and Vienna’s Josefstadt [Theatre].’ Make of that what you will.

Even for those of us who remained sceptical about the production, however, there was much to enjoy, for which many thanks should go to the Bavarian State Opera. This would surely make an interesting prospect for ENO, whose Strauss record has recently been anything but conspicuous, to bring to London. Now, how about an enterprising company offering us Salieri’s Angiolene, also based (loosely) on Jonson’s Epiocene? Or even a hearing for Mark Lothar’s 1930 Lord Spleen, written for Dresden? (Does anyone know the music of Lothar, a Schreker pupil whom Max Reinhardt enlisted as Music Director for Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in 1933, whether for this or for anything else? I freely admit that I do not.) George Antheil’s Volpone, which apparently owes a good deal to Zweig’s German adaptation of Jonson’s play, also awaits revival. And yes, more Strauss would be much appreciated too: Feuersnot, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae, etc., etc. Opera houses of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but Timidia’s timidity!

Salzburg Festival (10) – Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 27 August 2013

Grosses Festspielhaus

Hans Sachs – Michael Volle

Walther von Stolzing – Roberto Saccà
Eva – Anna Gabler
David – Peter Sonn
Veit Pogner – Georg Zeppenfeld
Magdalena – Monika Bohinec
Sixtus Beckmesser – Markus Werba
Kunz Vogelgesang – Thomas Ebenstein
Konrad Nachtigall – Guido Jentjens
Fritz Kothner – Oliver Zwarg
Balthasar Zorn – Benedikt Kobel
Ulrich Eißlinger – Franz Supper
Augustin Moser – Thorsten Scharnke
Hermann Ortel – Karl Huml
Hans Schwartz – Dirk Aleschus
Hans Foltz – Roman Astakhov
Night Watchman – Tobias Kehrer

Stefan Herheim (director)

Heike Scheele (designs)
Gesine Völlm (costumes)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Martin Kern (video)

Academy Mastersingers of the Young Singers Project

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

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniele Gatti (conductor)

 



Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster

Salzburg’s new Meistersinger proves beyond a shadow of doubt, in the unlikely event that such proof were needed, that Stefan Herheim is the most intelligent, most thoughtful, most theatrical, and – most important of all – most musical stage director of Wagner and perhaps of opera tout court today. There is nothing worse, even the arbitrary setting of an opera in ‘an empty swimming pool or a slaughterhouse’ (see wagneropera.net’s revealing interview with Peter Konwitschny, perhaps Herheim’s only, though less consistent, competitor), than a mindless ‘traditional’ staging. As Speight Jenkins,  general director of Seattle Opera, argued in a career retrospective I heard him give in Seattle earlier in August, ‘traditional Wagner’ is a matter of a ‘rock and tree’, and let the singers get on with it; Jenkins recoiled from, indeed quite rightly attacked, the idea that Seattle’s ‘green’ Ring has anything to do with that. There is nothing Wagnerian – it is little exaggeration to think of Wagner as our first operatic stage director – about the bad old days of ‘park and bark’. Moreover, there can be few more gross insults to Wagner, theoretician of the ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’ (Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes), than to insist instead upon intellectual abdication; should you seek brazen ‘infidelity’ to the ‘Master’, look no further than the world-view, such as it is, of Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’. (Concert performances are of course a different matter entirely; I face here the difficult truth that the two greatest Ring performances I have experienced have both been of that ilk, or rather semi-staged: those by Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim at, of all places, the Royal Albert Hall. But then, I and the world at large are still waiting for Herheim’s Ring.)

Hans Sachs (Michael Volle)

There are countless ways to approach even a brief outline of Herheim’s staging – and even when one has seen it but once. (Doubtless, as with his Parsifal, subsequent viewings will reap further, dialectical rewards.) We might usefully start with the conception of Meistersinger as Hans Sachs’s dream, but fascinating though that idea and its implications may be, equally important, and indeed unavoidable in any discussion, is Herheim’s interrogation of dreams and indeed of his own Konzept. In that, of course, he both mirrors and interrogates Wagner’s own conceptions of dreams within the work. One is always aware of the latter, yet it is striking how heightened the role of dreams in poem and music becomes when an intelligent, sympathetic director heightens intellect and feeling, bids them become one. In the first act Prelude we see Sachs in his nineteenth-century workshop, dreaming, like Wagner, of a Nuremberg, which, like the ‘traditional’ productions of ‘traditionalists’, never was; we proceed to see – and to hear – how he creates, not recollects, before him and us a Nuremberg of his own time. Similarly, Wagner declines in the score to employ even the most cursory reference to Renaissance music; his guiding spirit here is Johann Sebastian Bach, or rather his own creation of Bach, the ‘history of the interior life of the German spirit,’ according to the contemporary essay What is German?  Invention of tradition is seen elsewhere, just as we hear it throughout the score. The Masters’ Nuremberg, now seen at a time of renewed crisis for the guilds and other corporate institutions, is shiny, new, a little insistent, a little desperate. I could not help but think of the Tand both of Sachs’s peroration and of Loge’s description of the Rhinegold. All that glistens, be it in the Rhine or at a guild meeting, is not necessarily gold; indeed Sachs, rightly or otherwise, will condemn it as the very thing the Masters insist it is not; ‘wälschem Tand’, foreign vanity.

 

The ‘real’ world – but is it ‘real’ at all, when we, like Wagner and perhaps like Sachs, read from Schopenhauer? – both disappears and yet remains, projected onto the curtain a night-capped Sachs opens and closes, with increasing difficulty, at the beginnings and ends of the first two acts. Yet the dream world, initiated erotically by Sachs’s sexual approach to Eva in the church, is made up of what he knows, and of what his – and Wagner’s – culture knows. His writing bureau, magnified, becomes the organ, as indeed the furniture generally provides a Nutcracker-like magnification and intensification for the Wahn of the second-act riot; a painting becomes Eva. Most challenging of all, Beckmesser finally becomes Sachs’s alter ego, emerging for a curtain call in matching night dress: a move equally alert to the comedy and to the darkness at the heart of a work whose profundity lies in precisely the matters faux ‘traditionalists’ from the Nazis, and indeed still further back, would ignore and preferably bury. Or is it the other way around? Does the organ, resplendent as a nineteenth-century, Gewandhaus-like invention of tradition, become Sachs’s bureau, and thus nourish via tradition, in a proper sense, his creations, whether artistic or social (manipulation of Wahn more generally)? It is not either-or, of course; Wagner and Herheim are both dialecticians, and so must we, as a responsive, responsible audience, be too. A bust of Wagner makes its ambiguous, multivalent point without exaggeration.

 

Perhaps most telling on a structural level is the way in which Herheim’s staging traces, or rather instigates, Sachs-like manipulation of Wahn – and doubtless Wahn’s manipulation of Sachs. Just as Walther, his song, and Nuremberg’s public are guided, so too are Sachs’s dream and Sachs’s reality. Yes, there are proto-fascist undertones there for those who wish to find them, as suggested by the chilling lighting of a semi-crazed Sachs during his final peroration, yet they may always readily be understood in a multitude of other or at least additional ways; a signal strength of Herheim, as Wagner, is that he asks questions that are too great to be banally ‘resolved’. When, then, the third act begins, the drama continues, but Sachs is in ‘real’, that is night, dress. Has he made the terrible realisation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy? Has he lifted, as does Wotan, through Brünnhilde, the veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, seeing and feeling in the carnage of the world, whether on the banks of the Pegnitz or of the Rhine, not only ‘suffering humanity’, but also a ‘world that passes away’? One can hardly fail to think of Tristan, too, when it comes to such clever game-playing between night and day. And yet, Meistersinger is not, of course, Tristan, not least since Sachs would not become King Marke. That truth is borne out not only in the third act, but even during the Prügelfuge at the close of Act II. The glow worm who could not find its mate, to whom Sachs will refer in the following act, is seen in the mêlée desperately – and graphically – trying to find a replacement. This is no world of idealised Romantic or even sexual love; it is clear-eyed, brutal as the Will itself. And so, the creation of the third act, Wagner’s and Sachs’s, both breaks with and incorporates what has gone before, like the Prize Song itself.

 

What else? The world of fairy tales enters explosively, erotically, frighteningly, during the second-act riot. They also reappear in the following ‘reality’, Red Riding Hood chased in Sachs’s workshop. The Brothers Grimm live in Wagner’s, Herheim’s, and our, imagination; so does Freud, even before the letter. A steam locomotive, recalling Germany’s very first railway line, between Nuremberg and Fürth, brings the girls from the latter, yet they are not quite what they might have been; instead, they are nightmarish dolls. Who is dreaming now, and of what? We also recall Adorno’s critical observations on technology and the instrumentalisation of reason, both in the stagecraft and the very idea of such a production itself; in Schiller’s well-worn yet indispensable typology, this is no ‘naïve’ art, but ‘sentimental’ art with a vengeance. One makes connections, and they will probably be different for each audience member, probably different for each viewing by the same audience member. That is successful theatre direction. For Herheim never forgets that this is theatre; every observation is keen, every member of the chorus is his or her own person; yet by the same token, he never presents effect without cause (Wirkung ohne Ursache: choose from Wagner on Meyerbeer, or Nietzsche on Wagner, according to taste, or indeed reject the terms of the choice itself).

 

If I have written at greater length on the staging than I shall on the musical performances, that is not because I think the latter realm of intrinsically lesser importance; quite the contrary. It is partly because I wished to suggest Herheim’s production formed part of the musical performance, but also partly because, all in all, it was the exemplary experience of this particular night. Daniele Gatti’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic surprised me somewhat, especially during the first act, which sounded – and, in terms of the number of strings, I suspect was – somewhat small-scale. Yet as the work progressed, one realised that Gatti’s conception was dynamic in a very real dramatic sense, complementary to that of Herheim, but not identical – representing, furthering the relationship between Wagner’s poem and music. The score bloomed, darkened, expanded as the drama itself; the orchestral performance could be understood to have instantiated a similar dialectical strategy to that of Sachs’s dream. It is certainly not the only way to perform Die Meistersinger, but the scattered boos Gatti – uniquely and undeservedly – suffered seemed more likely to have emanated from those who thought the work ‘must’ sound like a particular recording or misremembered performance from a ‘golden’ age that never was than from thoroughgoing critique. The VPO was not exactly on vintage form, however, sometimes offering a thinness of string tone that went beyond Gatti’s initial chamber imperative. ‘Tradition’ in that case had something in common with Mahler’s Schlamperei.

 

Michael Volle’s Sachs was the undoubted star on the stage. In full command and sympathy with music, words, and production, he inhabited the role, made it his own, and offered more rounded a portrayal than I have ever previously seen on the stage. The Wahn monologue was all the more moving for emerging from what had already passed; this was no mere set piece. Markus Werba offered a finely-honed Beckmesser, navigating with apparent ease – though, like the mediated Prize Song, that ease can only have been apparent – the tricky balancing act between malevolence and Malvolio, learning and charlatanry. Werba did not make the common mistake of unduly dignifying Beckmesser; nor, however, was his creation in any way a caricature. Roberto Saccà experienced certain moments of strain; yet, by any reasonable standards this side of Sándor Konyá, his was an estimable assumption, welding words, text, and stage action in a properly Wagnerian unity. Anna Gabler, as his intended, was at times a little bland of tone, but acted well. She was outshone, however, by Monika Bohinec’s Magdalena, who, in Herheim’s hands, offered a far more interesting second-act Magdalena-as-Eva than I have seen, a true dramatic engagement with and reaction to Beckmesser’s serenade without singing a single world. Not that she could not sing too. Peter Sonn’s David was bright and bushy-tailed, without offering anything especially distinctive, but there was experience aplenty in Georg Zeppenfeld’s Pogner and Oliver Zwarg’s Kothner. The other Masters were a characterful bunch, and not only on account of Herheim’s alert Personenregie, and the choral singing was pretty much beyond reproach.

 

This was undoubtedly the best Meistersinger I have seen. The Paris co-production and rumours of a trip to the Metropolitan Opera will offer opportunities that should be grabbed with open arms; if only Covent Garden would join the party...