Energetic invention that peters out
Because it so squarely addresses the question of what it is to be German, Meistersinger is perhaps the most ideologically contentious of Wagner’s operas, easily misread as championing a culture based on exclusivity and conformity.
A new production by Barrie Kosky – an Australian of Jewish descent – critiques it from the narrow perspective of Wagner’s egomania and the disease of anti-semitism. Like so many such interpretations, this one begins with an energy and inventiveness that soon peters out.
The first act is set not in a 16thcentury Nuremberg church, but in 1875 at Wagner’s Bayreuth home Wahnfried, where the composer is receiving birthday adulation. Eva appears as his neurotic wife Cosima, Sachs, Walther and David all represent Wagner at various stages of his life, and the Mastersingers materialise in fancy historical costume out of a grand piano. In one of several stunning coups de théâtre, this amusing tableau dissolves at the act’s climax to be replaced by the hall of the post-war Nuremberg trials, with Wagner about to ascend the witness box.
This is all enthralling, if perverse. Sadly, the second act – set in a scrubby meadow that conveys no sense of a town square on a midsummer’s night or the comic intrigues afoot – is dull and even ineptly staged.
The third act focuses on Kosky’s other big idea – the Malvolio-like town clerk Beckmesser becomes Hermann Levi, the abject Jewish conductor ruthlessly exploited by Wagner in the last decade of his life. Here he is the eternal scapegoat, bundled out ceremoniously after his hopeless ode to Eva and trumped by the smug Walther who knows he is going to win out. In the final bars, we see Sachswagner lecturing the Nuremberg judges, then presiding over a vast chorus and orchestra. There is food for thought here, but Wagner’s opera ultimately seems much wiser, subtler and broader than Kosky’s.
Philippe Jordan’s conducting has a lovely light touch and warm lyrical flow, and both chorus and orchestra are superb. The cast is variable: Michael Volle seems too bluffly bossy for the melancholy Sachs and Anne Schwanewilms is miscast as Eva, but Johannes Martin Kränzle makes a heartrending Beckmesser, Klaus Florian Vogt, the audience’s darling, is a plangent Walther, and Daniel Behle, Wiebke Lehmkuhl and Gunther Groissböck shine as David, Magdalene and Pogner.