Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg
But it won’t be–because it’s also a magnificent musical performance. In the abstract that shouldn’t be enough: a successful production ought to be equally strong as music and as spectacle. But in the real world, you take what you can get–and as hellish as this thing is on the eyes, it’s glorious in the ears. The cast is uniformly excellent, the Lyric orchestra sounds better than I’ve ever heard it, and the young conductor Christian Thielemann–who’s making his Lyric debut–is clearly a major talent. And then of course there’s Wagner’s astonishing score, which is performed uncut and at a deliberately unhurried pace. This is the longest single opera ever written; the Lyric production begins at 6 PM and lets out at midnight. But I can honestly say I was never bored, never in a hurry for the curtain, never less than thoroughly enchanted. If the test of an opera is that it can triumph over a bad production, I’m now convinced that Die Meistersinger is the best opera in the repertoire.
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It’s over this massively specific background that Wagner spreads a wispy fairy-tale trifle of a plot: a singing contest where the winner earns the right to ask the beautiful heroine Eva to marry him. The three contenders represent different attitudes toward the art of music. There’s the wandering knight Walther, the singer of pure spontaneous inspiration; the talentless clerk Beckmesser, who blindly follows the musical rules of the mastersingers; and the great Sachs, who teaches Walther to balance his inspiration with respect for tradition and thus win the contest and Eva’s hand.
So what are we watching for so long? Neither a plot nor a Platonic debate about the nature of art, but the slow unfolding of an emotional landscape. The real drama is in the secret love Sachs feels for Eva and in his willingness to renounce it for her happiness, in the half-conscious knowledge she has of Sachs’s love and in her almost willingness to return it. This current of sadness and irresolution, which is always flowing underneath the bright surface, keeps opening out into unexpected gulfs of melancholy. It does so at the end of the second act when a brawl in a back alley erupts into a riot (which vanishes like a summer squall before the night watchman comes by on his rounds), and Sachs is suddenly overcome with sadness at the absurdity of human affairs. He has already been feeling he’s too old for Eva, and now he’s starting to feel he’s too old for the world. The melancholy emerges again in its most startling form at the finale, after Eva and Walther are betrothed, when Sachs suddenly warns the townspeople that they should treasure the work of the mastersingers because doom is hanging over Germany: if their homeland is invaded and their way of life destroyed, they will have nothing to sustain them but the enduring beauty of German art.
Ultimately the result is that the thick circumstantiality of the libretto seems like a mirage. Nuremberg may look and feel like a real place with historical roots and a living tradition, but the music undermines all that. It turns the setting into another one of Wagner’s imaginary worlds, a myth of a happier age that’s as private and ahistorical as the dream landscape of Parsifal or the gloomy metaphysical vistas of the Ring.
If you can somehow get beyond that, the cast can generally be praised for performing well under trying circumstances. Nancy Gustafson as Eva and Jan-Hendrik Rootering as Sachs are both excellent–at least when they aren’t interacting with each other. Gustafson’s voice was a little pale the night I saw her (I’ve been told it was stronger at other performances), but she was always exquisite to watch. Rootering is maybe too monotonous–especially given that so much of his inner drama has been deleted–but his voice is always strong and lyrical. It’s also a pleasure to listen to Gosta Winbergh’s Walther, though I do have to say that he looks and acts too old; he should seem callow compared to Sachs, and instead he comes off as mature and companionable, like an old college friend in town for the weekend. The most agreeable performance is that of Eike Wilm Schulte as Beckmesser. Though he’s directed to perform some peculiar bits of business–including a grotesque silent-movie stalk through Sachs’s workshop–he’s otherwise a charming and funny villain. It’s rather touching that at the finale he stays onstage to congratulate Sachs rather than running off in disgrace.
