Other Links
Editorial Board
- Editor - Bill Kenny
- London Editor-Melanie Eskenazi
- Founder - Len Mullenger
Google Site Search
SEEN
AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW
Wagner, Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg:
Soloists, Staatskapelle und Staatsopenchor Berlin.
Conductor: Daniel Barenboim. Staatsoper
Unter den Linden, Berlin. 19.3.2008 (MB)
…
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.
Cast:
Hans Sachs – James Morris
Veit Pogner – René Pape
Kunz Vogelgesange – 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
Production:
Staatskapelle Berlin
Staatsopernchor 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
synchronistically 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 Prize 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,
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:
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.
Mark Berry