Opera: Nuremberg's singing masters, the power of singing and a bewildering management

The street fight of the end of Act II – © Wilfried Hösl

• Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Opera in three acts. Booklet of the composer
• Wolfgang Koch (Hans Sachs), Daniel Kirch (Walther von Stolzing), Sara Jakubiak (Eva), Christof Fischesser (Veit Pogner), Martin Gantner (Sixtus Beckmesser), Allan Clayton (David), Okka von Damerau (Magdalena), Michael Kupfer-Radecky (Fritz Kothner), Kevin Conners (Kunz Vogelgesang), Ulrich Ress (Balthasar Zorn), Dean Power (Ulrich Eisslinger), Peter Lobert (Hanz Schwarz), Roman Astakhov (Hans Foltz), Christian Rieger (Konrad Nachtigall), Thorsten Scharnke (Augustin Moser), Levente Patli (Hermann Ortel), Milan Siljanov (Ein Nachtwächter)
• Chor und Extrachor der Bayerisches Staatsoper, dir. Sören Eckhoff
• Bayerisches Staatsorchester, dir. Kyrill Petrenko
• Directed by: David Bösch
• Sets: Patrick Bannwart
• Costumes: Meentje Nielsen
• Lights: Michael Bauer
• Video: Falko Herold
• Dramaturgy: Rainer Karlitschek
• Nationaltheater München, 27th July 2019 at 17h

One of the highlights of the Munich Opera Festival 2019 was to be the resumption of Masters singers of Nuremberg with the presence of Jonas Kaufman in Walther von Stolzing. Event likely to move the crowd of its admirers. Las, the divo canceled, as it was for the resumption ofOthello a few days earlier. After the disappointment of his absence for Tosca at the Opéra Bastille in May-June, we are worried about the assoluto tenor of the moment. The Munich production, initiated in 2016, stands out notwithstanding its very high musical level and a staggering for the less disconcerting.

decidedly Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg ignites the minds of the managers. After the leaders of the Regietheater, including Katharina Wagner in Bayreuth and Stefan Herheim in Salzburg and Paris, who brought their share of novelty, the vanguard of the moment gives free rein. For whom the staging becomes subject of pure speculation. In Munich, where it was created in 1868, the opera The Masters singers of Nuremberg is regularly honored. This staging by David Bösch is disconcerting, provoking a feeling of exasperation felt at his very personal reading of the piece: a vision driven by the desire to stand out at all costs of the stage games minutely indicated by the author. Instead, there is a stack of effects more curious than the others. First, Bösch decides to place all the scenes outdoors: a more or less dilapidated city street in East Germany. At the desperate greyness of the places meets a black background. Inside church point at the first act or Sachs' cabinet at the first painting of the third. A standardization that gives in the banal, not to say ugly, miserabilism, and a desire to turn their backs on any form of aesthetics. The characters are swallowed up to everyday beings, and sometimes shabby: the young Walther von Stolzing, punk and leather jacket, musician dragging his guitar case, is a kind of terrible child, indomitable, stubborn and suspicious of all. He is told, however, what is meant by the welcome to the school of singing, sitting on a sort of electric chair to cut his first verse, each fault gives rise to a kind of discharge. Hans Sachs, a village shoemaker, has a 1950s Citroën combo – sometimes called "the pig's nose" – which opens laterally, uncovers a tackle of tools while on his work table a shapeless muddle reigns. This is where in the third act, Walther will come out after a restful sleep, and that perched on his roof, it will appear to Eva shortly after … There is better as magic effect! Beckmesser delivers his incredible romance to the previous act planted in a sort of platform mounted on a passable, sort of yellow elevator chick, operated from the bottom up with the help of a command button, that Walther, mute witness of the scene, does not hesitate to operate. Because the boy also knows how to be facetious. At the end of the street fight, the night watchman, in the severe mode of guarding the peace, will himself be assaulted by a squad of blockbusters armed with clubs.

At the Feast of St. John, the representatives of the guilds wear leather panties more Bavarian than true, while streamers hover over, like "Hans we love you". A little earlier, the divine quintet has given rise to very little emotion. This emotion that Bösch seems to want to flee at all costs. Above all, the end of the opera is modified to the taste of the stage manager: after refusing to be enthroned master, and duly slandered by Sachs, Walther decides not to hear anything and takes Eva who, for a while, makes a splash Sachs before fleeing the scene with her boyfriend of the day. Suffice to say that is evading the ultimate trait that sees Eva crown Sachs. Frightened, Beckmesser returns to shoot himself in the head. Under the cheers of the crowd, the poor shoemaker-poet remains alone, sitting on the edge of the podium, a dreamer, meditating on the vanity of things …

Wolfgang Koch / Hans Sachs and Sara Jakubiak / Eva – © Wilfried Hösl

Theater, of course. But for what message? The struggle between modernism and archaism, no doubt. Still, everything is sifted through a systematic critical analysis. Thus of the narrow pace of the Masters-singers, stared in their rites, even their rituals: a stack of Ordex binders where are undoubtedly recorded the famous rules of good singing. Moreover, this iconoclastic reading does not go without contradictions. If the character of Beckmesser is relieved of his ridiculous and puppet side, why then make him sing his serenade in the grotesque manner mentioned and then make it appear in a glittering gold accouterment at the singing contest? The height is that the room sometimes becomes long and talkative. In addition to a cruel absence of poetic atmosphere, more than one scene appears to be laborious or, on the contrary, meaningless, like the short dialogue between Pogner and Eva at the beginning of the II. A constant agitation reigns paradoxically around, and not only during the riot that closes the same act. This willingly provocative vision, too scattered and confused, underlies a desire to rewrite another dramaturgy and to remove any poetic emphasis on the discourse.

Wolfgang Koch & Martin Gantner / Beckmesser – © Wilfried Hösl

Vocally, the account is there fortunately. And the cast presents some class individualities, honoring the reputation of the Munich Opera. So from Allan Clayton's David. This artist who made the beautiful nights ofHamlet from Bret Dean to Glyndebourne, and more recently from Candid at the Komische Oper Berlin, offers a characterization of a rare intelligence, masterfully sung. Bringing the role a certain dramatic weight, like Peter Schreier once with Karajan. The long dissertation on the rules of tablature in the first act is a great success. Martin Gantner's Beckmesser, who was already performing in Berlin in the production directed by Daniel Barenboim, is a paragon of subtle singing and play, out of any caricature, which is meritorious considering the party adopted by the control room in his place . Christof Fischesser is a well-sounding Pogner whose quickdraw of modern gentleman fails to deprive him of his natural authority. Sara Jakubiak plays an Eva away from all faded, wide soprano that allows him to confront without flinching delicate passages of the role, including the quintet. The character is more mature than often and this is one of the highlights of the management. Similarly, Okka von der Damerau's Magdalene offers a wider vocal surface than often. Daniel Kirch fires himself more than valiantly from the ungrateful part of Walther von Stolzing by a sure theatrical sense, already appreciated in his incarnation of Paul de The dead city from Korngold to the Opera of Nancy, and a line of song which if it does not have the finish of a Kaufman, is not less agreeable by the clarity of the timbre, the rigor of the intonations and the beautiful projection. And we will not forget that he will have saved the evening. Some of the opera troupe of the Bavarian Opera still shine among the cohort of masters, many of whom were already at work the day before in the production of La Fanciulla del West.

Hans Sachs by Wolfgang Koch is the hero of the show. As there is little in Berlin, he lives the role to such a degree of depth that it adapts to the differences of staging. It is not enough to say that it transcends the eccentricities imposed by Bösch's by a presence of a beautiful simplicity covering a true charisma. The artistic emotion, it is due to him, and not only during the great solos that are the "Flieder Monolog" of the second act or the "Wahn Wahn" of the last one, but naturally in the course of his interventions since the beginning of the opera where Sachs rose a little as a judge of peace in the fray aroused by the raw chant of Stolzing stripping. The timbre has this nobility of tone, not weighty, and the projection never fails along this vast course, it is true in a very present acoustics favoring the voices. A great and beautiful interpretation. Like the Bavarian Opera Choir, with remarkable homogeneity and equally memorable accents.

Wolfgang Koch, Sara Jakubiak & Christof Fischesser / Veit Pogner – © Wilfried Hösl

All are supported by a sumptuous direction. The General Musik Director Kyrill Petrenko deploys treasures of sounds and the luxuriance of the score comes to a rare degree of completion, through all the desks of the orchestra, including the masterly traits of violas. Nothing seems to be supported, and this music will never have come out so well. It favors tempos more than sustained, not to say fast, as if we wanted to degrease the partition of what it can celer of risks of redundancy. By linking the patterns as they tile into each other. If the first act benefits from this stripping reading, which also requires a lot of singers subjected to a denser rhythm, the street fight of the end of the second is led to such a hellish train that it loses some of its musical consistency. The famous climax marking the beginning of fading of the sound mass does not sufficiently reveal its luminous function of resolution. The last act, meanwhile, comes to lose a quarter of an hour compared to the usual timing, which is not negligible. Willingness to lighten? Desire of adequacy to a staging that is litter of all tradition? Everything shifts to the country of Wagner and we come out of this representation grabbed, even abused, and somewhere frustrated. Just like this bust of the musician Wagner, shamelessly broken by the intrepid Walther to the last bars of the first act, and whose brave Fritz Kothner tries to pick up the ends he is holding on his heart.

Text by Jean-Pierre Robert

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