A Midsummer Night’s Dream

When it was over, one could only marvel. Stefan Herheim’s staging of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – which opened this month at the Opéra de Paris after an initial, well-received outing in Salzburg in 2013 – was less a triumph of ingenuity than a model for everything to which an opera production in the twenty-first century might aspire. High in concept, dense in allusion, and overflowing with visual detail, it occupied a previously unimagined space between tradition and reinvention, remaining on the one hand scrupulously faithful to the tone and action of the text while continually uncovering new avenues of meaning and magic in Wagner’s great comedy.

Yet for all its extra-textual innovations, the production was never so beholden to its own concept as to alienate those members of the audience who had come to revisit the familiar story of…