Behind the Scenes

Wagner may have conceived Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the vehicle for a very specific argument about the nature of art, yet his libretto is so full of complexities, subtle oppositions, and gloriously imperfect characters that it often seems to transcend its origins from a single authorial hand. This is perhaps the secret to its longevity. It is a work too vast for any single interpretation, and the task of the modern director is less to reconcile its inconsistencies than to construct new arguments from its myriad possibilities. Yet director Jens-Daniel Herzog, whose new production opened recently at Dresden’s Semperoper, did not seem especially interested in arguments. His willingness to unearth interesting themes only to leave them unexplored resulted in a staging with a lot of wonderful set-up and a frustrating lack of…