Alemania
Sensible Footwear
Jesse Simon
The Deutsche Oper’s new production of Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg was nothing if not troubling. The staging of
Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock and Sergio Morabito – which replaces the wonderful,
if quite traditional Götz Friedrich production after nearly thirty years
– had numerous great ideas and a few terrible ones; it conjured a
convincing world and populated it with well-realised characters, then allowed
entire scenes to fall flat. There was some very good singing and even a few
moments of great singing, but also passages of extreme disarray. It was an
evening about which it was impossible to feel anything other than ambivalent.
The staging was not without promise: the directors
transplanted the action from sixteenth-century Nürnberg to a present-day music
conservatory owned by Veit Pogner, attended by a select group of students (the
apprentices), and staffed by a rogue’s gallery of professorial stereotypes (the
masters). Somewhat inexplicably, the faculty also included Hans Sachs, who
seemed to be the academy’s resident physiotherapist; it was unclear whether or
not he was also a professor of music – the programme booklet informed us he was
– but he seemed responsible more for yoga and foot massages than harmony and
counterpoint.
(It was perhaps telling that the synopsis included in
the programme booklet described not the story of Meistersinger as
conceived by Wagner, but rather the story of this particular staging, taking
care to fill in some of the gaps and elaborate on the directorial concept.
Although helpful, it also seemed the operatic equivalent of adding a voice-over
in post-production to make sense of an incoherent film; even with the
clarifications, some of the action on stage was still baffling.)
Sachs was the most plausible, most completely realised
character in the staging, and also by far the least likeable. He had an air of
cheap spirituality – the kind that conflates physical well-being with moral
virtue – and the laid-back, free-spirited vibe that allowed him to show up to
staff meetings in bare feet was wholly consistent with someone who would have
zero qualms about sleeping with his students. In the cloistered world of the
academy, where everyone both lived and studied, there were undoubtedly some
messy student/teacher entanglements – Magdalena and David, for example – but
Sachs had the singular lack of judgement to have developed a long-term, albeit
fairly casual sexual relationship with Pogner’s daughter.
The decision to make the relationship between Eva and
Sachs explicitly physical was perhaps the staging’s greatest stroke of
inspiration. It was amusing in the second act to watch Sachs get intimate with
Eva only to back away and start staking out his independence the moment she
mentioned the possibility of marriage; and in the third act, Sachs’s jealousy
and anger gained in pathos, while Eva’s subsequent monologue was illuminated by
the pain of letting go. Like Rosenkavalier, this Meistersinger
was concerned with the difficult transition from an untenable relationship to a
potentially more sustainable one; unlike the Marschallin, however, Sachs gained
little nobility from his selfless act of rejection.
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Markus Stenz, conductor. Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, and Sergio Morabito, directors. Deutsche Oper Berlin, June 2022. © 2022 by Thomas Aurin.
Indeed, Sachs seemed to grow less likeable as the
staging went on. It is rare that one reaches the end of the second act feeling
such sympathy for Beckmesser – a character about whom the staging had no strong
feelings – and even less frequent that the final ten minutes of the third
act leave such a bitter taste. Sachs’s final speech, a shameless appeal to
popular taste over academic erudition, and his snatching the reins of
leadership from a crestfallen Pogner emerged more as a victory of selfishness
and vanity than an affirmation of artistic principles; neither the apprentices
nor the masters (save for one devoted acolyte) seemed very happy about it.
Certainly the Sachs of the libretto stands up to such a reading, and the
decision of the directors to reveal the charismatic villain beneath the
benevolent façade offered unorthodox insight into one of Wagner’s most
fascinating characters; yet for those in the audience who view Sachs as a
pillar of nobility, it may have been something of a letdown.
If the story of Eva’s liberation from Sachs gave the
staging its guiding force – Walther, if nothing else, seemed like a decent guy
– it was supported by a handful of other intriguing ideas: the vaguely cultish
atmosphere of the conservatory, compounded by an unusually sinister Pogner,
gave the opening act a uniquely disquieting edge, and the looks of disgust and
outrage on the faces of the female apprentices when Pogner announced his
intention to marry his daughter to the winner of the competition were an
elegant acknowledgment of the allowances a modern audience must make in order
to enter fully into the world of the opera.
In the second act, however, the staging collided
abruptly with the limitations of its concept. The directors, having
demonstrated their command of skilfully-wrought characters and complex stage
action, somehow managed to bobble the tone of their own creation while missing
out on the charm and comedy of what is undoubtedly the most charming, most
comedic act in all of Wagner. From the opening scene, which featured a long,
laboured bacchanal of the apprentices, everything felt remarkably off; and
things went downhill rapidly with the arrival of Beckmesser. With no shoes to
cobble, Sachs was reduced to dumping a bin-bag full of multi-coloured Crocs
onto the stage where Beckmesser was trying to give a recital of his song, then
marking the song by hitting Beckmesser’s piano – used here instead of the
standard lute – with drumsticks.
Throughout the scene one could feel the dialogue
veering further and further from the action on stage; but instead of
recontextualising the libretto, the jarring gap between words and action simply
caused the scene to lapse into incoherence. And if the climactic riot is
notoriously difficult to stage convincingly, the directors built to a remarkably
low level of energy: David attempted to whip Beckmesser with a curiously
resilient bouquet of flowers, the apprentices decided to have a fairly tame
dance party on stage, and Sachs sat zen-like on top of the piano until coming
down and bashing Walther over the head with an also curiously resilient whiskey
bottle.
The third act managed to repair some of the damage of
the second, but also had its own lapses of judgment. Why, one might ask, did
the arrival of the guilds and dance of the apprentices turn into a horror-movie
nightmare set entirely in David’s head? If there was a good reason, the staging
kept it to itself. There were a few interesting symbolic threads that ran
through the evening: one could judge the moral and spiritual state of the various
characters by their level of back pain, and the footwear favoured by each
character seemed to act as a sort of thematic index. Yet such details were not
quite sufficient to overcome to the larger gaps in the action.
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Markus Stenz, conductor. Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, and Sergio Morabito, directors. Deutsche Oper Berlin, June 2022. © 2022 by Thomas Aurin.
The production’s greatest musical asset was Klaus
Florian Vogt who has made a specialty of Walther in recent years, but who on
this evening appeared to have uncovered new depths of vocal and physical
expression. In the first act alone, his ‘Am stillen Herd’ opened with a subtle
reticence, suggesting palpable trepidation, then blossomed to heights of wonder
as he became lost in youthful memories; his trial song was madly exuberant,
perfectly controlled but wild enough to upset the masters; and there was a
wonderful note of overwhelmed resignation in his conversation with David. The
first and final drafts of the prize song were both highlights of the third act
– the latter polished and graceful, the former sparkling with improvisatory
inspiration – although Mr Vogt has never given Walther’s set-pieces
anything less than the majesty they deserve. What was most notable about his
performance on this evening was an ability to weave the various showcase
moments into a subtly-delineated, fully-realised character.
Johan Reuter offered a near-faultless rendering of the
staging’s vision of Sachs, capturing both the surface of intense charisma and
the self-serving vanity that lay just beneath. His performance seemed to
benefit from the energy of interaction, and if his two solo scenes seemed more
pragmatic than poetic – the Wahn monologue marched forward instead of soaring
upwards – his subtle command of the meeting in act one, and the dramatic
spontaneity that drove his scenes with Walther, Beckmesser and Eva in the third
act placed him firmly at the centre of the action.
Between the dominating presence of Sachs, the
emotional volatility of Walther, and the increasing bewilderment of the
staging, Heidi Stober’s Eva spent much of the second act forced to the
sidelines. In the third act, however, she revealed a voice of generous presence
and pleasingly silvery tone: the startling ‘O Sachs! Mein Freund’ emerged less
as a response to Sachs’s jealousy than a sudden moment of clarity, a cathartic
outpouring of honest feeling that cleared away the messy emotional turmoil of
the earlier scenes. The same radiance and clarity carried over to the quintet
in which she was the dominant force.
Although Magdalena was somewhat neglected by the
staging, Annika Schlicht gave a strong reading, often severe but edged with
moments of warmth. Ya-Chung Huang had a high, clear tone and flexible delivery
that worked well for David, and his lithe enumeration of the tones was notable
for its nuanced shading and expressive personality. Philipp Jekal was a nicely
understated Beckmesser, forced by the staging to walk with varying degrees of
feigned back and leg distress, but nonetheless able to deliver his lines with a
clean, fastidious elegance that never overemphasized the character’s pedantry;
although the staging made little of his relationship with Sachs, he escaped the
second act with considerably more dignity than anyone else. As Veit Pogner,
Albert Pesendorfer had a depth of tone and solemnity of manner that imparted a
welcome air of authority to his scenes.
In the finale of the second act and, most notably, in
the interlude of the third act there were a handful of moments during which the
orchestra, the choir and the on- and off-stage brass and drum ensembles seemed
wholly disconnected from one another; the chorus of the guilds was especially
chaotic. This may have been due to the very late replacement of Donald
Runnicles – who was forced to withdraw due to shoulder surgery – by Marcus
Stenz, and it seems certain that such moments will be ironed out in the course
of subsequent performances. There were, however, a number of unusual elements
in Mr Stenz’s reading, which seemed generally more attuned to the score’s
smaller-scale textural flourishes than its moments of bracing grandeur. The
overture had a contrapuntal clarity that gave equal weight to the various
themes, but some of the more invigorating passages sounded curiously
restrained. Small moments were often delightful in their attention to detail,
while grand scenes could just as easily lapse into chaos or indifference.
If productions are judged on their ability to make an
audience reconsider a familiar work, the new Meistersinger at the
Deutsche Oper must be deemed a success. Whether or not one enjoyed the staging,
or approved of the attitude of its directors towards the text, there were
enough fascinating insights to deepen one’s appreciation of an opera whose very
immortality comes from the endless adaptability of its characters and
situations. Yet insight will only go so far, and the staging, in attempting to
posit its observations, was often forced to venture too far from the libretto,
leaving entire scenes to languish. If the staging was troubling it was not
because it forced us to consider the darker side of a much-loved character, but
because it wasn’t always able to integrate its fascinating insights into a
coherent vision of the story.
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