Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Director Barrie Kosky’s explosive take on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg caused a sensation at the 2017 Bayreuth Festival. The “astonishingly entertaining and convincing” production (Der Spiegel) boldly confronts Die Meistersinger’s nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes head-on: Wagner himself is placed centre stage, amid references to many figures from the composer’s life: his wife Cosima becomes the heroine Eva, and Hermann Levi, the conductor Wagner humiliated, becomes the reviled Sixtus Beckmesser. In Act 3 the singing contest is set at the Nuremberg Trials, with Hans Sachs’s hymn to the purity of German art coming from the lips of Wagner himself, addressing an empty courtroom.Opera News called it “a production of enormous insight and great quality”. “Kosky’s Meistersinger is a reminder that Bayreuth can still score palpable dramatic hits”, wrote The Guardian. The performance, conducted by Philippe Jordan, was also praised, with the superb cast of expert Wagnerians including Michael Volle (Sachs), Johannes Martin Kränzle (Beckmesser), Klaus Florian Vogt (Walther), Anne Schwanewilms (Eva) and Günther Groissböck (Pogner). But the focus remains on the composer, as The New York Times wrote, in an opera that “is Wagner’s mouthpiece, both when it’s humane and when it’s malignant”.