Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Teatro Real 14.5.24
By Sigmund Oakeshott
An elegant stream of Madrilènos flowed out from under the great grey-columned bulk of the Teatro Real on Tuesday, so exhilarated by the conducting of Pablo Heras-Casado as to have given the cast of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg an eleven-minute standing ovation. The sheer teutonic brawn of the hundred-strong chorus, amplified by the Teatro’s state-of-the-art acoustics and tempered by the majestically-slow baton-work of Heras-Casado seemed to move the audience to a state of semi-rapture . I last saw the Andalusian conductor conjure up his dark magic at Bayreuth in August with Parsifal. Just as the sub-par staging there of a post-Apocalyptic VR-enhanced Monsalvat was redeemed by the sheer bliss of the closing Chorus Mysticus, here in Madrid Laurent Pelly and Caroline Ginet’s muddled backdrops and gender-bending costumery were figuratively drowned-out by the meadow-set legion belting out their final praises of tragi-hero Franconian cobbler Hans Sachs. Hans was powerfully portrayed by Canadian baritone Gerard Finley, still amply-lunged at 64 and utterly convincing in noble widower / german romantic nationalist guise, as perhaps Wagner saw himself after the death of his first wife Minna.
Sadly the character of Walther von Stolzing, roving-Junker turned convert to the cause of German-craftsmanship and the other crucial male protagonist was played by tenor Tomislav Muzek whose upper registers and flabby gait seem to lack that quintessential Wagnerian virility so essential to Die Meistersinger. Nichole Chevalier’s Eva was adeptly sung. Die Meistersinger having been composed in the 1860s after both Wagner’s disastrous Parisian Tannhauser ballet dalliances and a failed stab at staging Tristram… in Vienna, the role of Eva is unusually lyric and was well suited to the clarity of Chevalier’s voice.Jongmin Park's Pogner was a fine fit also to his dramatic, booming bass voice. The hapless Sixtus Beckmesser, well-sung if played with slightly overdone comic villainy by baritone Leigh Melrose, spent the first two acts in an inexplicably plaster-stained frock coat and by the third act was leering, post-beating, beneath full joker-like make-up. The extended quintet set in Hans Sach's Nuremberg workshop as the Christen the new song'Selig wie die Sonne meines Gluckes lacht' was of particular note for how sublimely it was sung, Heras-Cacado keeping the brass stately but subdued.
The set throughout was fenced off by 1930s architecture, confusingly evoking more the swimming pool of the Berlin Olympiad than anything of artistic substance while the crucial final meadow scene became instead an ersatz Berchtesgaden, a painted backdrop of soaring Bavarian Alps before which non-binary styled bands of singers clustered around in drab trenchcoats.
One began wondering if the director Pelly had ever laid eyes on the Pegnitz river which snakes so lethargically like a muddy-brown serpent uncoiled into heart of Franconia - Wagner’s setting for the Meistersingers’ final Third Act contest. Erroneously shoehorning on an oversaturated melange of snow-capped peaks and Gestapo-esque flasher macs rendered the whole mis-en-scene like some sort of disturbingly volkisch home movie, hardly helped by Hans Sach’s final exhortations to shake off the ‘foreign mists and foreign vanities they would plant in our land’ and to ‘live in the honour of the German masters.’ Indeed, given the political leanings of the Madrid, one pondered whether the last few minutes of manic applause might as much be for the slightly problematic sentiments of the work as for the strength of the performance.
More effective was the setting for the Second Act, perhaps betraying the hand of the master set-builders of the Royal Danish Opera, with whom this was a co-production. Dozens of card-board-built mediaeval merchant houses, church spires and squat castle bastions adorned the stage, huddled on top of one another. These not only reassembled the hulking mass of Nuremberg as depicted in Albrecht Durer woodcuts, but as the characters wove between them, serenading windows and making midnight trysts, captured the sense of curtain-twitching neighbours and the stifling 16th century social mores that bound both Eva and Hans to share only a platonic passions.
In sum then, the excellent orchestral work under the measured pacing of Heras-Cacado matched with the powerful Schopenhaueren pathos of Finley’s Hans Sachs triumphed over the suspect staging and disorientating costumal affections of what was a still bizarrely compelling production of Die Meistersinger.
