Romanticism vs. Modernism at the Royal Opera House

Given the"controversy" around newer productions at Bayreuth, I thought this extract from the late 90's BBC documentary about the ROH might be of interest. Includes their soon to be revived Meistersinger and Ring Cycle

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Anthony Negus leads Wagner's heros in the English countryside. First Hans Sachs at Glyndebourne now Siegfried at Longborough

From today's Guardian. Follow the link to continue reading.

Anthony Negus: with Siegfried at last
Anthony Negus is looking forward to conducting Wagner's Siegfried at Longborough Festival Opera

Nicholas Wroe

Anthony Negus at Longborough

Anthony Negus ... 'We really are creating something remarkable with this Wagner pilgrimage.

While there is rarely a shortage of Wagner's operas being staged in the UK, the increased pace of productions emerging from national, regional and festival opera companies in recent years represents a discernible uptick in activity. Two of the most significant productions of this summer have been Glyndebourne's Meistersinger – streamed to wide acclaim on the Guardian website a couple of weeks ago – and the continuation of the Longborough festival Ring cycle which, next week, will follow up its triumphant 2010 Die Walküre with Siegfried. The two productions have a common link in the conductor Anthony Negus, who has emerged as a slightly unlikely figure to be at the heart of this Wagnerian intensity.

Negus has been on the music staff of Welsh National Opera for more than 35 years and has worked on many dozens of productions in Wales and around the world. But most often his role has been in assisting the lead conductor in preparing the production; he has conducted relatively few performances himself. But a closer look at this apparently modest CV reveals that not only has Negus worked closely with a long list of eminent names – Mackerras, Boulez, Reginald Goodall and, more recently, Vladimir Jurowski – he has also enjoyed a lifelong engagement with Wagner's music. It is therefore fitting that that, as he celebrates his 65th birthday, this engagement appears to be coming to remarkable fruition. "It's true that there is a lot of Wagner activity all over the world," Negus explains. "And it will speed up in the next couple of years in the runup to the bicentenary of his birth in 2013. For those of us closely involved, it feels like our version of preparing for the Olympics."

Walkure at LFO: 2010

For Negus the highlight of 2013 will be conducting, in a single season, the complete Ring cycle at Longborough, the Gloucestershire opera festival best known for being held in what was, originally, a converted barn. Longborough's involvement with Wagner began with a reduced-size Ring, for an orchestra of just 18 players, adapted by the composer Jonathan Dove, in the late 1990s. Negus took over conducting duties on the project halfway through and managed the impressive feats of slightly enlarging the orchestra and bringing in Bayreuth's Wotan, Sir Donald McIntyre, for the final performances.

Longborough's owner, Martin Graham, had long held the ambition, apparently ludicrously unrealistic, of staging a full-size Ring cycle. Every winter he made additions to the theatre – the red velvet seats came from Covent Garden when it was refurbished; the pit has been enlarged to accommodate 60-plus musicians. The Longborough Ring eventually commenced, under Negus's baton and directed by Alan Privett, with Das Rheingold in 2008. A concert version of the first act of Die Walküre was included in the 2009 season – "to get the orchestra acquainted with the very long journey we were about to take" – and last summer the full version was performed.

"The fact that people still talk about chicken sheds and so on in relation to Longborough does wear a bit thin," Negus says. "We really are creating something remarkable with this Wagner pilgrimage. The small Ring worked very well and the full-scale Das Rheingold went better than we could have hoped. But last year's Die Walküre was the best thing we have done and a significant step forward. I can't wait for Siegfried."

The critics agreed about Die Walküre. Michael Tanner claimed the ongoing cycle could stand comparison "in terms of musical interpretation and commitment, to any Ring one might see in the world". The Sunday Times identified Negus as a "British Wagner conductor second to none". Though he may have had comparatively limited experience of conducting full-scale operatic productions, when the opportunity came to take on the Longborough Ring, Negus was nothing if not prepared.

As a child of musical parents he saw his first Ring in his early teens and a Rudolf Kempe-conducted Rheingold in 1960 at Covent Garden when he was 14. The following year the family attended a Bayreuth festival Ring cycle and the year after that, Negus, on a student exchange visit to Germany, found himself actually in the Bayreuth pit for a Karl Böhm performance of Tristan.

"Of course the stage door man shouted at me, but some instinct told me I'd be OK if I stayed put and didn't leave for the whole evening, even to go to the loo. The players were completely unfazed. The pit was covered and they wore civvies, so there were even a few rather fat men in lederhosen." The young Negus found a way to return to the pit repeatedly and observed at the closest quarters conductors such as Kempe – "conducting in a T-shirt", Knappertsbusch – "very crumpled summer jacket" and Sawallisch. "I was there the first time boos were heard at Bayreuth in 1963 for a Wieland Wagner production. I also bought tickets and remember queuing in 1966 for Boulez's Parsifal. The whole period was very formative."

In the early 70s Negus returned to work at Bayreuth and became friends with Wagner's grandson, the director Gottfried Wagner. He worked as an assistant on a new production of Tannhäuser directed by Götz Friedrich and on some Ring rehearsals. He remembers marital tensions among the Wagner clan and political anxieties about Friedrich being the first East German to work at Bayreuth. He was also becoming increasingly aware of the cultural difficulties surrounding Wagner's work, not least the accusations of antisemitism.

"While it is never possible to be entirely free of politics, when I first went to Bayreuth it was a comparatively apolitical period. In the years since I've observed how we apply our increased psychological knowledge and understanding of Wagner's period to the way we approach the pieces. And I find my understanding of the dramatic aspect of the pieces has grown naturally with all this. And being a Wagnerian allows one to hate him as well as to admire him at times. I've read things he did and said, even aside from the Jewish issue – the way he treated friends, for instance – that provoke abhorrence. But I've also read about compassionate aspects of his character that moved me deeply."

Walkure at LFO: 2010

Working most recently on Meistersinger and Siegfried, Negus acknowledges that in the characters of Beckmesser and Mime there are quite clearly Jewish parodic elements. "These things can blacken the overall picture. David McVicar directing at Glyndebourne was all too aware of the shadow that can hang over the last scene of Meistersinger. We all have to deal with it in our own way, but when you penetrate below the surface of what Wagner is writing, then it goes much deeper than the nationalistic elements that were grabbed by Hitler and the Third Reich."

Negus admits there have been periods of his career when he has needed "to get away from the whole Wagner thing". He says the period from 1974, when he returned from Germany, to 1979 was "almost a Wagner-free zone" until Goodall was invited to conduct Tristan for the WNO. "It was a major moment in my life when I heard Goodall's Mastersingers at Sadler's Wells in 1968. I hadn't realised that Wagner could sound like that. Solti was the main Covent Garden conductor of Wagner at that time, and while he could be thrilling, this had a far more gentle quality of attack: there was a rich undertone and measured, unhurried tread, which was quite amazing."

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Bayreuth 2011 Preview 2: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Yes, it's a revival and yes it's Katharina Wagner's "infamous" production - don't expect a Glydebourne here. Oddly, first time this premièred in 2007, the Bayreuth regulars gave the odd hearty clap and whistle after acts one and two - it was only after the Meistersingers with giant penises (yes I did say Meistersingers with giant penises, although "oversized" might be more accurate) went a romping on the hallowed ground of the Festspielhaus  that they became somewhat upset. Perhaps it was a Mesitersinger with a papier-mâché head of Richard Wagner (with accompanying purple beret) doing the "can-can" that was simply to much?

2008

What the reviewers said (this is a mix of reviews from the premier in 2007 and last year, where it was "tidied-up"a little - as it has been each year since 2007)

"One boo for the first act, several for the second. Then the curtain fell on the third act and the storm broke. Katharina Wagner's new staging of her great- grandfather's ``Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg'' unfolded amid passion at the Bayreuth opera festival in Germany."

Bayreuth needs change, and in its convoluted way, this production was a plea for that. The problems lay less with the concept than with its execution"

This incoherent production tries to do far too many things at once. There are abundant clever references to German art, culture and architecture. Statues of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Wagner, Kleist and others come to life and dance, in grotesquely oversized masks and their underwear, for the third-act meadow festivities. A little nudity and some simulated sex are thrown in for good measure.

Katharina's calculated subversion of the plot could have been brilliant if it had been more sparingly realized. In her frenetic struggle to prove herself clever enough, presumably aided by intellectual dramaturge Robert Sollich, a few good ideas and strong images are lost in the dross. Bloomberg - 2007 

"Meistersinger," an opera about tension between tradition and innovation in art, stands as a glorious affirmation of the human spirit but also has its dark side. Katharina Wagner homes in on the opera's two most troublesome aspects. One is the peroration by the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs urging the populace to keep "holy German art" free from foreign influences. The other is Richard Wagner's mean spirited treatment of the town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser, narrow-minded guardian of the rules of song.

Fascinating though the ideas of Wagner and her collaborator Robert Sollich may be, the result is more a critique of "Meistersinger" - and a negative one - than a production. Nor did she achieve the kind of absorbing interaction between characters typical of the best concept-oriented directors. Of the opera's warmly expansive spirit there was little trace. You left thinking you hadn't really seen the opera." New York Times - 2007

"Katharina Wagner and her set designer Tilo Steffens locate the first two acts in a spacious school auditorium. Peter Konwitschny's Hamburg production of "Lohengrin" comes to mind, and the hunch is proved right again and again that Wagner's great granddaughter - how could it be otherwise - must have seen a good many Wagner productions by now. The school - with galeries on the side and rooms at the back - is clearly an academy for music, theatre and dance: a sombre, ugly building

After the second intermission everything is simply different. Sachs meditates in an elegant salon wearing shoes, a white shirt and a suit, while behind him appear the old German masters - Richard Wagner among them, of course - as huge masks. They then get down from where they're stationed, chain Sachs and whirl in a grotesque satyr's dance. A rather mysterious scene in which only so much is clear: Sachs resigns, and with him a stage crew very much like that of the production, who takes their bows in pantomime.

Sachs resigns, Stolzing conforms, Beckmesser becomes an action artist giving a new twist to the art scene - a commentary on today’s opera in general and the Bayreuth Festival in particular? Perhaps. Yet it all remains too intellectual, on the one hand filled to overflowing with ideas and props, on the other hand a void - the entire history of the ideological reception of the “Mastersingers” as “Nazi opera” is blended out, for example, while Katharina Wagner remains focussed on the performance aesthetic. Sign and Sight - 2007

Her interpretation, which turned the original plot on its head - Richard Wagner danced in his underpants and topless dancers took to the stage - proved too much for the traditionalists, who made up the bulk of the audience, at the same time as irritating the iconoclasts. The Guardian - 2007

This is the opera production singled out as the scandal among those currently presented at the Bayreuth Festival. After thunderous applause at the curtain calls for the singers, a young woman darkly and elegantly dressed comes from behind the curtain to a cacophony of boos … and increasingly a few ‘bravos’. She greets this volley of abuse with a beaming smile, a wave, and an extravagant flick forward of her - equally extravagant - blonde hair. This is the director whose staging goes largely unappreciated mainly because she has had the misfortune to be born into the Wagner family and so some opinion has it that she is there birth right rather than talent. This person is… of course you know already…. - Katharina Wagner, who also now joint director of the Festival. For Die Meistersinger, hers is clearly a Konzept from the school of Regietheater and if it was by Marthaler, Neuenfels or Herheim - all of whom currently have ‘shows’ running at Bayreuth - then the applause would undoubtedly have outscored the catcalls" Seen and Heard International - 2010

Even if the action in the first two acts logically builds towards the final scene this is simply not good “Handwerk”. It is a "Schreibtisch" concept which hasn’t translated into interesting music theatre. When I first saw this production in 2008, I summoned all the goodwill I could manage in a conscious effort to take a stand against the conservative and reactionary elements attending the Bayreuth Festival. Having now seen the production live for the second time, I have to acknowledge that the flaws cannot be outweighed by the ingenious finale of Act 3.

The Bayreuth audiences showed no mercy when Katharina Wagner came out before the curtain. She must have some nerves, enduring such negative reactions year after year. Wagneroperanet - 2010

2008

See Also (as there certainly is some relationship): Nuremberg Used and Abused: The true and imagined Nuremberg of Wagner and others


Cast 2011

Conductor Sebastian Weigle

Director Katharina Wagner

Stage design Tilo Steffens

Costumes Michaela Barth  Tilo Steffens

Choral Conducting Eberhard Friedrich

Lighting Andreas Grüter

Hans Sachs, Schuster James Rutherford

Veit Pogner, Goldschmied Georg Zeppenfeld

Kunz Vogelgesang, Kürschner Charles Reid

Konrad Nachtigal, Spengler Rainer Zaun

Sixtus Beckmesser, Stadtschreiber Adrian Eröd

Fritz Kothner, Bäcker Markus Eiche

Balthasar Zorn, Zinngießer Edward Randall

Ulrich Eisslinger, Würzkrämer Florian Hoffmann

Augustin Moser, Schneider Stefan Heibach

Hermann Ortel, Seifensieder Martin Snell

Hans Schwarz, Strumpfwirker Mario Klein

Hans Foltz, Kupferschmied Diógenes Randes

Walther von Stolzing Burkhard Fritz

David, Sachsens Lehrbube Norbert Ernst

Eva, Pogners Tochter Michaela Kaune

Magdalene, Evas Amme Carola Guber

Ein Nachtwächter Friedemann Röhlig

Dates

Tuesday 26th July -        The Meistersinger of Nuremberg I

Saturday 30th July -       Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg II

Saturday 06th August -  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg III

Friday 12th August -      Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg IV

Thursday 18th August  - Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg V

Wednesday 24th August Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg VI

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Nuremberg Used and Abused: The true and imagined Nuremberg of Wagner and others

Thomas Stewart "Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!"

"Wahn! Wahn!

Uberall Wahn!

Madness! Madness!

Everywhere madness" Han Sachs

Had it ...(not)... been forced to serve the imaginative needs of others for so many years, the history of a city (Nuremberg), a country, perhaps even a world, might have shared more of the benevolent humanism of Wagner's Hans Sachs, and less of the Wahn of his confused compatriots" - David Littlejohn: The Ultimate Art. Essays around and about Opera

This is a chapter from David Littlejohn's "The Ultimate Art. Essays around and about Opera". It describes the history of Nuremberg - both real and imagined - in the context of Wagner's opera, the rise of the Nazies and after. I present it in anticipation of tomorrows broadcast of Glyndebourne's Meistersinger. Think of it as part of an unofficial program note. Images and audio added by The Wagnerian


The whole of" David Littlejohn's: "The Ultimate Art. Essays around and about Opera" is available (as is this chapter) to read, completely free,as part of the generosity that is the UC Press E-Books Collection. To read the entire book follow the link at the end of this article.


Chapter Ten — Nuremberg Used and Abused

The imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has burdened the mastersingers' city of Nuremberg with an almost unbearable weight of symbolism. Like other of the world's dream cities (Alexandria, Istanbul, Paris, Venice), Nuremberg has been seized on by people living elsewhere to represent one thing or another, because of either real or imaginary qualities in its history and nature.

But few other cities have paid so heavy a price for the dream images of them that non-natives have created and maintained. The story of Nuremberg is unique and impressive—particularly its story in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the period that most of its idealizers choose to idealize. But that story has been rewritten and misread, used and abused many times since then.

The first people to invest the old imperial city with their own fantasies were German Romantic writers and painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They half-discovered, half-invented a stage-set image of quaint old Nuremberg, which continues to work well in opera. These men were followed by Baedeker-toting tourists, who followed their predecessors' directions in search of the authentic altdeutsch picturesque: crumbling riverside castles, steep dormered roofs, high half-timbered buildings projecting over narrow cobbled lanes. For better and worse, Nuremberg has also been chosen to serve private symbolic functions by Teutonic chauvinists from Richard Wagner to Adolf Hitler, men who were trying to rewrite European history in order to prove that Germania was and always had been number one.

Hans Sachs

Reconstructing the "real" Nuremberg of its own Golden Age (from the birth of Albrecht Dürer, say, to the death of Hans Sachs, 1471–1576) requires that one abandon all subsequent images of the city. Independent since 1219, Nuremberg grew in prosperity mainly because it was, for most of that one century, at the crossroads of a dozen trade routes. With a population of about 25,000 citizens behind its walls (and perhaps another 20,000 dependents outside), it was one of the largest and richest cities in the German-speaking empire. Since 1422, even the imperial castle on the hill, about which it had grown, had been the property of the all-powerful city council.

The forty-two members of the council had sole and absolute power over virtually every activity in the city. They kept Nuremberg as tightly self-contained and rulebound a little beehive as Europe has ever known. The councilmen, almost all wealthy patrician merchants from the top forty families—those stout fellows one sees in paintings and engravings, with their fur-trimmed robes and velvet berets—established an intricate set of laws and all extensive civic bureaucracy to govern wages and prices, weights and measures, foreign relations, dance steps, the length of jackets, the quality of herring, and the texts of poems.

Wagner to the contrary, they forbade the town craftsmen to form guilds, so as not to risk protest demonstrations or a dispersal of their own power. A street not like that of Die Meistersinger , Act II they would have put down in no time. Not only had they no emperor, prince, viceroy, or bishop to tell them what to do; the council actually ran the town's thirteen Catholic churches, convents, and monasteries. It appointed their pastors, administered their finances, legislated their morals. When Luther came along in the 1520s, this puritanical and fiercely independent city slipped from Catholic to Protestant with scarcely a ripple. Both Sachs and Dürer publicly welcomed the new dispensation. The council happily took over the rich monastic properties in the name of the city. Unfortunately, the Lutheran distrust of sacred images marked the end of rich commissions for many of Nuremberg's celebrated artists.

"Celebrated" may be overstating the case. Nuremberg of 1470–1570 was almost as famous for its fine craftsmanship as it was for its stable government, its mercantile prosperity, and its thick double circuit of walls. But what we think of as "art" was rarely taken with any special seriousness, despite the modern aesthetic assertions of Wagner's Pogner and Sachs. In sixteenth-century Nuremberg, Dürer was certainly respected, but primarily for his magical-realist technique and his popular woodcuts. For all of his 3,848 songs, 133 comedies, and 530 poems (by his own count)—or perhaps because of them—Hans Sachs was regarded as a kind of droll civic father figure. But he was no more considered a serious "artist" than were the other versifying Rotarians who attended the weekly meetings of his Shopkeepers' Singing Club.

Durer

To mystical Germans looking at the city through the rose-stained glasses of a later generation, Nuremberg appeared as "the Florence of the North." But take away Dürer—who probably preferred Italy anyway—and one is left with a few highly skilled wood and stone carvers, glaziers, engravers, and goldsmiths, whose workshops were judged by the city fathers no more important than those that turned out Nuremberg's excellent (and profitable) bells, cannons, scissors, toys, clocks, trumpets, and locks.

After his Italian travels, Dürer became part of a small Nuremberg cenacle of humanists—one or two of them genuine scholars, the rest fascinated dilettantes. But their private readings, their translations from the Greek and Latin, and their heady conversazioni had no effect whatever on the hard-working, penny-counting habits of their townsfolk, who—like Wagner's mastersingers—resisted every effort at innovation. As Gerald Strauss writes in Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century:

From the mastersingers with their mass of punctilious rules guarded by official watchdogs, to the small band of humanists who dissected and criticized each other's books, from the physicians, so vain of their professional reputations, to the Protestant theologians who knew truth when they saw it, men spoke and acted by codes according to which they approved and censured.

The new, the different was everywhere regarded with suspicion. Nuremberg was emphatically an unintellectual society. . . . Not a single thinker, poet, or scholar was able to impress his mind upon the city's civic personality. Nuremberg would have been exactly what she was had no one written a book there or, for that matter, read one.

For a short while—as long as prosperity maintained, as long as churches and rich merchants needed new buildings and decorations, as long as costly wars could be avoided and powerful nation-states had not rendered them obsolete—cities like Nuremberg could at least feel contented, secure, and self-righteous. With the shift of trade routes to Atlantic ports, the emergence of Protestantism and the trauma of the Thirty Years' War, and the consolidation of power in the united kingdoms of Spain, France, and England, snug and prosperous little cities like Nuremberg lost much of their energy, their spirit, their very reason to exist. This lack of continued prosperity helps to explain why Nuremberg remained frozen in its sixteenth-century form. It was like an ancient ship caught in the ice, waiting to be discovered.

After three decades of religious wars, the city slept in its economic and cultural decline for the better part of two centuries. Educated Germans of the Enlightenment saw nothing but dark, clumsy Gothic crudeness in the native art and traditions it embodied. Passing through en route to Frankfurt in September 1790, Mozart (who rarely noticed the scenic attractions of the cities in which he performed) only "breakfasted in Nuremberg, a hideous town," as he wrote to his wife. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more progressive German cities had adopted new and sophisticated French or Italian models, or had turned to ancient Greece and Rome for their inspiration.

Goethe

It was Goethe himself, in an outburst of youthful enthusiasm for Strasbourg Cathedral in 1770, who gave the first notable German stamp of approval to the old native style. He went on to praise Hans Sachs, the almost forgotten cobbler-poet. Most historians attribute the cultural rediscovery of Nuremberg itself to two Berlin University students, Ludwig Tieck and Heinrich Wackenroder, who took a walking tour of the South during their spring break in 1796. They loved what they saw of Italy and the Rhine valley; but Nuremberg was a revelation. "Nuremberg, thou once world-famous city!" wrote Wackenroder. "How gladly did I wander through thy crooked alleys; with what childlike love I contemplated thy old-world houses and churches, which so firmly bear the stamp of our old native art! How deeply do I love the products of that age, which bear so racy, strong, and genuine a character!"

Wackenroder and Tieck helped persuade a whole generation to "honor the German masters" (as Wagner's Sachs commands). At an exhibition on "the Romantic discovery of Nuremberg," held at the city's German National Museum in 1967, misty, past-evoking paintings and drawings of the city by twenty-five Romantic artists were displayed, along with rapturous, loving descriptions of the city by many of Germany's most famous early nineteenth-century writers. The tricentennial of Dürer's death was celebrated in Nuremberg in 1828 with all embarrassing excess of fervor. Longfellow—a great admirer of Goethe, the German lyrists, and German culture generally—celebrated his visit to Nuremberg in 1836 with one of his drippier poems ("Through these streets so broad and stately, / These obscure and dismal lanes, / Walked of yore the Mastersingers, / Chanting rude poetic strains").

Wackenroder

After the poets and painters came the tourists. From 1883 on, the indispensable Baedeker guides to southern Germany led the seeker-after-art dutifully past every even marginally noteworthy building, sculpture, and painting in the city. While declaring "there is probably no town in Germany so medieval in appearance," they also reminded their English-speaking readers that "great care should be taken to ensure that the sanitary arrangements are in proper order, including a strong flush of water and proper toilette paper."

"Year by year," began a guidebook of 1907, "many a traveller on his way to Bayreuth, many a seeker after health at German baths, many an artist and lover of the old world, finds his way to Nuremberg." It was "a city of the soul," with "a flavour indefinable, exquisite."

By the mid-nineteenth century, a proper grand tour would have been unthinkable without a wistful pause at Nuremberg. The only qualms expressed by the Victorian and Edwardian guidebook writers were over the recent, almost too exact imitation-old Gothic buildings in the city, which tourists had a hard time distinguishing from the genuine article; and over the increasing number of factory smokestacks that were beginning to surround the jewel-casket of Germania.

Die romantische Entdeckung Nürnbergs —the Romantic discovery of Nuremberg—was more than just a local version of a European cultural craze, a trendy taste for the picturesque past. Unlike comparable "Romantic discoveries" in England or France, it was also part of an aggressively antiforeign movement, part of a defensive, irrational, even monomaniac chauvinism.

Ludwig Tieck

Nuremberg satisfied the needs of romantic travelers, poets, and painters because it offered a virtually "unspoiled" image of a fourteenth-to-sixteenth-century town. But it also satisfied the needs of Germany-firsters, because they thought it the purest possible representation of just how wonderful German culture could be, with no alien admixture of anything French or Italian.

This is one of the most important reasons Richard Wagner chose Hans Sachs, the burgher-mastersingers, and the common Volk of sixteenth-century Nuremberg to serve as both background and (much of the time) foreground for his most accessible and most popular opera. Sachs, he declared, was "the last embodiment of the artistically productive national spirit . . . something different from the Latin type." Wagner carefully studied historical accounts for his text, then incorporated into it actual verses of Sachs's, folk songs, and a Lutheran congregational chorale. He consciously strove for a musical style more simple and old-fashioned than his own norm at the time.

In 1867, he had published a long essay entitled "German Art and German Politics," which has been called "his commentary on Die Meistersinger ." In it, he wrote, "Ever since the regeneration of European folk-blood, considered strictly, the German has been the creator and inventor, the Romantic the modeller and exploiter; the true fountain of continual revolution has remained the German nature. In this sense, the dissolution of the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation' gave voice to nothing but a temporary preponderance of the practical-realistic tendency in European culture"—which had now, he insisted, reached a nadir of spiritless decadence. The Thirty Years' War, he declared, had utterly destroyed German civic culture. It left all German art, for two barren centuries, in the hands of the petty princes. They, unfortunately, had simply imported or imitated spineless Latin art: tinny Italian operas, insipid ballets from France (a vain and light-minded nation").

Late in the eighteenth century, a few prescient Germans, led by Lessing and Winckelmann, recognized their "Ur-kinsmen in the divine Hellenes." (Wagner, like Hitler, regarded the ancient Greeks' as the only culture equal to the pure German.) Then the sublime Goethe symbolically wed Greek Helen to German Faust. Next, Schiller inspired a generation of patriotic German youth to an ideal of Volk und Vaterland , around the time of the 1814 Wars of Liberation.

Schiller

But since then, Wagner insisted, there had been nothing; or at least nothing better, in German theatre, than Rossini and Spontini, Dumas and Scribe, the penny-dreadful melodramas of Kotzebue ("the corrupter of German youth, the betrayer of the German folk"), fatuous actors and singers. Worst of all were the operatic travesties that Rossini had made out of Schiller's William Tell and Gounod out of Goethe's Faust —"a repellent, sugary-vulgar patchwork, with all the airs and graces of a lorette, wedded to the music of a second-rate talent." Somehow, Wagner declared, German art had to find its folk roots again; and particularly German theatre, the folk art par excellence.

And where were German writers and composers to find their ideal inspiration? Not, surely, in the decadent, Paris-aping court theatres. Certainly not in the soulless, Jew-dominated commercial theatre. No—look to "the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, [who] in the prime of classic humanism, preserved for the eye of genius the old-German mode of poetry."

Many observers have stressed the elements of historical authenticity in Die Meistersinger , from the correct architectural settings Wagner demanded for the 1868 première to David's recital of the mastersingers' rules and tones and modes. But more important than the opera's historicity, I believe, are the uses to which Wagner put it.

Most of what Wagner wants to say is communicated musically of course, and can never be reduced to a prose statement. He is "saying" things in this opera about true love and true art that have nothing specifically to do with German art or German culture. But in addition to his conscious choice of setting and subject, Wagner does from time to time repeat in the opera the ideas of his essay.

Viet Pogner (who has traveled far in deutschen Landen ) is distressed that the courtiers of other provinces make so little of the solid burghers of Nuremberg—who, after all, alone in the wide German Reich still care for art. When he learns that Walther von Stolzing—a knight, after all—wants to gain entry into their guild, he feels that the "good old days" have returned. Hans Sachs argues with his fellow masters that, if they genuinely want to show the people how highly they honor art, they will let the people themselves judge their work; that way Volk und Kunst will bloom and thrive together. All of this comes close to Wagner's own prose prescription, published the year before the opera's première, for a popularly based revival of true German art.

But nowhere in the opera are Wagner's own cultural and political opinions more clearly voiced than in Hans Sachs's final exhortation ("Habt Acht!") to the people, who then take it up en masse as the opera's closing chorus.


Beware! Evil tricks threaten us:—
If the Deutsches Volk und Reich  should once decay
Under false foreign rulers
Soon no prince would understand his people any more,
And foreign mists, with foreign trifles,
They will plant in our German land;
No one would know any more what is German and true,
If it did not live in the honor of the German masters.
Therefore I say to you:
Honor your German masters! . . .
And if you favor their endeavors,
Even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve into dust
For us there would still remain—Holy German Art!

The link between Wagnerism and National Socialism, between the muddled social thinking of Richard Wagner and that of Adolf Hitler, has been written about too much already. Although the two men shared certain noxious racial and German-nationalist notions, Wagner did also create works of art that even the most scrupulous humanitarian can enjoy without guilt. Wagner cannot be blamed for the fact that Hitler enjoyed Wagner's works even more than some of us do—and no work more than Die Meistersinger , which the Führer is reported as having seen more than two hundred times.

 H. S. Chamberlain

Long before Hitler, Die Meistersinger 's vision of Nuremberg and Old Germany, and especially Hans Sachs's notorious "curtain speech," had made this work a special favorite of the newly unified German empire. It was adopted as a kind of propaganda piece by those who wanted to assert not only German national unity, but also German superiority over "false foreign rulers."

Under the guiding spirit of H. S. Chamberlain, the dogmatic English anti-Semite who had married Wagner's daughter Eva in 1908 (and who first met Adolf Hitler in 1923), the annual Wagner Festival at Bayreuth became more and more an Aryan-nationalist celebration. When, after a ten-year wartime hiatus, the festival reopened (with Die Meistersinger ) in 1924, it was firmly committed to the new National Socialist cause. At the opening performance that year, the audience rose to its feet at Sachs's "Habt acht!" and remained standing to sing "Deutschland fiber Alles" at the close.

Nine months before, in September 1923, Adolf Hitler had personally chosen the city of Dürer, Sachs, and Die Meistersinger to be the site of his National Socialist German Day—the first of nine increasingly spectacular Nazi Party rallies to be held in Nuremberg. Flowers and flags were laid on, the imperial castle was illuminated, and the market square was roped off for speeches.

Hitler liked the visual image of the city, its symbolic fortress-castle, the islanded river that ran through it, its surrounding walls with their sturdy gates and round towers, the hill-forest of steep roofs and church spires within. It seemed to give ancient Germanic roots, and thereby a spurious authenticity, to his movement. After 1933, it also asserted a connection between the Third Reich and the First—that loose federation of more than three hundred German states and independent cities, called (for no good reason) the Holy Roman Empire, which had begun to offer some form of allegiance to a German "Kaiser" (i.e., Caesar) in the year 962.

For almost two hundred years (1355–1523), Nuremberg had been the city in which every new emperor held his first Reichstag, or parliament, of German leaders. For more than three hundred years (1424–1796), Nuremberg had the honor of serving as the civic safety-deposit box for the sacred imperial relics and regalia.

These two distinctions, in Hitler's view, made Nuremberg the symbolic holy city of the First Reich; so he determined to make it his as well. In a folio of photographs of old Nuremberg, published in Bremen in 1940 for American readers, the author made explicit the connection between the old city and the new: "From the Heidenturm of Kaiser Freidrich Barbarossa, in the Burg, float the colours of the new Reich, and over the Market Place which bears the Fuhrer's name Young Germany marches every year. The Old City gives the proud consciousness of a great imperial and civic tradition, the town of the Reichsparteitag faith in the future."

Today, thanks to old newsreels and Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film Triumph of the Will , most people probably identify the Nuremberg rallies of 1927–1938 with the immense parade ground and arena southeast of the city. But the old city of Dürer and Sachs played its role as well, in these morale-building propaganda rituals.

Hitler was always officially received in Nuremberg at the 1618 Town Hall, with its great vaulted chamber dating from 1332. Each year the mayor of Nuremberg offered him some splendid and symbolic gift: one year an engraving of Dürer's "Knight, Death, and the Devil"; the next year, copies of Charlemagne's crown, orb, and scepter. Before Hitler's arrival, all of the church bells of the city were ordered to ring for half an hour. The roads were hung with Nazi banners; the window boxes were filled with flowers. Hitler received visiting foreign diplomats in the old imperial castle, where he expounded on the beauties of old Nuremberg. (He had tried, he explained, to clear the medieval sector of all "trashy imitations," and to restore its ancient charm.)

Day after day, the wide, winding streets of the city were filled with marchers (from 500,000 to 1,000,000 party members descended on Nuremberg in September for the 1930s rallies), parading twelve abreast: first the Hitler Youth with drums and banners; then a torchlight parade of up to 180,000 party leaders; and finally the "march-past" of the Führer in "Adolf-Hitler-Platz" by 100,000 SA and SS men, and a closing serenade under his hotel window.

A highlight of the 1935 and 1936 rallies was a gala performance for the party elite at the Nuremberg Opera House of Die Meistersinger . For these performances, Hitler himself commissioned new sets and costumes, which were reproduced for almost every subsequent production of the opera during the Third Reich. The Festival Meadow set for Act III was backed by a long row of banners in perspective, exactly like those at the Parteitag rallies.

One is tempted to believe that the next two nightmares in the life of this much put-upon city were visited on it as punishments for its symbolic role as what Allied reporters liked to call the "birthplace" or the "nursery" of Nazism; "the heart of the world's enemy," in Rebecca West's phrase. But this may not have been the case.

Nuremberg was bombed eleven times between September 1944 and April 1945, most devastatingly on January 2, when a thousand RAF planes all but obliterated the historic center in one twenty-minute raid. This was done not because it was Hitler's favorite city, not because of the Nuremberg laws or the Nuremberg rallies; but because it was an "important industrial and communications center" (something the romantic guidebooks rarely mentioned), manufacturing aircraft engines as well as pencils and toys. It was besieged and shelled for five straight days by the U.S. Seventh Army in the last days of the war, not because it was "quintessentially German," but because the two SS-Panzer divisions remaining within its walls put up such a ferocious resistance.


At the end, three-fourths of the buildings in the old town were destroyed. What was left for the Allied armies of occupation were piles of rubble stinking faintly of disinfectant, under which lay at least 2,000 dead Germans. Half the population had fled; the remaining half lived on as best they could, many without food, in cellars and bomb shelters. The city's total wartime toll was estimated at 8,000 dead, 12,000 missing, and 350,000 homeless. No German city except Dresden had been so totally wiped out.

On April 28, 1945, the London Times correspondent inventoried the incredible damage done to what he called "the finest medieval city in Germany." " 'The best thing would be for the citizens to go and find a vacant piece of ground and build a new town,' " he quoted one Allied officer as saying. "This cannot be rebuilt," declared a member of the U.S. prosecution team in the fall of 1945.

But it was rebuilt. The "old city" tourists visit today is in great part a reconstruction. The pale stonework in the facade of St. Sebaldus's Church is all new; the darker stones inserted here and there were recovered from the ruins. Again and again, guidebooks and placards note, "Destroyed in 1945." The more important buildings, beginning with the castle, the two great churches, and the Dürer house, were rebuilt to look more or less as they did in the sixteenth century; the ruins of others were simply cleared. A few—including St. Catherine's, the mastersingers' church—were left as ruins. A little Disneyland imitation of an Old Nuremberg street was built for quick-stop tourists behind the Frauentor gate.

In On Trial at Nuremberg , Airey Neave wrote in 1978, "There are many reasons why Nuremberg in that October after the war was a most hated city. It had given its name in 1935 to the laws by which Jews were deprived of their rights as citizens. . . . If the highest Nazis were to be tried what better place could there be than Nuremberg? . . . Was it not here that Hitler's oratory had turned Germans into savage hordes calling for blood?"

In fact, Nuremberg was chosen for the international trials of Nazi war criminals because—as General Lucius Clay told Justice Robert Jackson, who was to head the tribunal—it had the only law court building still standing in any German city: the 1877 Palace of Justice, which Rebecca West called "an extreme example of the German tendency to overbuild. . . . Its mass could not be excused, for much of it was a waste of masonry and an expense of shame, in obese walls and distended corridors."

Twenty-one Nazi leaders were lodged in the prison behind this building, while U.S., English, French, and Soviet judges heard testimony from them, their attorneys, and their adversaries six hours a day, five days a week in Courtroom B. After nine months of hearings, sentences were passed. On October 17, 1946, eleven of the Nazi leaders were hanged in the gymnasium of the prison.

The most famous of Hans Sachs's utterances in Die Meistersinger is his nationalistic exhortation, often misread and exploited during the Third Reich. But to my ears, his profoundly moving Act III soliloquy is Wagner's definition of the best possible symbolic role that this ancient city could have played in the heart of its tormented, sometimes dangerous, even barbarous land. Reflecting on both the history of humankind and the mindless riots of the night before, the old man begins to despair of his city, his land, his century.

Wahn! Wahn!
Uberall Wahn!

Madness! Madness!
Everywhere madness![1]

Everywhere he sees people tormenting and beating one another, even themselves—"the old madness without which nothing can happen."
Midway in his reflections, Sachs pauses. The satisfying, stately, steplike "Nuremberg" motif breaks like sunlight through the melancholy clouds:
Wie friedsam treuer Sitten
Getrost in Tat und Werk,
Liegt nicht in Deutschlands Mitten
Mein liebes Nürenberg!

How peacefully with its faithful customs,
Contented in deed and work,
Lies in the middle of Germany
My beloved Nuremberg.

More than any subsequent fantasy of altdeutsch charm, volkisch art, or Teutonic superiority, this winning quatrain of Sachs's does describe the actuality of sixteenth-century Nuremberg—a solid, stolid, unified, hardworking, and contentedly conservative community. Had it been allowed to retain this image, and not been forced to serve the imaginative needs of others for so many years, the history of a city, a country, perhaps even a world, might have shared more of the benevolent humanism of Wagner's Hans Sachs, and less of the Wahn of his confused compatriots.

To read this and more from  David Littlejohn: The Ultimate Art. Essays around and about Opera

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Meistersinger for the perpetually perplexed

From today's Guardian and for Meistersinger "newbies" only. Click the link at the end for the rest of the opera and some Meistersinger miscellanea  

Denis Forman
guardian.co.uk,


Meistersinger (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Wagner

The one with a disagreeable town clerk, a noble cobbler, a street brawl and a prize song.

CAST

Veit Pogner, goldsmith and Mastersinger - Bass

Eva, his daughter - Soprano

Magdalene, her maid - Mezzo

Hans Sachs, cobbler and Mastersinger - Bass

David, his apprentice - Tenor

Sixtus Bechmesser, Town Clerk and Mastersinger - Bass

Walter von Stolzing, a knight - Tenor

Mastersingers (nine), a night watchman


Act I Sc I: Inside the church of St Katherine's Nüremberg

In which our hero declares his love for a lady but fails to sing his way into the club of Mastersingers whose members will be allowed to compete for the lady's hand.

We are in Nuremberg medieval city of song and there is a church service in progress. Handsome knight Walter sidles up to pretty young woman Eva and says excuse me but are you spoken for? Eva recognizes Walter as overnight house guest. Well no not exactly says her maid Magdalene not actually engaged but father Pogner has booked her as the prize for an upcoming song contest. Whoever wins gets her as wife. I see I see says Walter to Eva let me escort you home. No stay here says Magdalene, here's Mastersinger's apprentice David (sure enough David is fussing about resetting the church as venue for a song contest) he'll teach you the tricks of the Mastersinging trade: you stay and get your Master's certificate and then you can compete for her. Eva I love you says Walter [a bit sudden? Ed] see you tonight. OK says Eva. Exits.


Act I Sc 2: A makeshift arena

So you think you can get your certificate at first try? says David. Ho ho. How much do you know about the Meister method? Zero says Walter. OK listen to this says David. He launches into a farrago of rules regulations admonitions prohibitions. Meanwhile the apprentices set up the singers'dais all wrong. David sorts them out: they take the mickey out of him.

Pogner and Beckmesser enter. You are odds-on favourite to win my girl Eva says Pogner to Beckmesser: such a good singer you are. But if I win and she won't have me will you push it? asks Beckmesser. No I will not push it says Pogner. Excuse me says Walter would the Masters accept me as a late entry? I must propose you for the Masters' club first old friend says Pogner . The Masters assemble: roll call: Pogner makes the opening address. In my travels he says I found Nuremberg's image very poor. We are generally perceived as stuffy starchy stingy also philistine so I dreamt up this song contest to improve the image of this great city of ours and I offer my daughter as wife to the winner. Nice one Pog! shout the Masters. Viva Veit! cry the apprentices. But just one thing says Pogner if she doesn't like the winner she has power of refusal.

Why not allow the people to exercise their democratic right and judge the contest? asks Social Democrat Sachs. Subversive left-wing talk say the Masters. Order! back to the agenda says Pogner: we have this late entry my friend Sir Stolzing. I propose him as candidate for the Masters' Guild. Excellent C.V. noble parents property owner Name at Lloyds member of the Athenaeum banks at Coutts. Vocal education? asks the baker Kothner. I studied these classic LPs of Caruso Gigli Chaliapin says Walter (All dead says Beckmesser). But what actual educational establishment? asks Kothner. School of Nature says Walter (He learnt from the birds says Beckmesser. Are you prepared to submit a trial song? asks Kothner. Yes says Walter (poetically and at some length). Right! Into your marker's box Beckmesser says Kothner and remember Sir Stolzing seven faults and you're out. Take a look at the conditions of contest (apprentices show a video to Walter whilst Kothner sings the soundtrack).

Cue! shouts Beckmesser. Walter takes off into a romantic rhapsody. Beckmesser jumps out. Seven faults already he cries gleefully: do you want any more of this rubbish?It's funny sort of stuff say the Masters. Is this what they call minimalist? asks one. More atonal I would think says another. Perhaps it's tone rows says a third. Can't stand this modern stuff says a fourth. I liked it says Sachs: the marker is clearly biased jealous and emotionally upset. His intervention is unfair. I say go on Sir Stolzing to hell with the marker. Walter sings. Sachs and Beckmesser slag each other off: the Masters argue. Pogner tries to cool it: the apprentices dance: chaos. Beckmesser yells let's take a vote. Big majority against Walter's admission. Curtain.

Continue reading

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Listen Now: Vladimir Jurowski discusses Die Meistersinger

In preparation for live internet broadcast in association with the Guardian nodoubt

Stephen Moss discusses Glyndebourne's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with its conductor, Vladimir Jurowski. From its historical context and its notorious association with Hitler and the Nazi ideology, to how their current production sets out to liberate the opera's humane intentions and more emotional themes.

You can watch the production live on Sunday at guardian.co.uk/liveoperafromglyndebourne, or, if you miss it then, it will be available for the following week.

Click to launch MP3 audio player.

Alternatively go to the Guardian and listen there by clicking here

Source: Guardian Newspaper

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The Countdown Continues: Glyndebourne 2011: The history of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - video

On Sunday 26 June from 2.45pm, guardian.co.uk will be live-streaming Glyndebourne Opera's new production of Wagner's masterpiece. Here director David McVicar and conductor Vladimir Jurowski discuss the work and its history at the festival

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Nearly Time: Glyndebourne 2011: Staging Wagner's Die Meistersinger - video

From The Guardian:

In a second video previewing guardian.co.uk.music's live stream of Glyndebourne's sold-out staging of Die Meistersinger, we go behind the scenes to see preparations for the biggest production in the company's history.

Watch Die Meistersinger live, here, on Sunday 26 June from 2.45pm

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Listen Now: Die Meistersinger - Sebastian Weigle. Gran Teatre del Liceu de Barcelona, 2009

Well, at least you don't have to look at it.

Again, found over at Latvian Classical Radio in their archives. This is the last one - streaming audio. Same as the Werther, go to the archive Here and it's 7 November 2009 - or click here. Alternatively, click either of the links below and it will open up the relevant music player. Detailed explanation if you get lost  in the Werther post  here

Windows Media Player Stream: Click Here

RealPlayer Stream:  Click Here
Details:

Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg : Soloists, Orchestra and Chorus Gran Teatre del Liceu.  Conductor: Sebastian Weigle. Gran Teatre del Liceu de Barcelona. 17.3.2009 (JMI)Production from Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden.
Director: Claus Guth.
Sets and Costumes: Christian Schmidt.
Lighting: Jan Seeger

Cast:Hans Sachs: Albert Dohmen.
Walther von Stolzing: Robert Dean Smith.
Eva: Veronique Gens.
Beckmesser: Bo Skovhus.
Pogner: Reinhard Hagen.
David: Norbert Ernst.
Magdalene: Stella Grigorian.
Fritz Kothner: Robert Bork.
Night Watchman: Magnus Baldvinsson.
Kunz Vogelgesang: Yves Saelens.
Konrad Nachtigall: Kurt Gyssen.
Balthasar Zorn: Roger Padullés.
Ulrich Eisslinger: Ángel Rodríguez.
Agustin Moser: José Ferrero.
Hermann Ortel: Joseph Ribot.
Hans Schwarz: Tobias Schabel.
Hans Foltz: Dario Russo.


Review Here

This is what it looks like but really, I wouldn't look:

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