“Here Art is What Matters!”

[DVD booklet for Katharina ’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.]

At first sight, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg seems to tell a wry tale about craftsmen with a fine ear and eye for art. The goldsmith Veit Pogner offers his daughter Eva as the prize in a singing competition, with three potential suitors: the comical town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser, the aristocratic Walther von Stolzing, who has just arrived in town, and the ageing shoemaker Hans Sachs, who is also an accomplished poet. But the events that unfold onstage are more than just a farce in a petty- bourgeois setting. For on closer inspection it turns out that Wagner's real aim is social analysis: he examines how much innovation and deviation from the norm a society can tolerate, how that society deals with tradition and breaks with that tradition and what art is worth to such a society and, finally, what it should be worth.

It is this element of social analysis that Katharina Wagner privileges in her first Bayreuth production: Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg as a discourse on art. Central to her staging is not the craft of shoemaking or even poetry, nor the Romantically transfigured Nuremberg of the Renaissance but the question as to the freedoms that art is permitted in any social system with firmly established rules. For Katharina Wagner, Nuremberg represents a frame of mind, a system of fixed rules and laws to which people have to submit if they are to coexist as social and political beings. And this includes art.

As a result, the entire production is permeated by questions about art and artistic creation. In the opening act St Catharine's Church—a hallowed building that is also used as a community center—gives way to an idealized academy of art. Published by Reclam, the little volumes with yellow covers that are popular editions of the classics symbolize the canon of western art. Neatly piled up or photocopied, they imply that art and intellectual effort are merely being administered, rather than evaluated and revised. In the second act Hans Sachs exchanges his shoemaker's bench for a noisy portable typewriter. And the shoes? The only shoes are those that rain down like tiny bombs from the flies to ruin Beckmesser's amateurish serenade. And in the final act the procession to the Festival Meadow becomes a phantasmagoria of German artists such as Schiller, Goethe and other famous figures wearing deformed and oversized pantomime masks and dancing a grotesque cancan, while effigies of the team responsible for this piece of Regietheater are burnt. In Katharina Wagner's hands the work ends with an act of restoration that implies a very real threat, when Sachs exhorts his assembled listeners to celebrate "holy German art", the conservative, custodial tendency of which is seen to be reactionary and, by extension, dangerous.

At least at the start of the work, Sachs, Beckmesser and Walther are all seen to have firmly held views. But by the time of the orgiastic riot on St John's Eve at the end of the second act all three have lost those fixed beliefs. Unlike the townspeople, who resume their former lives, hung over and subdued, these three characters are challenged and transformed by the events bound up with this expression of anarchic frenzy, which is more of a wild happening than a street fight. Sachs was initially a liberal freethinker who within the circle of master craftsmen can show off his non-conformism thanks to his undisputed gifts as a poet. But he turns into a pensive and backward-looking custodian of tradition, — 1 — which is why he later exchanges his baggy shirt for a designer suit. And he now wears elegant shoes instead of going barefoot through the world—and this in spite of the fact that he is a shoemaker. Walther von Stolzing is initially presented to us as a hothead and a dandy who misses no opportunity to incorporate everything and everyone into his vision of art, using wild brushstrokes and irascible gestures. But he turns into a conformist artist who subordinates himself to prevailing tastes and the artistic mainstream precisely because it holds out the greatest promise of personal and commercial success.

It is Beckmesser who develops the most. He was previously a pitiful bureaucrat and an amateur artist, but on St John's Eve a genuinely free artist breaks loose. He uses the same source as Walther but interprets it in a consistently different way. He does not simply make a mess of things with his performance on the Festival Meadow, he also shows people his contempt for convention. The ridiculed outsider becomes the most modern artist of all precisely because he shuns mass taste, to which he refuses to kowtow. By the end Beckmesser alone is in a position to heed the note of warning in Sachs's final address. While the amorphous mass of the townspeople, shrouded in a threatening half-light, launches into the final chorus in the jubilant key of C major, Beckmesser makes himself scarce, clearly registering the point at which restoration becomes dangerously reactionary.

At the same time Katharina Wagner sheds light on the particular role played by the within the Bayreuth repertory. The work has had a troubled history, and not just at the time of the Third Reich. On Bayreuth's Green Hill it has always seemed strangely sacrosanct, preventing it from enjoying a proper reception history. It is also the only one of the ten works in the Bayreuth canon to remain the virtual preserve of the and as a rule has been interpreted in traditional ways. Although tentatively tried out an alternative reading, his production—decried by traditionalists as "The Mastersingers without Nuremberg"—was ultimately impervious to new perspectives. In short, the work had been spared the annealing fire of Bayreuth's workshop approach to productions. Katharina Wagner's aim was to introduce to the Festival the type of production style that had long been adopted by her eminent colleagues elsewhere, namely, to relocate the work in the here and now and reflect on its reception. This engagement with the opera finds particularly striking expression in her treatment of the final scene on the Festival Meadow. Normally this is a prime example of conventional folksiness, its colorful folk art helping to draw a veil over the more problematical aspects of Sachs's final address, with its nationalistic overtones. Here Katharina Wagner dispenses with all decorative details and consciously directs the spectator's gaze to the half-lit areas of the stage where something grimly threatening still lurks in the shadows.

This production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg is replete with images of a kind never previously seen in Bayreuth. And it is aided and abetted by an enthusiastically committed cast that ensures that Katharina Wagner succeeds in exploring new approaches to her great-grandfather's only mature comic opera and in offering fresh insights into a work that audiences may think they already know. She shatters the bull's-eye windows traditionally associated with Reformation Nuremberg, does away with shoes and cakes and sausages and challenges the audience to enter with her into a drama which, all extraneous features having been swept away, is notable for its tension and actuality, dealing, as it does, with questions that are of daily import to us all.

Jochen Kienbaum (tr. Stewart Spencer) — 2 —