Number 202: July 2011 - Wagner Society of England

DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG AT GLYNDEBOURNE
2nd June 2011
Paul Dawson-Bowling
This glorious realisation of Wagner’s lovely and happy opera was a landmark event
both for Glyndebourne and for Wagner in England. It followed the common tendency to
update its era to late Victorian, but it did so with deftness and taste. In the pit was
Vladimir Jurowski, whom I have come to regard as a chameleon conductor, changeable
from one evening to the next, but happily at his superlative best on this occasion. The
Glyndebourne acoustic and the fewer strings than customary allowed Jurowski to bring
out the many wind counterpoints that are easily swamped over; and they sang out for him
with a soft sparkle; not that there was anything missing by way of weight and opulence
when the music needed it. In some ways the occasion put me in mind of Jurowski’s
Tristan und Isolde Act II at the Festival Hall, recalled with gratitude, and although a
subsequent version of the complete Tristan at Glyndebourne missed the vivid identity of
the Festival Hall version, our particular performance of Die Meistersinger at
Glyndebourne had exactly the same beauty and depth of feeling.
The curtain went up on a clever semi-permanent set with a cupola covering most
of the stage. The area beneath it was the porch at St Catherine’s church with the pews
visible through an arch to the rear, and in Act III Scene 1 the cupola made a very grand
ceiling for what was more like a very bourgeois Sachs’ living-room than his workshop.
This room contained a fair amount of widower’s disorder, with piles of papers and books
and teacups strewn about randomly, all crying out for a woman’s civilising influence. At
one point during the prelude to Act III Sachs, caught up in the poignant night of his spirit,
raised the veil on a portrait of his dead wife and child, and this was characteristic of this
production’s currents of darkness within its over-arching humanity. In Act III Scene 2 the
cupola really came into its own as the roof of a Victorian bandstand where Eva and Pogner
sat in the shade, overlooking the parkland scene where the singing contest took place.
The Times Newspaper had crassly and inelegantly previewed the opera as Wagner’s
“bum-numbing paean to German art” but as it happens, we were at Glyndebourne as
guests of a distinguished surgeon who had never previously seen a live performance of
the work, and at the end of Act I he made the telling comment; “My goodness, Wagner
wasn’t half being critical of the Germans!” This was an illuminating and unusual
perspective from a keen intelligence perceiving what the work actually presented when
untainted by preconceptions. It struck him that Wagner was in fact condemning not only
the authoritarian fabric of the guild, but the whole Teutonic way of doing things for being
inflexible, uncompromising and rule-bound. He saw Wagner not as being anti-Semitic but
anti-German, and the production made several of the masters quite apoplectic over
Walther and his Act I trial song. They dictated the terms from on high, commanding him
to stand down and shut up; and this was all of a piece with my surgeon friend’s long past
time as a trainee surgeon at Mainz. His perspective was a healthy corrective to the
Wagnerian orthodoxies which hold that in Die Meistersinger Wagner was simply banging
out a jingoistic acclamation of all things German.
The production went on to affirm the very real virtues of community, the smaller
community of the Guild, the wider community of Nuremberg, and even the opera
community as it exists at Glyndebourne. It was the Glyndebourne community that had
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