Michael Volle as Hans Sachs (with a different soprano in the role of Eva than the production we saw today)
Dear friends and readers,
I thought I’d record that Yvette and I spent 6 long hours watching Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (to give Wagner’s opera its full title) today at our local HD movie-theater. Neither of us hardly ever drowsed off — I observed a number of people half-dozing at times. Two people in our row left after the second act. It was an utterly unimaginative production not quite rescued by the intelligent acting and realism and singing of Michael Volle.
Speaking for myself I found the second act charmed me by the touching and human psychological interactions of the principle characters, especially the Volle as the older intelligent witty passionate complex character of a cobbler Hans Sachs genuinely in love with Eva (Anne Dasch in the production we saw), the daughter of his friend) who herself seems torn between Sachs and the lifeless stiltedly acted and (it mattered) unattractive Johan Botha as a supposed dazzling Knight-poet Walther von Stolzino.
The scene is a street in a picturesque fairy tale German-like town, Hans is making shoes for the coming wedding of Eva and whoever wins her as a prize in a coming singing contest, and along comes a master-singer, Johannes Martin Kranzle as an emasculated over-sensitive and therefore mocked suitor-contestant Sixtus Beckmasser intending to serenade Eva at a window. Some of the wall of music in this and the third act swooningly as well as some of the comic singing and hammering away by Volle appealed to me, was amusing. Also the overt theme of how valuable original poetry which does not follow rules or conventions is (Wagner thinking of himself) appealed to me as well as some of the romantic lyrics (a leider-like song attributed to and sung by the Knight-Poet Walther).
Renee Fleming’s interview of Volle showed him to be a deep feeling singer who had given a lot of thought to his role as a man in love with a much younger woman who gives her up (as he foresees he will be a Mark to her Isolde). The interview of the production design person who talked of this 1990s pre-computer set, watching it put up, and then a rehearsal of the dancing (Kelli O’Hara as lead, Deborah Voight interviewer):
and an interview with a costume designer for the coming new production of The Merry Widow starring Fleming were entertaining.
Had Jim been alive he’d have certainly been there; I remember half-sleeping through a Meistersinger next to him where he stayed up for all of it I’m not sure where. He would have understood and listened to the music as Yvette seemed to.
Jim joined the Wagner Society of Washington DC here in DC shortly after he retired and envisaged us going to its lectures and concerts and yearly full weekend get-aways; and was bitterly hurt when after a second year of going to all its events, supporting it with money, we were clearly at the last moment excluded from their weekend (they held onto his check for it, some $500 until a week before when he said they must have at last had enough people for this event so they need not include us). He had thought here was a semi-popular cultural group we could attend, pretend to belong to. What was wrong with us I’ll never know — I did talk a lot on the one weekend we attended to a hired photographer-historian who shared my political outlook; maybe this was frowned upon. Maybe we weren’t important enough in any way. The snobbery of this society and the way the leaders behaved sycophantically to the supposed civic or political or cultural leaders of this or that place was without awareness. I was aware of how the fascism of Wagner, his anti-feminism (by the women there) was just ignored in all the talks about Wagner operas. I bring this experience up to expose this Wagner Society of Washington DC for doing that to him, and also show how much he was willing to endure to participate in the music of Wagner with the occasional person who knew something about it.
I’d like to think he might have agreed this production was hopelessly dull; the first act of the masters arguing over the coming contest was without drama — even Renee Fleming, the hostess could find nothing beyond vague hype about how “special” and “wonderful” this Wagnerian production was as she talked to the dull Kranzle and at least honest Dasch (she admitted the part was small, the psychology simple). In his filmed interview Levine kept going using the same contentless words. The third act went on for an interminable 2 hours: each of the major characters visits Sachs before the contest begins and while the interaction leads to the climax, each phase not only went on repetitively, but predicted the over-long heavy-handed climax with its gestures of gaiety, priggish self-righteousness at someone not wanting to join something, scorn of weakness and then insistence of how important it was to respect even conventional guilds and Germanness.
For me the HD film close-ups and surtitles made this another first time to see and understand an opera I’ve watched before and really gotten little out of. I was surprised to discover that Yvette didn’t like the second act: she thought it could have been a lot funnier. Very “uninventive.” She too felt it could have been half as long.
Not that anyone who matters in making new productions of this opera will pay attention to this blog, but I’ll still make the suggestion it needs not only to be wholly re-designed using modern symbolic staging but someone needs to take seriously its riveting interest is the erotic relationship between Eva and Hans. Wagner’s words do not call for Hans to act avuncular; and she asks him to marry her more than once and seems to prefer him to this suitor of hers in the third. Almost the whole of the first act could be eliminated, whole sections of the third, and if it cannot be cut, at least the mockery of Beckmesser could be cut down, made less snarky (he’s a kind of Mr Moseley character for anyone who watched Downton Abbey). There was no undercutting of the intense patriarchy of the male roles, but Karen Cargill, an Irish soprano as Magdalene, sister to Eva, showed some comic gifts:
Yvette and I caught sight of the dress circle we sat in when we were at the Met in mid-November, and she said she liked that she could now imagine where the various places filmed were in relation to what we had walked through.
I wonder when these opera companies who broadcast through HD will admit that filming for audiences makes them change how these operas are directed. The one person never interviewed in any of these productions is the person called “the live HD director,” this time Matthew Diamond. It is egregiously obvious that blocking and entrances and exits and choreography is done with movie needs as well as in-house stage limitations and sets in mind.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
My first Meistersinger – enjoyed it, but found I got third-act-fatigue in a way that I haven’t with Wagner in the theatre. I agree – the second act was a highlight. The comic acting of Volle and Kranzle was wonderful, but as fine a tenor as he may be, you could have done dendochronology on Botha’s acting.
I find it interesting that Deborah Voigt was banned from Covent Garden due to her obesity, and few dispute her singing or acting ability, but Botha continues to get parts in operas where appearance plays a significant part. He is often referred as “barrel-chested” as a code word for obese. He is no Pavarotti, who could get away with playing lithe young tenors.
Actually good point. You’re right. I had not thought of that. You do know that Voigt had the gastric by-pass surgery and for a while was thinner; but I see in the interview that she has grown large (to use these euphemisms again): she risked life and her voice.
In this opera there is a male wet dream point of view: like Galsworthy’s novels, where Irene is this dream vision all the men want (and presented in the first novel very hostilely as cold and frigid to Soames — he is presented ironically but sympathetically) and one of them is presented as a dream vision of women too — like the Rosencavalier so the script really demands a beautiful male. And one who has a personality one is drawn too. Botha was so much in reverse it was jarring. Maybe that’s why I thought the production needed to be revamped with her falling in love with Volle and say make it that she was forced to have this dense man.
There is a small black tenor, Brownmiller (I forget his man) who was very chubby and is short; recently he’s lost weight to try to look the roles his voice suits; but he is not handsome and too short. I cannot imagine a similarly structured black woman getting anywhere as heroine.
As I count up Met operas, it comes to me more and more of them are undaring or conventional bores in some fundamental ways. The broadcasting across the world is responsible for this in part. Maybe the loss of Levine at the head of the place is now having a reverse effect – he was responsible for the Met becoming this great place in the last 30 years. While he can still (just) conduct, it’s obvious he’s not up to much else. Did he have a grave neurological disease?
Judy Shoaf:
Wasn’t Volle remarkable? He sings full-out for hours as if it were his natural means of expression.
Ellen, apparently Peter Gelb is planning to bring to the Met the European production Volle starred in recently. I am not sure what I think about it but it does seem to get away from that “view from my window at the Nuremburg Hilton” quality of the current production.
I watched. Thank you. Yes the Europeans seem so much more intelligent than us in their willingness to deconstruct these operas. Gelb does not want to share this with his Met audience cross the world? What’s called Euro-trash is a modern sensibility trying to see more deeply in these — I can see that Volle is now the secondary male — but the central Knight is a re-do of Rosencavalier and the whole thing so male-oriented; the males are in worship of this woman who has no say for real in her future, only this father substitute can help her. It’s really hard to make this opera anything but what it is. Wagner is hopeless over sex. Verdi we can find an alternative vision in — I refer to the Traviata with Desay recently seen at the Met.
Yvette’s blog where she talks about this season in general (and by implication the last):
She develops the excellent point: “Meistersinger inadvertently ends up demonstrating why sometimes rules are there for reason …”
She is way too kind to that Nozze we saw.
When it has good singers, who fit the roles, Meistersinger is a delight. It sounds as if the production was let down by unsuitable singers. If the Italian Tenor isn’t good looking and an excellent singer, the whole plot is a nonsense. The best production I ever saw had Hermann Prey as Sachs, who was terrific, both as an actor and singer.
Botha can’t act either and he looked like a turkey in his over-silvered outfit. Clumsy with his sword. No one seemed alive in the first act. Well the man who sang Sachs’s apprentice, David (Paul Appleby) was good but it’s a marginal part; he shows up in Act 3 and is good again, but it’s a marginal part. And Karen Cargill with her lively Irish brogue was far more fun in the interview than the production.
“Re. the super-literal production, I was quite interested in seeing it because it appeared to me to be the same one I saw live around 1970. However, the commenters kept saying this Schenk production dated from 1993. After quite a bit of looking, I tracked down the very similar production I had seen, which dated from 1963, and was by Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O’Hearn.
For example, in the second act two city streets were onstage instead of just one. I found the names in a 1993 NYT article complaining THEN that one set of postcards had been replaced by a different set. I suspect Gelb revived this production as a kind of “farewell tour” for those who love it, before he says good-bye and replaces it with a more thoughtful and amusing one.”
Judy, how Jane Bennet of you: you give charitable (in Austen’s language, candid, making the kindest) constructions for people’s motives.
Judy: Gelb is not in charge of sharing the European production with viewers across the world. Presumably when it is mounted at the Met, something he is trying to achieve, he can do so, and possibly in the meantime a DVD will be released of the one in Europe, if it was filmed. In the meantime, he brought over Volle specifically for this HD presentation (this was his second and last performance in the role at the Met), so I am grateful. I agree that this is an opera about testosterone + art, with the women either dead (Sachs’s wife) or prizes. Aside from stripping poor Eva naked and putting an apple in her hand, I’m not sure what can be done about that.
Well why not? let the audience see what’s going on. They’ve have to get a thinner singer, or hire some surrogate dancer to enact the role symbolically. I can see it 🙂
Judy: “I’m not really being kind to Gelb. I have only been Met-watching for a few years, but he seems to run into a lot of static over any new production, and there has been so much brouhaha over the Tosca and Ring productions. By presenting the old Meistersinger in HD at a time when he is planning a radical new one he can at least say he wasn’t pulling the rug out from under folks who liked everything literal. I was pretty angry at him over the union confrontations but I do like that he wanted to mount Klinghoffer. I envy you seeing that.”
I should say I feel justified empathy for the Palestinians and this summer made me want to see them get equal time in more places; when I tell some Jewish friends we went they look dark or unapproving. All the more did I want to support the production.
On going to the Met itself to see Death of Klinghofer, we were supporting Gelb doing daring productions. Why should we be excluded? It was expensive to go and our reasons also included 1) for me to get myself to return; 2) for her to see the Met at long last. You’re right to point out that we saw 3 productions and I’ve been told that Nov 15th was the last because the anger of the Jewish organizations was such they were threatening to (starting) legal suits.
I first heard of the union confrontations while in NYC; the expensively paid singers who volunteered to give up a percentage of their take were only a few. I see Gelb’s problem as wanting to get more revenue and expand his audience into younger people; 2) but broadcasting around the world means he hits different cultures of all sorts so it’s natural to be “careful”; 3) go for the Broadway young and he offends traditionalists, but it is his job to make tough decisions as Levine once did.
For my part not being as musical as Jim and Izzy, I’ve ever been aware of the neandertal values of some of these older operas and enjoy seeing them undermined while done or by insight made newly relevant. I enjoy concert performances; something of a puritan I find the settings can get in the way and like to see the barebones of the singing structure. So I like the abstract modern settings too. They can be overdone; Jim and I saw a couple from HD European cinema that were all wrong. But one needs to dare …