“It’s like an international flight,” whined a member of the Metropolitan Opera’s audience within earshot of me the last time that Richard Wagner’s longest opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, was performed in New York. She probably did not make it to this year’s Bayreuth Festival, which opened with a new production of Meistersinger by the German director Matthias Davids. Including the festival’s generous intermissions, each of which lasted a bit less than an hour, the performance clocked in at six hours and thirty-five minutes.
Davids emphasizes that Meistersinger, Wagner’s only comedy among his ten “mature” works, is the stuff of whimsy and fun. In this production, set in an imagined present in which the nature of what Wagner called “holy German art” is debated in the town of Bayreuth itself, the visuals and action are downright jovial. The knight Walther von Stolzing aspires to win the hand of Eva, the daughter of the goldsmith Veit Pogner, who insists she marry a guild-certified mastersinger who can win her hand in a song contest.
Walther has studied music from the writings of Walther von der Vogelweide, a medieval German troubadour who makes a cameo appearance in Wagner’s earlier opera Tannhäuser, but the knight’s tryout song does not strictly adhere to the mastersingers’ pedantic rules. Only the wise cobbler Hans Sachs sees that Walther’s new musical style has outstanding merits. Despite the machinations of the awkward town clerk Beckmesser, who also covets Eva’s hand, and despite Sachs’s own attraction to the girl, Sachs helps Walther compose an exultant prize song to win the contest and the maiden. When Walther triumphs and is united with Eva, he is acclaimed a mastersinger but initially rejects the title, only for Sachs to upbraid him in a monologue proclaiming the sacred necessity of preserving Germany’s national culture.
Setting the opera in modern Bayreuth raises certain questions. It also follows a recent trend of framing Wagner’s operas in and around the festival, which still reverentially performs his works here 149 years after its inception in 1876. In 2008, Stefan Herheim staged a historically incisive Parsifal set on the premises of Wagner’s house, the villa Wahnfried, which is now a museum. Tobias Kratzer’s imaginative Tannhäuser of 2019 updated the action from a medieval song contest at Thuringia’s Wartburg Castle to contemporary Bayreuth, where the title character is a wayward soloist. Bayreuth’s previous production of Meistersinger, by Barrie Kosky, used the work as an inquiry into Wagner’s culpability for the darker side of German nationalism, identifying the composer—in his home at Wahnfried—with both Walther and Hans Sachs before transporting him into the prisoners’ dock at the Nuremberg Trials.
Davids is much less political, recognizing that art should ultimately be about art; or, as Eva says, “Hier gilt’s die Kunst” (Here it is art that matters). When Bayreuth reopened in 1951, its direction memorably used that phrase at the end of an official notice requesting that patrons refrain from political discussion. Davids’s approach is decidedly cultural. Walther auditions for the mastersingers in a replica of the Bayreuth Festival Theater, a cross-section of which faces out towards the audience. The public space of Act II, where the characters interact before precipitating a brawl, reflects Bayreuth’s urban landscape, including versions of its old-fashioned street signs with Wagnerian connotations (the town actually has a “Meistersingerstraße” and streets named for Walther von Stolzing and Hans Sachs), its carefully manicured flora, and its public-library kiosk. The song contest is staged as a merry, if rather garish, public festival at which artists and townspeople assemble, much as many southern German communities still do for music and beer. Walther politely yields to Sachs’s admonition to accept his recognition as a mastersinger, but, to the last strains of the score, Eva sees the fundamental truth of the situation and rejects the titke for him before leading him away to a life of bliss outside the realm of pedantry. Sachs and Beckmesser proceed upstage together, heatedly debating the rules of song as the curtain falls.
Hans Sachs is Wagner’s longest role and an Everest for bass-baritones. For the new production, Bayreuth cast Georg Zeppenfeld, one of the festival’s stalwart singers, whose voice tends more toward the lower bassline and who has delivered magnificent performances as Gurnemanz in Parsifal, a role he is concurrently singing this summer, and King Marke in Tristan und Isolde. Entrusting him with the leading role was a great mark of confidence, which he acknowledged with grace and humility at the curtain calls. The voice was superbly suited to the part’s lower tessitura and the intensity needed for Sachs’s final monologue. It did not exactly soar in the higher baritonal line, but whatever was missing paled in comparison to the sheer humanity that Zeppenfeld poured into the part.
An international attraction was the remarkable American tenor Michael Spyres, who originally trained as a baritone—as many great heldentenors do—and sometimes describes himself as a “baritenor.” His broad range came out forcefully at the point when Walther is called upon to imitate Eva’s father Pogner, another bass role. While most Walthers sing the lines in tenor voice, Spyres transposed them down at least two registers. Throughout the evening, he relied on a solid and spectacularly well-voiced sensitivity that recalled Ben Heppner’s best singing in the role, relying on arch breath control to unroll a superb legato.
Spyres sang opposite a great Swedish soprano called Nilsson—not the legendary Birgit Nilsson who internationally dominated the Wagnerian roles of Isolde and Brünnhilde two generations ago, nor the coloratura soprano Christina Nilsson who ruled the Paris stage a century before her. This is a new Christina Nilsson, who debuted as Eva in this production and clearly has an extraordinarily promising career ahead of her. A lithe, sweet voice captured the part’s innocence with an arresting beauty both vocal and physical.
Bayreuth supporting casts often comprise top talent even in small roles. Michael Nagy’s fine lyric baritone was well suited to Beckmesser’s edgy music. The Korean bass Jongmin Park was a powerful Pogner. The mezzo-soprano Christa Mayer, best known for principal roles in Wagner’s Ring cycle, was a luxurious addition as Eva’s nurse Magdalena. Jordan Shanahan, a talented baritone from Hawaii who is also singing Klingsor in Parsifal and Kurwenal in Tristan, filled the small but notable role of Fritz Kothner, a mastersinger who makes official announcements. The young bass Tobias Kehrer took the even smaller part of the Nightwatchman—whose only role is to announce the time before and after the second act brawl—and left an impression of a future Hans Sachs.
The outstanding Italian conductor Daniele Gatti was a victim of cancel culture a few years ago, but after more than a decade away from Bayreuth he is back in the orchestra pit, exactly where he belongs. He led a steady, lyrical performance that kept the production within the bounds of fine musical sense. In Thomas Eitler-de Lint, Bayreuth has found a skilled and effective new chorus master to succeed the retired Eberhard Friedrich after the latter’s brilliant twenty-four-year career.
