Abstract
Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been, and remains one of the most controversial works in the operatic canon. A new production by Barrie Kosky, the Jewish-Australian director of the Komische Oper Berlin, was premiered to great acclaim at Bayreuth in 2017 and repeated in 2018 and 2019. This chapter investigates how Kosky has confronted the dark legacy of this monumental work, interrogating many of the deeply disturbing elements while finding a way to strikingly dramatize these fault lines in the opera. His production achieves a profound vision of the role of art in a deeply politicized society; one distrustful of the “other”, and constantly seeking scapegoats. While the Nazi past looms large over this production—some of it set in a Nuremberg courtroom with Sachs/Wagner in the dock—it also unflinchingly, and often darkly comically, addresses contemporary political and social issues. Kosky’s production is contrasted with Katharina Wagner’s highly controversial 2010 Bayreuth version which starkly divided the critics, but which offers a very different, and equally fascinating perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Kosky obtained German citizenship the following year.
- 2.
See Millington (1991).
- 3.
Hohendahl (1993: 39) notes that the 1951 production by Rudolf Hartman used much from the 1943 Heinz Tietjen production “as if the defeat had never occurred.”
- 4.
Spotts (1994, p. 225) notes of Wieland’s later 1963 production that if the earlier production “portrayed Mastersingers without Nuremberg, this version lacked both Nuremberg and Mastersingers”. The production elicited the most vehement booing the Festival had ever experienced and was seen by some as Wieland’s most revolutionary production.
- 5.
Marc A. Weiner (1996, p. 54) argues that Wagner scholarship in general “has been divided, often vituperatively, into two camps: those who wish to defend the Master’s works from the taint of antisemitism, and those who seek to read the music dramas as intimately, ideologically linked to the racism reflected in the diverse documents of the composer’s biography … and in his overtly antisemitic essays”.
- 6.
Thomas S. Grey (2008, p. 203), regarding Wagner’s antisemitism, suggests that the “real question has to do with the consequences of these facts, either for our understanding of the operas or for any possible consensus regarding Wagner‘s implication in the murderous anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime that came to power in Germany fifty years after his death.”
- 7.
Grey (2008, p. 212) observes: “Wagner’s decision to identify himself as the author of Judaism in Music is important … since it could then be regarded as a key to such potential readings for anyone with a desire to use it so. Nearly all modern interpretations of anti-Semitic content in the operas refer to this key, although we still have very little evidence of whether or not Wagner‘s contemporaries chose to avail themselves of it.”
- 8.
This is a viewpoint that Barrie Kosky articulates in his account of the genesis of his production. Adorno’s discussion of antisemitic elements in the operas significantly influenced later perspectives on Wagner’s antisemitism: “the gold-grubbing, invisible, anonymous, exploitative Alberich, the shoulder-shrugging, loquacious Mime, overflowing with self-praise and spite, the impotent intellectual critic Hanslick-Beckmesser” (Adorno 2005, pp. 12–13). Thomas S. Grey (2002, p. 178) rather disparagingly describes Adorno as “in a certain paradoxical way, himself sometimes com[ing] across as a kind of high-modernist Beckmesser”.
- 9.
Vaget (2002, p. 203) argues that the way in which Beckmesser is employed in the opera is as “the enemy of the new music, the ‘music of the future’: first, through his reaction to Walther’s Trial Song, then through his own serenade, and finally through his botched rendition of the Prize Song. How could this not evoke—over the heads of the protagonists on stage—associations with the most articulate critic of Wagner’s music, Eduard Hanslick, whom the composer, in the 1869 printing of Das Judentum in der Musik, pointedly, though not quite correctly, took to be Jewish?… .Like most ambitious creators, Wagner aspired to broad, even universal acceptance, and therefore took pains to keep any overt indication of his very particular anti-Jewish obsession out of his operatic work. By and large he succeeded in this. In two instances, however, with Beckmesser and Mime in Acts I and II of Siegfried , he was unable or unwilling to mask completely the affinity of his portrayals to his publicised views on Jewry”.
- 10.
However, several productions of the opera during the Third Reich portrayed the Festwiese scene in Act 3 as versions of the Nuremberg rallies. Hohendahl (1993, p. 59) observes that through “their closeness to the party rallies, Bayreuth productions between 1933–1945 underscored the fateful appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich. At the center of this claim, we find a radical extension of the aesthetic into the political realm. It is significant that Goebbels defined the identity of the new Germany in terms of its art. ‘All great art is rooted in the people. When it loses its connection with the people, the development of a bloodless artificial virtuosity is inevitable.’”
- 11.
Mark Berry (2018, p. 454) notes that Wagner “more or less invented the role of the modern opera Regisseur—Wagner was, almost irrespective of intention, perhaps the single most important godfather to a critical, modernist tradition of staging and interpretation that has been unavoidably, if problematically, linked to the word Regietheater (director’s theatre)”.
- 12.
Ulrich Lenz (2017: 47) notes the opera’s investigation of ideas about art “to create a work which was unique even among his own career, the most German, and, at the same time, most self-referential of all his operas.”
- 13.
Close readings of the details of Kosky’s production can be found in the following chapter by John Severn, which is designed as a companion to this chapter.
- 14.
Lutz Koepnick (2002, p. 73) argues that Richard Wagner’s Nuremberg “is a dreamt one, a chimera of the nineteenth-century imagination deeply affected by the course of German history after 1848 and prior to unification in 1870/1871”, while Peter U. Hohendahl (1993, p. 57) observes that Nuremberg “derives its meaning precisely from the confrontation between past and present, between medieval community and modern industrial society”.
- 15.
Kosky also uses large puppets, but they are terrifying images of Nazi Jewish stereotypes.
- 16.
Katharina Wagner (2009) argues that she was “constantly visualising two lines which cross at one point and then move apart again. Sachs develops from a free and lateral thinker to an adapted Boeotian. With Beckmesser it is the total opposite. He is searching for his own artistic release from the conventions in the intentional new interpretation of the award song in the third Act—and finds it”.
- 17.
The German term “Schlagerstar” carries more negative connonations than the English equivalent.
- 18.
See Geck (2013), p. 265.
- 19.
Bernhart (2015, p. 453) argues that “the three artist-protagonists, who in Act I appear in updated twenty-first-century versions of Wagner’s roles as artists, undergo a radical change in the course of the opera”.
- 20.
David J. Levin (1996, p. 146) has a profoundly different view of Beckmesser at the end which is the “culmination of his ghettoization”; he is left among the people “in order to be left out; or we might say that he is kept among them in order to assume his place below them”.
- 21.
Very disturbing are the actions of Sachs at the end when a stage director and conductor are put into a coffin by Sachs’s assistants and set on fire by Sachs, evoking images of the Nazi era.
- 22.
Kosky initially rejected Katharina Wagner’s offer to direct the opera at Bayreuth, but agreed six months later (Goldman 2017).
- 23.
Thomas S. Grey (2002, pp. 180–181) identifies several elements that critics have used to argue the case for Beckmesser as an antisemitic caricature: “(1) the nervous, disjunct, and irascible qualities of Beckmesser’s vocal lines; (2) the emphasis on notes ‘unnaturally’ high for the prescribed bass voice … meant to suggest a querulous cracking of the voice; (3) the prosodic abuses and melodic poverty of his abortive ‘serenade’ in Act II; (4) its awkward decorative melismas, thought to mirror Wagner’s tendentious description of ‘cantorial singing’…; (5) Beckmesser’s ludicrous garbling of Walther’s poetry, further distorted by its mismatching to the tattered shreds of his own failed serenade (again, an allegory of the Jews’ alleged inability to understand truly the languages of their ‘host’ cultures from within).”
- 24.
As Geck (2013, pp. 277–278) observes: “Die Meistersinger may be regarded from start to finish as an opera about music. That it features an ongoing discussion about the ideological element of ‘German art’ tends to obscure that it is German music that is, as it were, the work’s invisible leading lady. The number of occasions when music is presented onstage speaks for itself … Indeed, the action of the first act as a whole is largely laid out along the lines of a discussion about music ... In short, around a third of the opera is taken up with scenes in which the plot requires singing in the true sense of the term (rather than simply as a setting of a prescribed text). A further third is reserved for aspects of the plot that bear some relation to the subject of music. And only the remaining third is a setting of words that are not primarily concerned with music”. Lutz Koepnick (2002, p. 73) notes that “nowhere .... is Wagner’s music so artificial as in the appearance of simplicity with which it clothes itself in Die Meistersinger ”.
- 25.
The use of the piano links it with Katharina Wagner’s production which sees Walther emerge from the piano in her staging. This opening scene strongly resembles the painting by Georg Papperitz, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”.
- 26.
In earlier drafts of the libretto, Beckmesser was known as Veit Hanslick—a direct reference to the influential Viennese critic, Eduard Hanslick with whom Wagner had a fraught relationship. Grey (2002, pp. 186–187) describes several contemporary caricatures of Wagner “that portray him in the guise of his own demonised Jewish enemy”, while Wagner’s “real competition … is not primarily identified with those ‘Jewish musicians’ [Mendelssohn , Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and Halévy], but with a higher authority in matters of popular melody and vocal display, Giuseppe Verdi (and the Italian tradition)”.
- 27.
The Konwitschny Hamburg production uses a similar strategy of Wagner look-alikes.
- 28.
Ulrich Lenz (2017, p. 46) comments that art and life for Wagner intermingled “quite unlike any other composer” and this “makes it difficult to separate the one from the other.” Wagner “stylised his own life as a work of art … his life and his daily existence were transformed into a performance that was ‘fit for a stage’. Stories from his contemporaries attest to how Wagner, in a kind of endless one-man-show, was perpetually reading aloud, reciting, acting, singing—in other words, always performing. Everything, even the most banal activity, was turned into theatre—and in the end, fed back into his work”.
- 29.
Adorno (2005, p. 19) argued that “the scene was merely an anticipation of the pogroms of the Third Reich”, while many critics have expressed their discomfort at the violence of this scene.
- 30.
See Pritchard (2018) for further discussion of this point.
- 31.
The harpist (Ruth-Alice Marino) is listed as the (fictitious) character “Helga Beckmesser” in the programme.
- 32.
Some productions have Beckmesser re-emerge after the performance of the Prize Song and participate in the general festivities.
- 33.
Most of the main characters step into the dock at some stage.
- 34.
Van den Berg (2002: 163) observes that “Beckmesser experiences a continual slide from his moral and aesthetic high ground in Act I as the virtually all-powerful Marker to the lowly thief in Act III—by attempting to steal Walther/Sachs’s Meisterlied—following his artistic humiliation in Act II … . Departing from the traditional ending of comedy, there is neither reconciliation … nor any indication that he might be reformed as a result of his experience. Laughter in Die Meistersinger does not function to restore and heal, but rather ‘malfunctions’ to ostracize and wound” (163).
- 35.
Sollich (2007, p. 26) notes of Beckmesser in Act III that “what appears at first sight to be a crude attempt at plagiarism … suddenly turns out to have unsuspected parallels with post-structuralist techniques of textual assimilation … Beckmesser turns out to be a deconstructionist avant la lettre, a reader who inscribes himself in the text and in that way continues to write it”.
- 36.
Lydia Goehr (2002, p. 61) notes that “what becomes obvious in his monologue is that there is nothing obvious about the significance of the Preislied [prize song], and that it is the shattering of this obviousness that is intended to shift our response to the song from being one of blind satisfaction to one of critical reflection on the future of art.”
- 37.
Edward Said (1998, p. 21) sees these final moments as “threatening” and “menacing”, with Sachs suggesting “that once one acknowledges the presence of something new and gifted like [Walther von] Stolzing, there is nevertheless the need to follow, and the collective is, in a sense, most important … there’s the idea of the outside as threatening: there’s a kind of xenophobic quality to it, in the opera … which is troubling”.
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Halliwell, M.J. (2021). “Es klang so alt und war doch so neu”: Barrie Kosky and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In: Phillips, J., Severn, J.R. (eds) Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75028-2_8
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