The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (21 page)

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Götterdämmerung.
After the grave recapitulatory scene for the Norns, Siegfried and Brünnhilde continue in jubilant duet, before Siegfried sets off down the Rhine – a journey through surging waters which Wagner depicts in another magnificent piece of scene-painting.
The most moving music of the remainder of Act I (which lasts in total for over two hours) is contained in Waltraute’s account of the decline of Valhalla.
Act II is tensely dramatic, focused on Brünnhilde’s humiliation and revenge, and featuring many elements common to nineteenth-century grand opera – a rousing chorus (of the Gibichung), a revenge trio, a wedding procession and some thrilling top notes for the prima donna.
Act III opens in a more relaxed atmosphere – the Rhinemaidens’ graceful bathing-beauties trio recalls the beginning of
Rheingold,
while Siegfried’s lovely music as he recovers his memory of life in the forest and his discovery of Brünnhilde literally re-enacts
Act II of
Siegfried.
The black, explosive ferocity of the Funeral March offers opportunities for a conductor and a timpanist to show off the power of their downbeat.

Somehow, after fourteen hours of music, Wagner manages to bring the
Ring
to a conclusion that does not seem anticlimactic: Brünnhilde’s immolation and the final orchestral postlude unite the leitmotivs in a tremendous musical apocalypse, which dies away to be replaced by a calm, clear light glowing with the promise of a new dawn.

In performance

Before the Second World War, the
Ring
was staged in quasi-naturalistic style, faithfully if not pedantically following Wagner’s elaborate stage directions.
All that changed for ever in 1951, when Wagner’s grandson Wieland directed a cycle at Bayreuth which eliminated much of the clutter (Fricka’s chariot drawn by a pair of rams, for example) and reasserted the opera’s roots in Greek tragedy.
Sets, costumes and props were austere, and the design was dominated by a circular platform, symbolic of the Ring itself.
Atmosphere was provided by evocative lighting.
Wieland’s approach proved enormously influential over the ensuing generation, even though his own second production, at Bayreuth in 1966, was more scenically graphic, making use of archetypal Jungian dream-images.

In 1976, Bayreuth celebrated the centenary of the first performance of the
Ring
with a radical new interpretation directed by a brilliant young Frenchman, Patrice Chéreau.
In place of Wieland’s emphasis on the timeless qualities of the opera, Chéreau gave each act a specific location (the Rhine itself became a hydro-electric dam), presenting the story in a real historical world, albeit one which seemed to span several periods.
Chéreau was fascinated by George Bernard Shaw’s idea that the
Ring
was an allegorical critique of modern capitalism, moving from Wotan’s
ancien
régime
in
Rheingold
to the distinctly Fascistic society of the Gibichung in
Götterdämmerung.
The acting style was vivid and credible, and the characters in this
Ring
emerged as real and even ordinary people.

This approach in turn inspired another generation of
Ring
productions, notably that of Nikolaus Lehnhoff in Munich and San Francisco.
An even more subversive and extreme line was taken by Ruth Berghaus in Frankfurt and Richard Jones at Covent Garden, whose grotesque cartoon surrealism more conservative audiences found baffling and offensive.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, Peter Hall at Bayreuth and August Everding at the Met returned to a more traditional pre-Wieland approach, creating beautiful stage pictures and ignoring the darker political and psychological implications of the story in order to reassert the plot’s roots in German folklore.

Recordings

CD: Birgit Nilsson (Brünnhilde), Hans Hotter (Wotan); Georg Solti (cond.).
Decca 414 100-2

Video and DVD: Gwyneth Jones (Brünnhilde), Donald McIntyre (Wotan); Pierre Boulez (cond.).
Bayreuth Festival production.
Philips 070 401-3 (
Rheingold
) / 402-3 (
Walküre
) / 403-3 (
Siegfried
) / 404-3 (
Götterdämmerung
) (video); 070 407 9 (DVD)

Die
Meistersinger
von
Nürnberg
(
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
)

Three acts. First performed Munich, 1868.

Libretto by the composer

Calling this opera a ‘comedy’ may set up the wrong expectations – only the figure of Beckmesser is liable to raise anything approaching a titter from a modern audience.
But this is undoubtedly Wagner’s most warmly genial and romantic work, full of a mellow wisdom about young love and middle age, as well as the relationship between traditions, rules and forms and the lonely development of an artist’s creative vision.

The cobbler-poet Hans Sachs is a historical figure and the guild of Mastersingers actually existed: Wagner researched their history in some detail.
Recent scholarship has argued that the opera’s undoubtedly nationalistic ideology conceals an anti-Semitic element.
But such a view remains highly contentious, and audiences may prefer to concentrate on the opera’s wonderfully life-affirming qualities and belief in the virtues of the small democratic community.

Plot

In a church in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, a wandering young knight Walther von Stolzing, exiled from his estates when his father died, tries to find out more about the lovely Eva, daughter to the goldsmith Veit Pogner.
Her maidservant Magdalene explains that she is to be married to the winner of the city’s annual song contest, to be held the following day.

Fired with passion for Eva, Walther is determined to enter the contest, and is instructed in all the Mastersingers’ complicated rules of song composition by David, Magdalene’s lover and apprentice to Nuremberg’s most admired songwriter, the cobbler Hans Sachs.
The panel of Mastersingers (local craftsmen who govern the city’s cultural life) assemble for the auditions – among them is the pedantic town clerk, Sixtus Beckmesser, who is entering the contest himself in the hope of winning Eva and her handsome dowry.

Walther scores badly in his audition, his impassioned and beautiful but somewhat wild love-song marked down by Beckmesser for breaking the rules of composition.
Hans Sachs is, however, much taken with Walther, recognizing in him a genuinely original poetic spirit.

It is Midsummer’s Eve.
Eva reciprocates Walther’s interest in her, and asks Hans Sachs’s advice.
An attractive middle-aged widower, he is drawn to Eva himself, but kindly resolves to help the cause of young love.
Beckmesser tries to serenade Eva, but Sachs ruins the music by hammering away at his cobbling.
Eventually there is a general riot on the street, during which David cudgels Beckmesser under the
impression that Magdalene is the object of the serenade.

The next morning, Midsummer’s Day, Sachs sends David off on an errand and sits reflecting on the folly of humankind.
He is visited by Walther.
Sachs helps him mould his song.
After they leave together, the cudgelled Beckmesser sneaks in and finds the manuscript of the song.
He jumps to the conclusion that Sachs is entering the contest himself.
Sachs returns and assures him that this is not the case and offers the song to Beckmesser, without telling him that the manuscript represents only its incomplete sketched-out form.
Eva appears, on the pretext that a shoe Sachs has cobbled for her is hurting her foot.
Sachs is overwhelmed by her beauty and Eva herself does not seem to know whether she loves Sachs or Walther more.
With a supreme effort of renunciation, he reminds her of the tale of Tristan and Isolde, and what a fool King Marke made of himself, marrying a younger woman.
Sachs promotes David to a journeyman cobbler and blesses his marriage to Magdalene; Walther completes his song and Eva is enraptured.

The song contest is held in a meadow, in front of the assembled townsfolk in party mood.
Beckmesser sings his incomplete version of Walther’s song and makes a complete mess of it – in his humiliation, he tries to blame Sachs, but Sachs calls upon Walther, who performs the same song with consummate artistry.
Walther is unanimously acclaimed the winner, and Eva’s hand is conferred upon him.
At first, he refuses to join the guild of Mastersingers, but Sachs persuades him otherwise, pointing out that the guild is a bulwark of true German art and its noble traditions.
The crowd acclaims Sachs’s wisdom.

What to listen for

The miracle of
Meistersinger
lies in the way that Wagner manages to marry his own mature style, with its flow of interacting motifs and chromatic ambiguities, to an imaginative evocation of the musical world of a sixteenth-century German town.
The blazing assertions of the opera’s prelude,
with its dazzling counterpoint, is based in the primitive key of C major, and it modulates magically into a beautiful chorale (to a tune composed by Wagner, not J.
S.
Bach).
The first act may have its longueurs – one may well feel that Wagner allows David too much time explaining the Mastersingers’ rulebook, for instance – but the second and third have a warmth, grace and charm unmatched in his
œuvre.
Note Sachs’s two monologues – one in Act II, one at the beginning of Act III – the spiritual heart of the opera, during which he ruminates on the loneliness of the artist in an enclosed bourgeois society and the evanescent folly and vanity of worldly aspirations.
Act III also contains Eva’s impassioned outburst, ‘O Sachs, mein Freund’, which often leaves one thinking that the girl would be far better marrying the cobbler than the wandering knight.
This is followed by the radiant quintet – one of the few episodes in Wagner’s mature work where solo voices sing in counterpoint.
The final scene of the song contest itself starts as an exuberant parade of marches and dances, before focusing on the melody of Walther’s Prize Song which has been slowly blossoming throughout the opera.
One curiosity of the plot: where are the other contestants for Eva’s hand?
Surely Beckmesser and Walther can’t be the only entrants for such a prestigious prize?