Wagner booed over opera

2008-07-29 07:25

Bayreuth, Germany - Whether you love it or hate it, there's no denying that there's never a dull moment in Katharina Wagner's uproarious production of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, revived here for the first time on Sunday.

Of course, there were many in the Bayreuth Festival's ultra-conservative audience who hated it, and the 30-year-old director and great-granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner was loudly booed, jeered and whistled when she took her bows at the end of the evening, just as she was when the staging was premiered last year.

But, despite her often laboured and heavy-handed direction, Katharina's staging of Wagner's only comic opera is hugely entertaining and has some bright and striking ideas.

The Mastersingers are a group of rule-abiding pedants and their arts academy isn't concerned with cultivating creative artists, but drilling conformity into its neatly uniformed students.

The walls of the academy are lined with the busts of Germany's Great Masters - Duerer, Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Handel, even Wagner himself.

Unconventional art

The opera's central character, Hans Sachs, is a non-conformist chain-smoking writer who takes the auto-didactic Stolzing under his wing and promotes his unconventional pop art.

Katharina's idea of turning the Mastersingers into Masterpainters initially seems rather arbitrary and sits awkwardly with the libretto. After all, Stolzing wants to become a Mastersinger so as to win Eva's hand in a singing competition.

But it later becomes clear that it's Art with a capital A that interests Katharina and how unconventional, innovative and rule-breaking art, initially reviled by society, can suddenly become fashionable until it is eventually hijacked and misappropriated by big business and corporate sponsorship.

Perhaps Katharina's most striking idea is to focus not on Stolzing's artistic development, but that of Hans Sachs and Stolzing's rival in love, Sextus Beckmesser.

Sachs, the bare-footed non-conformist, becomes gradually gentrified as his writing loses its socio-critical bite and he enjoys a bottle of good wine in his elegantly designer-furnished apartment.

Lavish production

Beckmesser, by contrast, turns from an anally-retentive pedant to a wanna-be pop artist of his own, seeing the light in the riot at the end of Act II.

It's a visually lavish production, even if Katharina's language and metaphors sometimes have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

She already used the same blonde page-boy wigs - seen here as a signal of the drilled-in conformity of the academy's students - in her production of another Wagner opera, The Flying Dutchman, in Wuerzburg in 2002.

The famous Festwiese scene which culminates Act III is turned into a trite and clumsy ballet where giant-headed figures of the likes of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and, of course, Wagner, cavort with enormous strapped-on penises.

Musically, the secret star of the evening was German baritone Michael Volle, whose virile and passionate portrayal of Beckmesser eschewed the caricature usually associated with the role.

The Bayreuth Festival continues on Monday with a performance of Rhinegold, the first instalment of Wagner's sprawling four-opera Ring in the critically slated staging by Tankred Dorst.

- AFP