Review of Richard Wagner’s opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at the Mariinsky II

On the new stage of the Mariinsky Theater they showed the premiere of the longest (six hours with intermissions) and the most multi-figured opera by Richard Wagner – The Nuremberg Mastersingers. The naive joys and delights of “poetic realism”, as stage director Konstantin Balakin defined his style, reminded Vladimir Dudin about the seemingly forever forgotten era of the pre-director’s theatre.

Valery Gergiev finally rallied to show the Russians another Wagner – not the one that everyone is more or less familiar with from the “Ring of the Nibelungen”, where the German gods scold, dividing the coveted gold, and not the Wagner-storyteller to match the Brothers Grimm, who talks about the Flying The Dutchman, the enchanted swan or the Venusian grotto of love, and Wagner the realist. In The Nuremberg Mastersingers (or, as was printed on the St. Petersburg poster of 1914, The Nuremberg Masters of Singing), Wagner himself composed a story about a famous, real-life historical person – Hans Sachs, a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Nuremberg, who headed the local Meistersinger guild. With his wise advice and the power of experience, Wagner’s Hans helps the young Franconian knight Walter von Stolzing in the fight against the pedant Beckmesser – not only for the prize at the musical and poetic tournament, but also for the hand and heart of Eva Pogner, the daughter of the goldsmith.

Wagner wrote this gigantic opera for a very long time, twenty-two years, and while he was hatching the idea, he managed to finish the “Ring” in parallel to half, and “Tristana” in its entirety. That is why in the Meistersingers one can hear both echoes with the spring theme of love from the Valkyrie, the composer’s favorite opera from the entire tetralogy, and self-citation – the appearance of the famous leitmotif of the fatal love drink from Tristan at the moment when Hans Sachs says to Eve, that is well acquainted with the history of Isolde. Here Wagner unleashes tons of major positive on the listener, as if pouring balm on the ulcers from the gloomy minor pessimism of the tetralogy and other disasters of his romantic heroes.

That The Meistersingers of Nuremberg was conceived by Wagner as a “comic opera” (a parody of the collisions of Tannhäuser, which also refers to a singing competition, only in the Wartburg) is, nothing can be done, very funny in itself. It really has a lot of comic situations and situations that make it terribly interesting to find out what seemed funny to Wagner, but six hours and comedy are still incompatible things. The opera-biography of Hans Sachs, which grew on the yeast of the epic, turned into a grandiose manifesto of the composer, where he speculated to the fullest about the nature of creativity, in which the canon and law should always have – and even vital – an alternative to a living impulse, momentary inspiration, deviation aside for the sake of cherished truth of the heart and the search for something new in art. It is impossible not to hear in the monologues of the suffering shoemaker Sachs that he exchanged music and poetry for shoemaking, the alter ego of Wagner himself, who, indulging in despair in the next expectation of fees, clearly thought that it would be much more reliable and profitable to make boots. And therefore it was necessary to force their creditors, directors and other powerful people to sit down in opera chairs for six hours in order to make them understand that the work of the composer is also worthy of a generous payment.

The Die Meistersingers of Nuremberg is a tough nut to crack for directors, and is perhaps most regularly staged in Germany, in Bayreuth or Berlin, although the Metropolitan Opera is sometimes capable of such a feat. The strongest experience of the last decade was Barry Koski’s production at the Bayreuth Festival, in which the director exposed the most unpleasant and provocative aspects of the national question, fearlessly sweeping through German history until 1945. But here Wagner actually put into the mouth of Hans Sachs the very same “art belongs to the people”. In the finale, he piled up such a vertical score that fits not only the architectural fantasies of Wagner’s contemporary Gottfried Semper, but also totalitarian-architectural utopias like Iofan’s Palace of Soviets.

In Konstantin Balakin’s production, the most powerful, stylish and poignant was the scene in the closet of Hans Sachs, which opened the third act. Sachs appeared in the light of a candle, visually arranged under the chiaroscuro in the painting of the old masters, in gloomy melancholy silence examining the engravings of Albrecht Dürer – with the artist, commemorated at the beginning of the opera, the shoemaker in this performance is visually rhymed. The soul-corroding monologue about the madness reigning in the world (“If there is no madness, then it lurks and accumulates strength”), Dürer’s engravings from the Apocalypse, shown above the Saxon closet in video projections, answered. Reassuringly from the point of view of the director’s idea, although not so fresh, next to the impulsive von Stolzing with his sleeves the color of living water, whitened meistersingers looked like carriers of the “correct” traditions, as if turning into lifetime monuments to themselves.

The scenery for most of the performance was as if mined from dusty warehouses in order to better depict the good old Nuremberg “in full size”. The illusion of playing in the old days might have succeeded if the Mariinsky workshops had more carefully painted over the details of cozy half-timbered houses and bothered to stretch the folds on the rag (“stone”) backstage walls. The culmination of “poetic realism” was the picture of the finale-apotheosis, where the dances of the burghers reminded at once of the festivities in “Giselle” and “Sleeping Beauty”. The poisonous green color of the temple grove and the shreds of tree crowns, designed to indicate the prosperity of the living “art of new forms”, were more reminiscent of the flowering of the August pond smelling of mud, as if on purpose illustrating the words from Beckmesser’s absurdly failed clumsy at the singing competition: “disgusting and sweet.”

Fortunately, for six hours, the audience had the opportunity to listen to two Wagnerian basses with world experience – Mikhail Petrenko as Hans Sachs, who sang in the compositions of the Berlin Wagnerian Daniel Barenboim, and Evgeny Nikitin (as Veit Pogner), without whom one still cannot live without cost important Wagnerian projects at the Metropolitan Opera and beyond. Tenor Sergey Skorokhodov sang his Walter with a Lohengrin radiance. Yes, and Valery Gergiev arranged for himself many hours of favorite Wagnerian meditations (on one of the premiere days, the opera was shown in an unprecedented way for world practice as many as twice – in the morning and in the evening), in which he strove to go into Schopenhauer’s nirvana and not return from there.