Die Meistersinger
Welsh National Opera, Cardiff and touring
Welsh National Opera’s new staging of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a triumph. Not an unqualified one — I doubt whether there has ever been such a thing — but enough to leave the audience feeling that mixture of glowing wellbeing and sadness that this work alone engenders. WNO has a distinguished history of Wagner productions, thanks above all to the close relationship which it had with Reginald Goodall in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which resulted in the most inspired performances of Tristan und Isolde that I have ever attended. By then Goodall had had his say with his great, enormous accounts of The Mastersingers with ENO a decade before, and the Welsh company moved on with him to Parsifal. So this is the first Welsh Meistersinger and takes its place in that exalted company.
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Martin Narey
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When you enter the theatre for this production you see a front cloth with the faces of many German or German-speaking figures of note: the director Richard Jones refers to them as artists, but that seems an odd way to describe Hegel or Max Weber.
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