Fatal distraction

I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger, in the new production by Kasper Holten. The run of the Royal Opera’s recent productions of Wagner — appalling Tristans, a dire succession of Parsifals, mediocre Rings — hadn’t prepared me for so deep an abyss of irrelevant idiocy as this. I thought I had reached the stage where, having seen so many fearful operatic productions of works I love, I was able to enjoy myself purely on account of the music, almost inured to what I was seeing. On this occasion, the musical level was uneven and sometimes quite bad, but even if it had been uniformly wonderful it would have been sabotaged by Holten’s direction, as Eugene Onegin and Don Giovanni were, only far more so.

Act One takes place in a London club, not a church as Wagner mistakenly thought. So the opening chorale is a chorus practising, with Hans Sachs — who Wagner scheduled to make his entry half an hour later — monitoring events at the front. The contrast between the sacred atmosphere of the church and the urgency of Walther’s passion for Eva is thus removed. Holten, shocked that women aren’t allowed in some London clubs, has them entering with their husbands the Masters, but then having to leave. All the while there are irrelevant little things going on and distracting from what is anyway a fairly complex storyline, and this fussiness gets ever more pervasive as the opera progresses. The club setting is so elaborate that it has to make do for Act Two as well — which Wagner set in the street between Sachs’s and Pogner’s houses — with no atmosphere at all. The famous elder tree is replaced by a couple of potted plants, and the complicated arrangements with Magdalene at the window mean there is nowhere for the lovers to hide.