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.
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