Awe and gratitude

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.

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. The point seems to be inclusivity, to use a word I loathe, but one which signifies the opposite of what Meistersinger is often taken to stand for. Gazing at and trying to identify as many of them as possible leads pleasantly into the lowering of lights and the Overture, which on the second night was one of the few areas of discontent of the evening. Slack rhythms, undernourished strings, made it lack both the excitement and the tenderness needed to set the scene.

But as soon as the curtain rose, to a demure congregation in a bare church about a century ago, things improved and went on improving.