It was a good week for opening nights, including San Francisco Opera’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner’s only comedy, Die Meistersinger is an engaging story with complex characters that demands a cast of formidable singers.
Wagner was never loath to air his musical complaints and desires, and he does so metaphorically in Die Meistersinger; its connection to Wagner’s life is all too clear. The opera tells of a young impoverished knight who, smitten with the daughter of Nuremburg’s goldsmith, enters the city’s singing contest. Her father, with some reservations, has promised her hand to the winner of the contest. The contestants are formidable, well studied and academically precise, but young Walther has something the others lack – talent and a natural brilliance. His songs, as the cobbler-poet master Hans Sachs notes, are “unruly but flawless”. And indeed, if there is a moral to the story it is that true talent and purity of heart will win the big juicy Fräulein, and all the ecstatic love she embodies, leaving the blundering overeducated musical boors far behind.
San Francisco Opera’s production is a David McVicar co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago and Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and had all the visual elegance and imaginative detail of the latter’s productions. It further demands that the opera is a complete theatrical experience, with chorus, dancers, and supernumeraries all involved in the action, especially in the large company scenes of rioting and carnival.
I have to say I loved Andrew George’s choreography. A mash-up of Bob Fosse and imaginary rustic dancing, it was thoroughly odd, rambunctious and amusing.
Tenor Brandon Jovanovich (Walther von Stolzing) and soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen (Eva) were well suited. Both with a clean yet rich and vibrant sound. They were placed in vocal contrast to baritone James Rutherford, who has a warm dramatic sound, in the role of Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet that Wagner based on a historical figure. Rutherford seemed the most vocally comfortable in a Wagnerian, albeit lighter Wagnerian, role. During the second interval, an announcement clarified that Jovanovich was suffering from a cold. Three hours of Wagner can surely depress the immune system. Nonetheless, he held his own excellently.
Mezzo Sasha Cooke sang a wonderful Magdalena, Eva’s companion, and was partnered with tenor Alek Shrader, singing Hans Sachs’ earnest student David. One of the loveliest moments of the opera was the third act quintet, an interweaving duet and trio with these five singers.
My hat’s off to baritone Martin Gantner, who sang the bumbling academic singer who longs for Eva’s hand, Sixtus Beckmesser. Besides infusing the part with real humanity, he displayed a wide range of emotions, from jealousy to poignant longing to irritable pedantry. His love song to Eva – as much as he was able to sing it given the scripted interference of Hans Sachs – was beautiful in its moments.
Marie Lambert and Ian Rutherford co-directed the San Francisco production, and Sir Mark Elder led the splendid San Francisco Opera Orchestra. And it is here that perhaps the Wagner’s genius shines through. Because, despite Wagner’s tendency to self-indulgence (the opera is over five hours long), the music is never endingly gorgeous. At one moment during the opera, in a quiet exchange with Hans Sachs and Eva, the music became especially lush. And I wondered what it would be like if that was how we experienced our lives: that if underneath the endless businesses of life and love, we could always hear a subtle surge of music, dynamically rising and falling, complicated with intertwining themes. Call it the music of the spheres, if you will, but isn’t that what we hunger to recognize? To hear? Isn’t it perhaps why we return to opera, because it strives to capture the unheard music of life? Of the universe?
Maybe Wagner was on to something …
– Jaime Robles
San Francisco Opera’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg continues through December 6. For tickets and information, visit www.sfopera.com or call (415) 864-3330.
Photo: Act 2 from San Francisco Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” with (l to r) Brandon Jovanovich, Rachel Willis-Sørensen, Martin Gantner and James Rutherford. Photo by Cory Weaver.