Another Sacred Cow Deflated in Bayreuth: Barry Millington joins the party at the new ‘Meistersinger’

Regular readers of this journal will be well aware that Die Meistersinger, for all its surface jollity and psychological probing into the mysteries of love and art, has a dark underside of nationalistic sentiment that extends, in the view of many, to a representation of anti-Semitism in the characterisation of Beckmesser. You wouldn’t know that from Matthias Davids’s new production, which studiously avoids any such murkiness in favour of spectacle, colour and fun.