Bayreuth Bulldozer: David Breckbill finds Böhm’s inexorable ‘Meistersinger’ unsettling

Karl Böhm (1894–1981) had a long association with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Recordings tell part of the story: it was he who presided over the pioneering studio version of Act III (made in Dresden by Electrola in 1938), while numerous live excerpts and a complete radio broadcast from Vienna in 1943–4 document his ongoing involvement with this work during a period in which Die Meistersinger had been unhealthily appropriated as National Socialist propaganda. Later, during his Bayreuth career, he led Die Meistersinger in both the second year of Wieland Wagner’s 1963–4 production and the first of Wolfgang Wagner’s subsequent stagings (1968–70 and 1974–5; the present set documents the opening performance of 1968).