Bosch Job: Tash Siddiqui hopes we have finally seen the last of Covent Garden’s ‘Meistersinger’ and its comedy codpieces

Review of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Vick, conducted Pappano, Royal Opera House, London, 2011.

March 2012, Volume 6, Number 1, 68–71.

What a treat, I thought, to be transported from a wet December evening in London to Nuremberg at midsummer. How nice to escape economic gloom, for a few hours at least, and bask in the warmth and joy of Wagner’s most glowing score. And how wrong I was. This Meistersinger sometimes seemed as interminable as the endless Eurozone crisis itself, a Meistersinger in which cheeriness replaces Sachs’s ‘Wahn’, bawdiness replaces eroticism and love. Moreover, Graham Vick’s purposefully naive reading, indifferently performed, unintentionally served to highlight the basely anti-Semitic elements in this most German of masterpieces.