Club Rules Apply: Covent Garden’s new ‘Meistersinger’ doesn’t deliver on its promise, feels Barry Millington

Review of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Holten, conducted Pappano, Royal Opera House, London, 2017.

July 2017, Volume 11, Number 2, 61–5.

It may be a minority view but not one of the productions of Die Meistersinger we’ve seen in the UK over the last two decades would have received the laurel wreath from me. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera (1993), Richard Jones’s for Welsh National Opera and English National Opera (2010, 2015) and David McVicar’s for Glyndebourne (2011) all boasted stellar vocal performances, engaged with the themes of love, art and renewal, and had a feel-good factor that sent audiences away with a song in their heart. But where was the exploration of the deeper, darker ideas that underpin Wagner’s conception: those dealing with Volk, culture, national identity, persecution of the outsider – as relevant today as ever – not to mention the baleful legacy of the work as appropriated by the Third Reich? Whereas every worthwhile production staged in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in recent decades has grappled with these issues in different ways, the best of them demonstrating how the positive aspects of the work exist in dialectical tension with the negative, British directors have chosen to sideline or ignore the latter.