No Apologies for Nuremberg: Jerry Floyd finds Harry Kupfer’s new Zurich ‘Meistersinger’ as evanescent as the bubbles blown in Act III

One of the grand seigneurs of Regietheater, Harry Kupfer, returned to the Zurich Opera with his production team in late January to stage a relatively contemporary and uncontroversial Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A year ago, Kupfer, with the stage designer Hans Schavernoch and costume designer Yan Tax, crafted a highly-regarded production of Tannhäuser, also in Zurich, which featured the title character as a rock singer. This Meistersinger, set in the 1950s, was advertised as new. But Mark Berry’s 2008 account of Kupfer’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden production in The Wagner Journal points up similarities between the two productions.