Perchance to Dream: Barry Millington relishes the interweaving of fantasy and reality in Stefan Herheim’s stunning ‘Meistersinger’

Review of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Herheim, conducted Gatti, Salzburg, 2013 (Unitel Classica, 2 DVDs).

November 2014, Volume 8, Number 3, 69–71.

As anyone familiar with Stefan Herheim’s productions will expect, his Meistersinger, a co-production with the Paris Opéra, the Met and La Scala, but so far seen only at Salzburg last year, plays fast and loose with the intersection of art and reality, constantly shifting the borders between the two. In a work that deals so prominently with the notion of dream-inspired art, Herheim is knocking on an open door. The entire action, in his conception, is a dream inspiration of Sachs’s, with switches of lighting denoting the transitions from dream to reality and back again.