Re-invention of Tradition, or, Effect with Cause: Mark Berry is bowled over by Stefan Herheim’s new Salzburg staging of ‘Die Meistersinger’

Review of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Herheim, conducted Gatti, Salzburg, 2013.  

November 2013, Volume 7, Number 3, 89–96.

Salzburg’s new Meistersinger proves beyond a shadow of doubt, in the unlikely event that such proof were needed, that Stefan Herheim is the most intelligent, most thoughtful, most theatrical, and – most important of all – most musical stage director of Wagner and perhaps of opera tout court today. There is nothing worse, even the arbitrary setting of an opera in ‘an empty swimming pool or a slaughterhouse’ than a mindless ‘traditional’ staging. As Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, argued in a career retrospective given in Seattle a week earlier, ‘traditional Wagner’ is a matter of a ‘rock and tree’, of letting the singers get on with it; Jenkins recoiled from, indeed quite rightly attacked, the idea that Seattle’s ‘green’ Ring has anything to do with that. There is nothing Wagnerian – it is little exaggeration to think of Wagner as our first operatic stage director – about the bad old days of ‘park and bark’.