Trials and Tribulations: Barry Millington hails this year’s Bayreuth offerings

Reviews of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed Kosky, conducted Jordan, Bayreuth, 2017; Parsifal, directed Laufenberg, conducted Haenchen, Bayreuth, 2017.

November 2017, Volume 11, Number 3, 51–5.

Wieland Wagner’s 1956 Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger, which infamously removed all vestiges of gabled houses, winding medieval lanes or cobbled workshops from the stage sets, was dubbed ‘Die Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg’. In Barrie Kosky’s new production, Nuremberg is far from absent: indeed it is present as never before. But it is not Wagner’s Nuremberg – a Nuremberg of the mind, that idealised, Romantic concept of a location that enshrined ‘the German spirit’. Here too there are no gables, churches or elder trees. For this is the Nuremberg of the Nuremberg Trials and here, in a simulation of the very courtroom where thousands of Germans were indicted in connection with crimes committed under the Third Reich, Hans Sachs, Wagner himself and his music drama Die Meistersinger are all put on trial.