Die Meistersinger

Die Meistersinger is no different in import from Wagner's more cosmic dramas, and the evening spent with the Boston Opera Group's production conveyed just that. The drama's specific setting (a curious one for Wagner) in bourgeois Nuremberg of the 16th century stresses the tie he envisioned between workmanship (or the Volk), and art's unmeasurable dreams.

The rule-encrusted town singers' guild rejects the newcomer Walther, and offers his new love Eva as prize to the Master she thinks best. The guild realizes Walther's rare artistry only when it is led to it by the commanding stature of the poet and cobbler Hans Sachs. Although the production, through occasional clownish acting, burlesqued this setting too much, it did capture well the drama's union of art's fantasy with life's conventionality.

What brought about this success most of all was Paul Schoeffler's brilliant handling of Sachs. The continual philosophical note of his lines never strayed into pomposity; a spread-legged geniality did not dissolve into pointlessly effusive gestures or sprawling pitch. The drama discards Wagner's customary alliterations; tense articulation turns melodies into musical prose that Schoeffler controlled with delightful precision and agility. Schoeffler kept Sachs' soliloquys from pretentiousness because his tone had in all registers a cleanness that blended movingly with the orchestra's winds. His very ease and control summed up Wagner's reconciliation of technique and spirit.

Since Eva and Walther are not figures so mystical as Elsa and Lohenrin, they require both in melody and acting a flair that Jutta Meyfurth and Marion Alch possessed. Miss Meyfurth sang Eva with a strength of passion less suited to the part than simple delicacy; still, she handled her forcefulness well. Alch had a proper impetuousness and mastered the demanding range of this part, but the song with which he won Eva was marred by swallowed vowels and consonants. The directors must assume much of the blame, for they cut the second stanza of this crucial song.

Most of the drama's humor is of a puckish sort; it involves the archaic formalism of the Masters, or the shrewishness of Eva's nurse Magdelene. Eunice Alberts sang a delightfully sprightly nurse, but Thomas Hayward (her fumbling lover David) did not give his movements and voice color and conciseness and consistency necessary to a humor ostensibly quaint. So also James Billings as Beckmesser, Walther's rival for Eva, effectively deadened Wagner's critique of professional narrow-mindedness with his ill-controlled buffoonery.

The staging too often did not fit the music's classical and stylistic humor: the second act riot needed classical, almost Elizabethan motions and its badly organized fisticuffs matched badly the music's careful development. The choruses fell apart several times (conspicuously in the final scene) but well made up for it with their smooth blocking and infectious spirit.

So much for lament. Director Sarah Caldwell saw how much mime matters in this drama; conductor Lazla Halasz perceived the continual recurrence of counterpoint and fashioned a clear texture to exploit the score's intricate dove-tailing of motifs. Meistersinger does not employ Wagner's half-mystical interweaving of words and orchestration. Rather, it makes the orchestra a commentator on the drama's events. This Halasz recognized, and gave the orchestra the subtleties of dynamics and tempo demanded by its place in the opera.

It is always obvious when a Wagnerian production succeeds, for a music drama is essentially a siege. Its purpose is presumptuous and its battle long because it seeks to overcome our delight in sonority for its own sake, and thereby to thrust upon us the import of precisely what it wants to say. This import strikes us at the moment that we become so imbued with Wagner's musical world that each single utterance--motif, cadence or action--conveys the full magnitude of the drama. In the end singers and orchestra should lose their novelty for us and become vehicles for the expression of Wagner's overarching musical revelation. Music can only touch our lives, he would claim, when it is aware of its mundanity. Die Meistersinger pleads for this aesthetic outlook, and the Opera Group performance achieved what this outlook intended.