The staging of ‘The Maestros Cantors’ by musical director Pablo Heras-Casado and stage director Laurent Pelly, has returned to the stages of the Teatro Real, after 23 years of its last performance, and has done so amidst applause and cheers, despite its duration of more than five hours, with a production that raises the function of art in society and the freedom of the artist above rhetorical norms.
At the end of the work, the audience applauded the more than 200 artists who participated in the production for more than five minutes, and the shouts of ‘bravo’ were repeated on numerous occasions. The audience ended up standing up to praise, in addition to the performers, Pablo Heras-Casado, who together with the musicians, located in the pit of the coliseum, have delighted the audience, especially at the beginning of the three acts. , in which the orchestra has played its instruments for a few minutes, without starting the performance.
‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’ is an unexpected opera by Richard Wagner as it is a comedy of manners, a ‘rara avis’ in the German’s libretto, which caused it to be used as an icon of an era during the years after the Second World War. embarrassing past and not as a cultural work. The production praises Germany with various phrases, such as those that the protagonists end up singing: ‘sacred German art will always exist’.
The plot takes place in a very specific space and time: the city of Nuremberg, during a single day, the night and day of Saint John, in the 16th century, coinciding with the real life of the poet, musician and shoemaker Hans Sachs, who is the protagonist of the score. The work presents Walther von Stolzing, played by tenor Tomislav Muzek, who wants to win the contest of master singers sponsored by the goldsmith Pogner (Jongmin Park), who has put the hand of his daughter Eva (Nicole Chevalier) as a prize. on the condition that she agrees to marry the winner.
The contest also features the clerk Sixtus Beckmesser (Leigh Melrose), as a rival of Stolzing in the contest, and Hans Sachs (Gerard Finley), a character who existed in reality, who becomes the protagonist’s teacher to win the contest. A competition governed by “rigid and obsolete” rules, according to the Real’s artistic director, Joan Matabosch, and which Sachs himself will intone saying that “good rules are those that the exception confirms.”
The action lasts just twenty-four hours, which range from the vigil and the night until St. John’s Day. The comedy of the situation emerges at every moment, and sometimes it is the orchestra itself who ruthlessly assumes this burlesque role: the ‘staccato’ expresses the insufferable punctilious spirit of Beckmesser, and the ‘scherzando’ effects make the solemn theme of the teachers suddenly sounds almost ridiculous. The comedy, many times, is in the music. Wagner uses humor as a weapon against conservatism.
In this opera, Wagner uses the chorus as a metaphor for the community in which the dramatic action takes place. In the opening scene, the choir embodies the religious union of the brotherhood and sings a liturgy that conveys immobility, anointing, and unanimity. The contrast becomes more evident at the end of the second act, where choral groups fragment into opposing individualities and reveal that the cohesion of a collective is fragile.
This work presents some differences with Wagner’s libretto, where the past is diluted with the present to favor what is specific about telling a myth and not an anecdote, here the action is narrated in the present.
This Wagner opera is also different from his other works because the political world and power conflicts are almost absent and because there are no figures of public authority.
MORE THAN 200 ARTISTS
Due to the long duration of the opera, the performance began at 6:00 p.m. Between April 24 and May 25, the Teatro Real will offer nine performances of ‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’, in a new production that will premiere in Madrid and will subsequently be presented in the co-producing theaters: the Royal Danish Opera and the National Theater in Brno.
Along with the 19 soloists, the work has had the participation of the Main Choir of the Teatro Real, with 112 singers prepared by José Luis Basso; four actors and the Main Orchestra of the Madrid Coliseum, with a staff of 95 musicians. In total, 230 artists have participated in ‘The Maestros Cantors’.
Another of the curiosities of this production is that it has included Beckmesser’s harp, on loan from the Bayreuth Festival for use in performances at the Teatro Real. The instrument premiered at the Munich Court Theater on June 21, 1868.