Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: The Proms, WNO, 17th July 2010

You know when the summer season’s finally arrived in London because there’s absolutely nothing on in the field of classical music in either of the principal concert halls, given over to jazz and tat, and with both the opera houses busy showcasing imported ballet. Oh, and the Proms will have started, taking one back to the glories of a hall with atrociously poor acoustics, non-existent facilities, no air-conditioning (after a £70 million refit), queues five miles long for the lavatories - of both genders - which block all possibility of free movement in the ugly, cramped corridors that provide the only access to the Stalls, and now the added insult-to-injury of a cloakroom charge of £1 per item (“bag and a jacket, that’s £2”), not to mention staff who have no idea where the press desk is. Suddenly the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican stand revealed in their true, clear light, as does the soon-to-be-renamed Ryanair Albert Hall. Why, they’ll be having people piled high, crammed in cheap, standing for the duration of the concerts next…..

I mention this because I do seriously wonder whether the general dyspepsia that the wretched place invariably engenders in me the minute I set foot in the door had any effect on my perception of this concert performance of Wagner’s opera, the staging, singing, playing and conducting of which met with universal acclaim last month in Cardiff and latterly on tour. Because, much to my surprise, I found the whole thing slightly dull and disappointing. Now, to be sure, on the evident downside we are immediately deprived of Richard Jones’s much-admired staging, though why this should be treated as inevitable in a house that every year manages to offer a carefully rethought replica of the Glyndebourne opera they mount, I don’t understand at all. (How I pine for the days when the Welsh National Opera used to bring a handful of fully-staged operas to London every Easter at the wonderful Dominion Theatre, a sort of mini fête des régions that the French still manage to put on in Paris most years.) There is also the regrettable fact that someone thought it a good idea to dispense with any form of costume for the men other than black shirts and trousers, which renders the always-intractable problem of identifying the individual Meister even more difficult, as well as rendering them indistinguishable from the chorus, and inevitably ironing out all possibility of social differentiation through dress. Some of Jones’s Personenregie doubtless survived this visual deconstruction, but having a bunch of men sitting down on chairs at the same level as the identically dressed orchestra adds nothing to basic comprehensibility, or even legibility, of the action, particularly in Act II, which at the simplest level of visual narrative made no sense whatsoever.

As it happens, the most recent live Die Meistersinger I attended was also a concert performance, given by the forces of the Zürich Opera at the RFH six or so years ago, and which I have to say struck me in virtually every particular as superior to this account – leaving aside for the moment the simple fact that I could hear every note of the music there, very far from the case here – with a sharply shrewd, “intellectual” Sachs in José van Dam in sweetly sonorous voice, Mr. and Mrs. Seiffert as the lovers, a David of surpassing beauty of tone – Christoph Strehl – and an entirely fat-free, dusted-down and re-energised reading of the score from Franz Welser-Möst that almost certainly got him the directorship of the Vienna Staatsoper single-handed. The WNO equivalents never really to my mind get close to this. The orchestra is a fine instrument generally, and indeed played well – excepting the very rough Act III trumpeters – but is simply too small to generate the kind of sumptuous rich-toned melos Wagner surely intended. 44 strings is not enough, and certainly not in an acoustically nightmarish barn like the RAH where whole strands of the texture go AWOL gobbled up in the prevailing mush for minutes at a time, and any voice not facing you directly is inaudible (not to mention the bizarre sound of the Nightwatchman in Act II, who, being made to stand high up at the back left, came across to me in the Stalls right as if singing through approximately four different tinny little loudhailers, none of them in synch with the other, and one of them quite definitely acoustically behind me). The whole effect is rather like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, or hearing a whole concert underwater.

As I’ve suggested, I really liked Welser-Möst’s lithe and springy account of the score that shaved a good 15 minutes off this by-no-means somnolent one (82’/60’/118’ exactly) yet still found room for the majesty and pomp where needed. Paradoxically, I found Lothar Koenigs steadier reading for WNO far more mere, and some of the great nodal points of musical gathering in the score – the massing of the Meister in the outer acts, the orchestral transition to the Pegnitz in Act III – struck me as rather thrown away, insufficiently weighty either of sonority or pulse. But then, I grew up on Goodall, and want the transitions big and broad (though the rest of it most certainly profits from being got on with: only Wagner would think to write a – usually - 4½ hour opera actually longer than either Parsifal or Götterdämmerung believing it to be his easy-option, comedic cash-cow that no-one would have the least difficulties in either staging or performing. Or sitting through). But the WNO chorus is an especial glory, making light work of the numerous tricky passages of musical mayhem that litter the first two acts, and crowning it all with their blazing rendition of “Wacht auf” in Act III.

I suppose I shall be thought merely perverse if I go on to say that the one soloist who to my ears conquered the aural sludge better than any other, and manifested quite the healthiest sounding, in-its-prime instrument, was Anna Burford, the Magdalena (the “alte” references to whom in the libretto were here replaced by “Lena”, I’m not sure why). Rich-toned, absolutely rock-steady, and powerfully projected, she set a standard at the very outset of the opera in the cathedral which, in the event, was only fitfully evident elsewhere amongst the rest of the cast. Some, frankly, I thought inadequate. I particularly disliked both the Kothner (Simon Thorpe) – no actual tonal focus to the voice at all – and the David (Andrew Tortise), who sounded to me thin, fibrous and thready and the most in need of Richard Jones’s dazzling visual legerdemain to act as distraction from the otherwise greyly interminable recitation of the tones in Act I. Brindley Sherratt has a glorious, fat-toned, sepulchral bass of real distinction, but found Pogner’s awkwardly high-lying excursions troublesome. About Amanda Roocroft I’m in two minds: one of them is very glad to encounter her in much firmer, focussed voice than I have heard for some time, at least for the most part; the other is not so grateful for the shrieky conclusion to the quintet, nor the general brittle hardening of tone when the pressure’s on. Maybe it’s just me, but she’s beginning now to strike me forcibly as a better actress than singer (this is not intended as a left-handed compliment, by the way: her theatrical skill is considerable, and it isn’t only in appearance that she increasingly reminds me of Helen Mirren).

The extensive scenes in Act II and III in which Sachs interacts with Beckmesser provided much food for vocal thought. Christopher Purves is, to my surprise, much shorter than Bryn Terfel, yet to see this mismatched pair side-by-side vocally sparring is of course to watch two of the very finest ranking Falstaffs in the world duking it out. Purves’s voice is also smaller-scale, leaner, more finely focussed, but without the range of colours at Terfel’s disposal. His Town Clerk is played more for broad comedy than wounded superiority, though it has to be said Wagner’s one-shot cobbling/marking joke, at over half-an-hour in the setting-up and execution in Act II, is a complete and interminable miscalculation of ends and means (I’d love to know how much – or rather, little – of this survived in Puccini’s apparently radical foreshortening of the score for Ricordi made in the 1890s). Purves seemed to home in instinctively on the “little man” aspect of Beckmesser’s waspish, preening personality (thankfully eschewing the usual latter-day drivelling guff in the programme informing us all that he is in fact a Jewish stereotype) and was clearly the audience’s favourite, which even I concede is probably not what Wagner intended, but which, sung with this much point and precision, becomes almost inevitable.

I believe poor Raymond Very has had a pretty hard press for his Walther von Stolzing. In one clear sense this need hardly cause surprise: the natural vocal quality is that of a Mime, perhaps a Loge; dry, reedy, unglamorous to a degree, and at the furthest remove from any kind of aural analogue to the shining knight’s supposed all-encompassing beauty. Nor does it remotely help that, stripped of wig, costume and beard-blacking, he stands revealed in propria persona as looking older than either the Sachs or even the Pogner. Given that he sounds it too, this is unfortunate in the extreme. However, I have heard worse: much worse, in fact (Jess Thomas, my first at the ROH, a piece of horror I shall never forget). Very has all the notes – no mean achievement in itself – and actually gets through the wickedly-written Act III intact, even with a (small) measure of radiance at the end. Pretty, it ain’t: but it is all there, and he manifests less sense of strain in the ever-ascending vocal line of the Prize Song than either Seiffert or Heppner managed the last times I heard them. Amongst latter-day exponents – pending Kaufmann: but then, isn’t everything? – only Robert Dean Smith sings the role any better: but he has even less of the character about him than Mr. Very, to whom on balance I’m inclined to be generous and salute intentions as much as actual achievement.
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Which leaves us with this whole shebang’s raison d’être, Bryn Terfel as Hans Sachs. Here, indecision goes into overdrive: I’m not in two minds, I’m in at least four, and none of them agree with each other about anything much as regards his assumption. For the record, he got through the role in one piece – not to be automatically assumed in any performance of this opera: I have heard far more Sachses voiceless in Act III than ones who could still sing it, including my personal favourite, Hans Sotin, invariably in trouble well before the Festwiese – though Terfel certainly got noticeably croakier as the evening wore on, albeit rallying in time for a stentorian "Verachtet mir die Meister nicht" at the very end (the bit that so upsets the self-appointedly politically sensitive who think that Wagner had no right to express German Nationalist sentiment in the C19th, whilst it’s of course perfectly fine for Verdi to have done nothing but for his whole career on behalf of Italy). Vocally and dramatically, you would think Terfel would be ideal, for what is Sachs but Wotan after the Ring? In the event, I found much of the acting to be “ACTING”, with a reliance on glum, eyebrow-knotted mugging to suggest deep-rooted personal angst. The extensive bout of face-pulling dumb-show that prefaced an otherwise impressively rendered “Wahn!” monologue struck me as utterly unconvincing, not “felt” at all but just pasted on, and surely ill-attuned to the battery of TV cameras ranged across the Arena doubtless peering right up his nose in the hopes of capturing something “real”.

But if the angst was ersatz (ah, where would we be without German, eh?) the bonhomie was much more spontaneous and unforced: Sachs, the life and soul – quite literally – of medieval Nuremberg is something Terfel captures spectacularly well, largely on account of his larger-than-life ebullience and energy (something in short supply with van Dam’s cobbler, it’s true: but then, his Weltschmerz was absolutely heartfelt and heartbreaking to behold, and his comedy much subtler). I keep thinking back to Norman Bailey at ENO, who seemed to have it all: that, and a more natural emotionally affecting, larmoyant character to the voice, at once authoritative and avuncular, which Terfel can only approximate by crooning. But the "Flieder" monologue was most beautiful as a piece of singing (why is this still translated everywhere as “Elder”? Surely it’s “Lilac”?) and lacked only that distinguishing touch of “interiority” or self-communing – hard to conjure in the Albert Hall, past question – which the finest interpreters have brought to it. I suppose I’m being hard on him, but the extent to which I felt disappointment is predicated upon just such considerations of micro-fine distinction and difference: and I’ve seen a lot of Sachses, and heard better, or at least ones I consider more moving, which is the ultimate essence of the deal.

I imagine that Terfel will feature in the ROH’s next revival of Meistersinger – I believe with Simon O’Neill bringing his succulent sapphire-and-silver tones to the role of Walther, and I‘m praying for it to be Anja Harteros as Eva – and have an idea that in the altogether more suitable and congenial setting of Covent Garden, we will finally get to see him achieve the career crowning glory that is clearly on the cards, but not quite audible or visible as yet on this showing. Let us all just hope that by that time, with a current government policy motivated less by actual financial necessity than score-settling ideological spite, we still have an opera house left in which to see and hear it.