Sphinx

What do you do with, or about, the inconvenient bits of the past, the bits that simply don’t fit with the present and its values or that create an uncomfortable tension? At least for its first two acts, Barrie Kosky’s Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg seems to adopt Nietzsche’s idea of critical history, holding up the past as something to be judged and overcome, and indeed presenting the past in a way that demands judgement (at the expense, as Nietzsche notes, of anything that could claim to be the ‘real’, complex and ambiguous past). What Kosky holds up for judgement, however, is not the past of late medieval Nürnberg, whose citizens (insofar as they’re supposed to be real, rather than figments of the imagination) are presented on stage as cheerful, simple, well-meaning, semi-anarchic folk, but the past represented by Richard Wagner, and the antisemitic ideas that are taken to taint his work.

The opera opens in a nice reproduction of the Villa Wahnfried, the Wagner residence in Bayreuth, in 1873. Wagner comes in with a pair of dogs, looking like a caricature of Wagner; Cosima strikes dramatic languishing poses; Franz Liszt drinks tea; servants fuss round the place. A more awkward figure, identified as visiting conductor Hermann Levi, gets all the cues wrong during an impromptu service during the first chorale. Really? As Mark Berry has noted, in one of his as-ever-indispensable reviews, there’s no evidence in Cosima’s copious diaries for such an incident with Levi, although the specificity of the setting seems to imply documentary status; it seems unlikely both that the Wagner household would do such a thing and that an assimilated Jewish musician would not long since have learnt to navigate such a situation. But the incident establishes the character of Wagner as something of a bully, domestic autocrat and bigot – and offers a way of incorporating the choral music into the chosen setting.

Then the scene is gradually invaded by characters from Die Meistersinger. Berry suggests that Kosky implies the bullying of Levi was the inspiration for the opera, but the ostentatious display of the supposed date of this setting, some years after the actual date of its composition, surely rules that out. Rather, this must be either a domestic performance, or a dream (suggested by the fact that so many people emerge from the piano…), or some sort of time-slip (as the clock does some funny things at various points, and the very precision of the original setting is surely drawing attention to the backwards and forwards movement of time. Maybe the faint of resemblance of Wagner to Pertwee-era Doctor Who is no coincidence…). It starts to feel symptomatic that the production doesn’t bother to explain its conceit, or doesn’t really have an idea either.

At any rate, the room fills up with a crowd of medieval burghers, and the original household joins in: Liszt takes the role of Veit Pogner, offering his daughter Cosima to the winner of the singing competition; the handsome young visitor (tutor? I really didn’t work out who Walther was supposed to be at the beginning) is savagely criticised by Levi as the pedantic Beckmesser; and Wagner is Hans Sachs, largely holding back from the action – until suddenly, at the end of the act, he is spot-lit alone at the centre of the stage, behind an upturned table, as the Villa Wahnfried fades into the background and the four flags of the Allies appear behind him. Bayreuth 2019 has become Bayreuth 1873 has become Nürnberg 1499 has become Nürnberg 1945/6…

Wagner is Sachs; Sachs is Wagner. Well, yes – though surely you could say the same about Walther, and even Beckmesser cannot be wholly free from his creator’s spirit. (I have as a result been imagining a production with multiple Wagners, in which Old Wagner and Young Wagner discuss the creation of a perfect Lied, or free-creative-spirit Wagner goes head-to-head with dogmatic-laying-down-the-law Wagner – perhaps watched in horror by Actual Historical Wagner, as the contradictory elements of his psyche confront one another…). But for Kosky, Sachs-Wagner is the only parallel that counts, and only in his interactions with Beckmesser – the relationship with Eva is rendered completely irrelevant, which does at least skip round the question of whether Wagner is contending with his other selves for the hand of his own wife. If this were more clearly his dream or nightmare, that might work better…

Sachs-as-Wagner is motivated to humiliate Beckmesser-as-Levi not through romantic or artistic rivalry but through pure antisemitic hatred – it may not be obvious in the libretto or music, but Kosky reads everything through the antisemitic remarks in Wagner’s essays. Wagner-as-Sachs doesn’t merely make some antisemitic remarks in his essays, fairly conventional for the time but expressed with his typical overheated rhetoric, he places a vicious antisemitic caricature at the heart of his opera, as its whole point and message. It’s a neat little two-step: Sachs must be an antisemitic bully because Wagner is; Wagner must be, because that’s how we see Sachs behave.

There is something undeniably powerful about the idea of a Jewish director confronting and challenging Wagner by putting him on trial for his musical promotion of antisemitism – if you accept that this is actually a reasonable interpretation of Die Meistersinger. But that is very much up for debate. Kosky’s ‘argument’ (and I felt more and more as if I were assessing a bit of student work with some interesting ideas that were insufficiently developed or supported) rests largely on assertion – Wagner was antisemitic therefore his opera is antisemitic therefore the humiliation of Beckmesser is essentially a pogrom – coupled with some powerful images that seek to determine the audience’s response: Villa Wahnfried (so this is all about Wagner, and we’re shown him being casually antisemitic); Wagner on trial (which can only be for the antisemitism), and the mockery of Beckmesser culminates with him having Hasidic side-curls put onto his head beneath a giant inflatable Völkischer Beobachter caricature (showing what the scene was *really* all about).

Kosky doesn’t appear to have much interest in the bits in between these dramatic visual moments; he doesn’t develop his interpretation out of the music and drama, but simply imposes it on them, and nor does he offer an interesting new take on the opera through this lens. Act 2 barely has a setting – a pile of furniture from Wahnfried in the middle of the courtroom – and in retrospect simply seems to be marking time until he can release the giant inflatable. This does have the advantage of leaving the magnificent singers and musicians to get on with things, with only a limited amount of pointless messing about, but it’s deeply frustrating if you’re actually trying to engage with his claims. The idea that Wagner’s work is permeated by, if not indeed motivated by, antisemitism, is presented as indisputable fact, as if the audience know this without any case having to be made.

Again, there’s hypothetical potential here, for a Publikumsbeschimpfung (in Peter Handke’s phrase), confronting the audience with their love of the music despite their knowledge of the problematic views and associations of its creator. But Kosky doesn’t seem to be especially interested in this either; apart from his chosen moments of confrontation, he is content to let everyone enjoy the opera more or less straight without any uncomfortable feelings. Perhaps there is also a feeling of reassurance that he’s going to resolve everything at the end…

The one thing that can be said for the set-piece images in acts 1 and 2 is that their message is clear; crude, and highly arguable, but unmistakable. This isn’t the case in act 3. First, for the singing contest and Sachs’ call for a witness to prove he wasn’t responsible for writing the song Beckmesser has just murdered – a line that’s heavily emphasised, as it’s the best the libretto offers for justifying the whole ‘Wagner on trial’ thing – the Nürnberg courtroom is invaded by the medieval townsfolk, apart from a single military policeman. Are they standing in for the judges (people’s justice?), or overthrowing them and rejecting their right to judge the past? Is the suggestion that Wagner’s source material explains and justifies the alleged antisemitism? (There certainly doesn’t appear to be any attempt at the bigger and more intelligible project of contextualising Wagner’s opinions in broader European traditions). Or just mockery of the seriousness of proceedings, when actually it’s all just carnivalesque fun? Or maybe it’s just a striking image for the sake of it. Heaven knows.

And at the end, the courtroom disappears – no explicit judgement or punishment, so either the verdict was ‘not guilty’, or this closing scene is itself the verdict – and the chorus reappears as an orchestra which Sachs/Wagner enthusiastically conducts. So, the music justifies everything? (Presumably it’s what a fair number of fans would think, or hope). Or, Wagner just wanted to make music, not hurt anyone? The conclusion to an interpretation based entirely on ideas from the essays is that we can simply ignore those ideas if they spoil our enjoyment?

Nietzsche’s analysis of critical history focuses on the psychology of the critical historian: the feeling of being oppressed by the past, and hence the desperate need to free oneself from it. But he also notes the danger of a critical historian without need; transplanting such a practice into the wrong soil brings forth weeds. My sense of this production is that the problem of Wagner’s music, ideas, personality and reception does not in the end matter very much to Kosky; he is not oppressed by it, he has no desperate need (beyond the paycheck) to unpick its complexities and contradictions and reach judgement. He adopts the pose of the critical in order to titillate and shock, without any depth or coherence of thought, and so the production ends up being vacuous and annoying. Actually it reminded me of the sillier elements of punk, with its pseudo-intellectual justifications for wearing swastikas to shock people. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

But the music was magnificent…