It is an enormous tour de force to create Mastersingers of Nuremberg, a different opera within Wagner’s repertoire – his only comedy apart from The Prohibition of Loving – and in which the composer satirically about the obstacles that talent has to overcome. innovative among artists of his time. In this comedy of manners from 1868, Wagner puts aside the myths, gods and figures of public authority that invariably mark his scripts to send an everlasting message: the true work of art represents a danger to the status quo. And the Teatro Real serves it with musical and scenic solvency, awakening great expectations after 22 years without having performed it.
The Madrid lyrical coliseum has not skimped on resources: 230 artists between stage and pit and a two-month joint effort between the musical director, Pablo Heras-Casado, who brings with him the triumph as a debutant from Bayreuth, and the stage director, Laurent Pelly, a magician storyteller with gifts for humor. And from the result he has launched to program no less than nine functions. This Sunday, the room was full and the first Spaniard who directed in Bayreuth, Plácido Domingo, was not missing among the attendees. In any case, the tenor did not come out of the experience well at all and left the task of raising the bar for the next person.
Heras-Casado was precisely the one who, previously supported by Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Real, who was the first to entrust him with a Wagner – The Flying Dutchman and then the Tetralogy -, demonstrated an unexpected value in the festival pit that Wagner created. And in these Cantores that the Madrid coliseum has premiered, it has just established itself as the new Wagnerian baton of Spain.
This script (almost five hours long) revolves around the competition that a merchant calls among artisans who master the art of singing. Whoever wins it will marry his daughter. Although at least she will have the right to reject him… However, she has already fallen in love with a young man from Franconia who in turn has a strong passion for her. And it is that romantic ardor of the lover that puts the merchants in check, who sabotage him by imposing an endless number of artistic norms that he, in his creative freedom, has skipped. Only the shoemaker, the prototypical Hans Sachs (played by the highly applauded and charismatic baritone Gerald Finley), refuses not to recognize the boy’s talent, invalidating Sixto Beckmesser (a histrionic and very artistic Leigh Melrose), the scrivener who competes by pretending to young Eva.
It is white humor against conservatism and closed-mindedness. An action that unfolds without any rush. “Since nothing happens, because nothing really happens, one can dedicate oneself to reflecting on what is said there,” argues Fernando, a waiter at the Alabardero Tavern next to the Real who never misses an opera. The existential artistic soliloquies of that incipient bourgeoisie served Wagner to pay homage to academicism while he rejected it. As Matabosch points out in the hand program, Sachs is that musical theorist who knows the rules but is not a slave to them.
In his staging for this plot that takes place on the summer solstice, the 24 hours that go from the eve to St. John’s Day, Pelly does not betray the kind spirit of the piece, and builds an idyllic Nuremberg with cardboard houses in a context of the great changes that the Great War brings to Europe. And he presents Hans’s workshop invaded by stacks of books. “If he weren’t a poet he would have stopped mending shoes,” says the character. The most successful moments of this co-production that will later be seen in Copenhagen and Brno come with the famous vocal quintet, when Pelly creates environments in which he merges dream and poetry.
The Real orchestra shows off nuances and colors in the hands of Heras-Casado, the theater’s main guest conductor. The audience, generous in applause during the cast’s greeting, especially recognized the work of the baton, who, by the way, lost a double bassist during the performance: he fainted slightly, causing the instrument to make a thunderous noise as it fell to the floor. of the pit. The musician left the place on his own and the performance did not stop for a second. And so it came to an end in which during the young people’s wedding, Sachs unleashes his tirade about the eternity of sacred German art. “Even if the Holy German Empire disappears, German art will always exist,” he says with the framed scene converted into a painting. Words that would later inspire Hitler and that Pelly already makes ringing in the ears of the newly married couple, who rushes to draw the curtain and leave those crazy people behind.
