The Mastersinger of Caerdydd

Walther (Raymond Very) and Hans Sachs (Bryn Terfel) - Photograph by Catherine Ashmore

THOMAS MANN once opined that nothing in the annals of human creativity compared with Wagner’s operas, save perhaps ‘a few Gothic cathedrals’. Whether you concur with this view or not, the music dramas of Wagner are a heady aesthetic feast for the ears and eyes – and Die Meistersinger von Nuremburg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg) is one of his richest offerings. That Wales has had to wait until the twenty first century to experience Richard Wagner’s six hour epic in its first full professional staging is remarkable. That Wales has (in our own mastersinger Bryn Terfel) produced its fourth world class Wagner singer in four decades – truly commanding the lead role of Hans Sachs – is equally remarkable.

Meistersinger itself is an ideal – if hugely demanding – showpiece for the Welsh National Opera (WNO). It requires not only a top notch bass-baritone ‘singing-actor’ (cue Bryn Terfel) but also complex polyphonic music for more than a dozen principals and a large chorus accompanied by an augmented orchestra. Eight of these principals are Welsh or are based in Wales (for those ill advised critics of the WNO). The chorus and wider company rose to these multiple challenges magnificently at the celebratory first night on Saturday 19 June. The opera itself also has uncanny parallels with Wales’s own cultural patrimony, centred as it was on the pivotal role of singing in social life and the bardic tradition, while Act III is crowned by Eisteddfod-like scene on the local Maes. Here Nuremburg’s medieval ‘Big Society’ is on full display with a great procession of guilds and confraternities building up to the opera’s grandiloquent climax.

Hans Sachs (Bryn Terfel) - Photograph by Catherine Ashmore

The large cast was generally strong, though with an inevitable weak link (in Raymond Very’s underwhelming Stolzing). Eva was alluringly sung by ever reliable Amanda Roocroft, and the role of David was characterfully (and camply) portrayed by Andrew Tortise. WNO’s new music director, Lothar Koenigs was clearly in his element conducting the superb WNO orchestra in this most Teutonic of operas. WNO regular Christopher Purves made the role of Beckmesser his own, unfailingly ensuring that comic moments were milked to perfection.

The director, Richard Jones, is no stranger to the WNO, or to iconoclastic Wagner productions. Jones’s infamous Ring Cycle at Covent Garden in the mid 1990’s still brings vivid memories to this opera goer, with its notorious “latex-clad Rhinemaidens inflated to the proportions of Michelin men.” But his Cardiff Meistersinger is no such shocker, and is instead characterised by a dramatic acuity and a wry humour, with a set judiciously ‘updated’ to the nineteenth century by Paul Steinberg. The costumes (courtesy of Buki Shiff) are an eclectic treat.

The story of Meistersinger is a familiar one: boy meets girl, young love ensuing. This simple plot set in medieval Germany quickly becomes complicated by the development of a comedic love quadrangle. The mastersinger Pogner (creditably sung by Brindley Sherratt), decides to offer his beautiful daughter Eva to the local mastersinger who wins the song prize at the annual midsummer festival. Though Eva can herself choose the winner, her problem is that she has already fallen for the handsome young knight, Walther von Stolzing, who is not cut out for the fusty traditions of medieval master-singing. To compound the situation, Eva’s other suitor is the town’s ageing arch-pedant, Sixtus Beckmesser.

Walther (Raymond Very) - Photograph by Catherine Ashmore

The quadrangle is completed by the widower Hans Sachs – Nuremburg’s resident bard and sometime cobbler – who grapples with his feelings for the winsome Eva. The action ensues over three mammoth acts, involving a ‘Talwrn y Beirdd’-esque song trial, a bawdy riot scene (set to a racy fugue), and an exquisitely introspective monologue from Hans Sachs in Act III on the nature of art and love (poignantly crafted by Terfel). That Meistersinger has genuinely touching and funny moments will doubtless fuel the ambivalence of the modern opera goer toward a composer who troublingly mixes utterly loathsome characteristics with almost boundless musical genius – a matter brilliantly illustrated in Stephen Fry’s recent BBC4 documentary.

Wales’s pedigree in Wagner singers is incredibly strong. The late Sir Geraint Evans was himself a distinguished Beckmesser, while estimable singers such as Gwyneth Jones and Anne Evans have excelled in the Wagnerian repertoire.

Having now sung three major Wagnerian roles, we can certainly say the same of Bryn Terfel. His performance as Hans Sachs was eponymously masterful, utterly convincing not only vocally but conveying brilliantly to the audience the humanity and complexity of Hans Sachs, one of opera’s greatest characters.

Overall, it was a memorable night at the opera, and it was pleasing to see many public figures present at this distinguished offering (Sir Simon Jenkins, Karl Jenkins and the Assembly Finance Minister, Jane Hutt, to name but three). This triumph and the international profile for Wales it will bring has fortunately not gone unnoticed by Wales’s arts funders at a time when fiscal austerity beckons. Those rightly interested in promoting a positive and outward looking ‘Brand Wales’ will doubtless take note.

The global cultural world had its eyes firmly pinned on Cardiff this weekend, and the WNO certainly delivered the goods.

Until July 10 at the Wales Millennium Centre (029 2063 6464) and the Birmingham Hippodrome