die Meistersingers

Like many of Wagner's operas, die Meistersingers is long. We went in at four in the afternoon and came out at ten in the evening, but there's an hour supper break in the middle, plus shorter intervals. The plot is less convoluted than in other Wagner offerings - it concerns a young man wooing a young woman, whose hand in marriage is the prize in a competition for singer-songwriters, I'd guess we'd call them, who attain recognition for their capabilities by the Nurenburg city guild of Master Singers - maintainers of a long tradition in creative artistry. There's lots of humour and just a bit of deviousness, with heaps of exquisite choral, small ensemble and solo singing. A good pace was maintained throughout, so it never got to feel as if it was as long as it actually was. This was partly due to masterful stage production, creating a visual backdrop to the singing perpetually interesting and varied. Another triumph for WNO.

Having not read the synopsis, I guess it took me a while to equate the mis en scene with our own sitz im leben (to mix the languages and metaphors) here in Wales. The competition of the plot was like that of an eisteddfod, the Guild of Master Singers a reflection of the Gorsedd of Bards, seen as cultural guardians, a point of creative reference in a changing world with its exposure to ideas and values from elsewhere. In the last half of the last act, when the hero has won his woman with a outstanding song, innovative and yet reflective of all the values and traditions of creativity upheld by the Guild, he is upbraided for attempting to decline the honour of membership of the Guild by the artistic doyen of the Master Singers (named after German mediaeval poet Hans Sachs and played beautfully by our own Bryn Terfel). What follows is a musical polemic on the virtuous ideal of German creative arts, an exhortation to resist crass foreign influences, and stay faithful to national tradition. 

The opera is set in mid-summer at St John's tide - the 'name day' of Hans Sachs - Hans being an abbreviation of Johannes. The libretto gives poetic indications to the spiritual and social importance of the feast in that setting, as it once was also the case here in Britain. The opening scene is set within the singing of a hymn for John the Baptist day in church. But apart from this, the ethos is of romantic idealism, with little expression of religious piety, the sacred, or deeper spirituality. I guess it's what was happening at the dawn of the era of secularity, when science and rationalism was killing off God, as Neitsche, a contemporary of Wagner, would have said. 

The opera's final chorus was accompanied by the entire cast displaying images of all kinds of German artists down the ages in a ritualised way, exalting the creativity of the nation. This brought to life a collage of the same images displayed on the proscenium curtain in between acts. It was a powerful coup de theatre, which made me wish that such effective and novel usage of modern imagery could be achieved in church liturgy to remind the community of faith of its spiritual identity.

The defence of noble German creativity was for Wagner a kind of patriotism  perhaps not unfamiliar to us in Wales. It was easy enough for nazis and radicals alike to co-opt it for their own purposes, as Christian faith centred spirituality and its moral focus was supplanted by a quest in different directions for something to fill the void opened by the 'death of God' in contemporary culture. The resistance of conservative religion in Wales to the rise of secularism seems to have absorbed a great deal of our extreme emotional patriotic energy, tempering the impulse to political extremism. The relationship between religious culture and artistic creativity endured for much longer, and as was pointed out by  Geraint Talfan Davies in his recent William Hodkin memorial lecture this remains a largely un-investigated aspect of culture in modern Wales.