MASTERSINGERS • BAYREUTH 2025

★★★★☆☆

REVIEW THE MASTERSINGERS: WAGNER – THE MUSICAL

This year’s new production at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth is a spectacle of enormous proportions. The daring German director Matthias Davids has staged Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as an überkitsch pastiche of archetypal German culture in a schlager-inspired musical design that is as far from everything you thought you knew about Wagner as you can possibly imagine.

The 62-year-old stage director wanted to create a counterpoint to the opera’s many political interpretations with a production that brings Wagner “back on track” after Barrie Kosky’s famous staging of Die Meistersinger, which allowed German arrogance, bitterness and complacency to ravage Bayreuth in 2017.

The 2025 performance takes place in a Broadway-like stage design with hundreds of performers in chaotic choreographies that trigger fascinating highlights in an opera that even hardened Wagner fans consider to be at least twice as long as it should be.

We have to wait until the very end of the second act before the utterly bizarre new production lifts itself up in a fabulous ensemble scene, where the whole town ends up in a mass brawl and the quarrelsome Beckmesser is beaten up after trying in vain to hide in a telephone box.

The opera, Wagner’s only attempt at comedy, is cheerfully and inventively staged in this production.

But there is something about it all that does not match Bayreuth’s usual aura of monumental, majestic gravitas. As one German reviewer wrote: Davids tries to be funny. But the audience does not come to Bayreuth to be entertained!

The light-hearted story is a kind of Wagner light that is quite far from the master’s usual ideals.

Sure, there are some terrific choral pieces and many beautiful musical arrangements. But that does not seem to be quite enough considering the performance’s running time of almost 7 hours, including two intervals.

The key role of the sensible shoemaker Hans Sachs is perfectly cast with the esteemed German bass Georg Zeppenfeld. The grumpy Sixtus Beckmesser, sporting a Spanish guitar with a neon heart and a pop star outfit with mirrored sunglasses and platform boots, is both super cheesy and exaggerated, but also quite funny, brilliantly portrayed by German/Hungarian baritone Michael Nagy.

International critics have been fairly lenient with the production, which has been skilful in marketing its premise and is framed by a voluminous, original stage design of a medieval city in a colourful geometric interpretation of half-timbered buildings on three floors.

Towards the end, it goes musical-mad, as the Master Singers turn into a kind of Oktoberfest with alpine hats, lederhosen, straw bales, giant inflatable plastic animals and a travelling funfair look.

The usual tribute to superior German cultural understanding and dangerous nationalism is well hidden – and it almost becomes a little toothless on this special, but perhaps also slightly disappointing evening in Wagner’s iconic opera house, which, in connection with the performance, has opened a beer garden in the frontgarden under a magnificent logo of a beer-drinking Wagner.

Cheers and four stars from GOT TO SEE THIS.