Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Salzburg Festival

Over het evenement

Richard Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' will be performed under the baton of Daniele Gatti at this year's Salzburg Festival.

While Wagner was still working on Act Two of Die Meistersinger, Hans von Bülow, who was to conduct its first performance, wrote to friends that the nascent work would be Wagner’s “creative apogee”, “representing the very highest […] that can be conceived under the idea of a national flowering of art”, and would be “his most classical, most German, most mature and generally most accessible work of art”. The composer Peter Cornelius, who was a close friend of Wagner’s, stated shortly before the premiere in Munich on 21 June 1868 that in his opinion Wagner had written the “German national opera”.
Intended by Wagner as a comic work, Die Meistersinger was encumbered from the outset by assertion that he had composed “the eternal idea of Germanity in a concrete image of German cultural life” (Peter Cornelius). The opera’s later reception was to be correspondingly disastrous: whenever reactionary nationalistic values needed to be invoked Die Meistersinger was performed, and during the Third Reich Hitler notoriously ordered the National Socialist Party congresses at Nuremberg to open with an evening performance of the opera.
 However, this kind of usurpation for political ends is based on a profound misconception. Die Meistersinger draws on historical models, but in a different way from that intended by this mistaken reception. (Udo Bermbach)

With German and English surtitles.


Co‐production with the Opéra National de Paris

Daniele Gatti, Conductor

Stefan Herheim, Director

Heike Scheele, Sets

Gesine Völlm, Costumes

Olaf Freese, Lighting

Alexander Meier‐Dörzenbach, Dramaturgy

Ernst Raffelsberger, Chorus Master

Cast:
Anna Gabler, Eva

Monika Bohinec, Madgalene

Michael Volle, Hans Sachs

Roberto Saccà, Walther von Stolzing

Georg Zeppenfeld, Veit Pogner

Markus Werba, Sixtus Beckmesser

Peter Sonn, David

Thomas Ebenstein, Kunz Vogelsang

Guido Jentjens, Konrad Nachtigall

Oliver Zwarg, Fritz Kothner

Benedikt Kobel, Balthasar Zorn

Franz Supper, Ulrich Eißlinger

Thorsten Scharnke, Augustin Moser

Karl Huml, Hermann Ortel

Dirk Aleschus, Hans Schwarz

Roman Astakhov, Hans Foltz

Tobias Kehrer, A night‐watchman

'Akademie Meistersinger' of the YSP, Apprentices

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus 

Vienna Philharmonic