Abstract
Tradition or innovation in art? Is the happy medium the right course? What value should art have in society? Richard Wagner’s opera The Meistersingers of Nuremberg explores such questions and provides the genre picture and mirror image of a society that would suffocate in philistinism, did it not receive important stimuli from outside. Young Walther von Stolzing applies for membership of the Meistersingers’ guild in order to win the hand of the goldsmith’s daughter Eva as the prize in the impending singing competition. With his unconventional audition he is initially unsuccessful in the ears of the Meistersingers, who are only concerned with complying with the rules. It is the cobbler poet Hans Sachs who finally teaches him the laws of art and form, and also smoothens his path to love and happiness: Stolzing throws his competitor, the pedantic Sixtus Beckmesser, out of the race in the singing contest. In our revival of Harry Kupfer’s production, the conductor Sebastian Weigle, Emma Bell (Eva) and Albert Dohmen (Hans Sachs) present themselves at our theatre for the first time. Roberto Saccà as Stolzing and Martin Gantner as Beckmesser can be heard as at the première.