Would You Buy An Opera DVD From This Man?

Chief music and opera critic of The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, is, I see, at it again.

Even the soprano Karita Mattila, who sings Eva gloriously [in the Met's DVD of Wagner's Die Meistersinger], is not always helped by close-ups. Onstage this blond and vibrant artist convinced you she was the very young, impressionable and winsome daughter of a medieval German shoemaker in Nuremberg.

Is that a fact.

Curiously, Mattila convinced me she was the very young, impressionable and winsome daughter of a medieval German goldsmith in Nuremberg, Pogner by name. The town's shoemaker, and one of the opera's central characters, Hans Sachs by name, has no children, or at least none that play a part in Die Meistersinger, and is in fact himself in love with Eva.

This is the very same Anthony Tommasini who, in his review of a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre a few years ago, would have it that the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, were separated at birth, thereby making nonsense of critical portions of Siegmund's dialogue in Act I, and even more critical portions of Sieglinde's dialogue in both Acts I and II of the opera, to cite just one other example.

Typical Tommasini.