Verdict's In

Well, the verdict's in, at least in the English-language press, and it's not pretty (see this post for a digest of the reports and reviews). Virtually every reviewer and critic panned in no uncertain terms Katharina Wagner's Bayreuther Festspiele debut with her Konzept production of her great-grandpapa's music-drama, Die Meistersinger . No surprise, of course, that this new production is the grotesque thing that by all reports it manifestly is. The surprise would have been had it been otherwise. Oddly enough, and unlike Wagner's other music-dramas, Die Meistersinger, because of its real-world grounding, is the one Wagner music-drama that can actually sustain a reworked postmodern staging in order to be realized in contemporary terms without the music-drama being made to appear a grotesque caricature of itself. One shudders to contemplate what with absolute certainty will obtain if (when) Katharina gets her hot little hands on any other of her great-granddaddy's music-dramas (she's welcome to the operas except, of course, Holländer which one could with some justice consider a proto-music-drama even though at bottom it's still ultimately an opera).

Would that Katharina had been born Katharina Bellini or Katharina Donizetti or Katharina _________ (you fill in the surname of any other composer manqué of opera as genuine dramma per musica). She could then indulge freely her self-important, self-involved Regietheater proclivities directing the works of her opera composer ancestor without meaningful harm being done either to the works or to their audiences. To the contrary. Her ministrations might well actually do them some good.