[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:43 PM Eastern on 30 Aug. See below.]
It's hardly a matter of any moment, and it's but a small slip-up, but here's what happens when you send a critic in another field (in this case, The New York Times's chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman) to do a music critic's job, although at the Times these days it happens often enough and much more egregiously when you send a music critic to do a music critic's job — most particularly if the music critic happens to be the Times's chief music critic:
Every opera season demands a scene-chewing scandal to feed fans' appetites for outsize drama, and this summer that niche has been filled in Europe by the new production here [at the Bayreuther Festspiele] of Wagner’s Meistersinger. Tuesday was its final performance, and it was a mess, as advertised, but at least it was a diverting mess.Its director is the comely 29-year-old Katharina Wagner, favored youngest daughter of the 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner (Richard's grandson), who for decades has been clutching the reins of power at the Bayreuth Festival like a gnomish Alberich hoarding his gold.
Although the gnome certainly hoarded his gold, it was the dragon, not the gnome, you were going for for use in this particular trope, Mr. Kimmelman. But we get the picture nevertheless.
The gnome-for-dragon business notwithstanding, this is an otherwise fine piece and worth your while reading despite these two bits of utter rubbish:
[Katharina's] approach is not, in the abstract, without merit, Beckmesser having always seemed a proto-Jew to Wagner, awaiting modern redemption; the opera’s end comes across as the screed it always seemed. But the production requires jettisoning all logic and humane sensibility. Characters whose interactions are unusually subtle for Wagner become props. [emphases mine]
RTWT here.
Update (2:43 PM Eastern on 30 Aug): More on this at La Cieca's Parterre Box.
