Borchmeyer has specifically German, and even specifically Nürnbergian, things to cite for his portrait of Wagner’s Nürnberg as aesthetic city-state. But that’s a fantasy that drifts behind the Romantic spirit in general, isn’t it? Don’t we dream of a world in which beauty, or let us say the fittest aesthetic solution for each given circumstance, is the ruling principle, and in which the nature of beauty and aesthetic fitness is the most serious matter to be settled when it comes to questions of governance? Don’t we think it should be the guidance behind child upbringing, education, cultural dissemination? Do we not believe that in our “real” world everyone, irrespective of racial, religious, occupational or “class” standing, is entitled to participation in this aspiration? To be a Romantic is to be an artistic idealist. To be what I’ll call a Practical Romantic is to believe that the artistic ideal must not function only as an escape, or as an ideology that allows for no difference, but as an element of spirit we seek to infuse into the reality we must perforce abide. If we seek a work capacious enough to embody that spirit, and in the end to lift us into it as none other does, Die Meistersinger is the one we’re looking for.

So, to the performances, starting with the Salzburg recording. By its end, it has approximated the conductor-plus-Sachs-plus-adequacy standing I posited earlier, and can thus be commended to devotees in agreement with those priorities. But at the first act’s end, I was in despair. Had the standards of casting at the high international level fallen this far? If so, what standard could I apply in writing about this effort? Did it even make sense to write about it at all? And what parts were the recording perspective and production surroundings playing in the generally lame impression? As to the production, I can’t comment on its effect, not having seen it, and, unlike the François Girard Fliegende Holländer at the Met, its conceptual  reasoning isn’t laid out in any source that I’ve seen so that its ideas could be discussed independently, as I did with that production. But it is clear from the booklet commentary and photos and the one review I’ve read (John Allison’s in Opera) that it is yet one more attempt at providing a  contemporary perspective in the form of a show-within-a-show framework, thus precluding any direct, emotionally potent contact with the characters and story. That always conditions not only the physical acting, but the singing itself. And it accounts for the annoying spatters of onstage applause and laughter we hear, interrupting the musical action with reactions from without and bidding us follow some other narrative.

Thielemann and his splendid, steeped-in-the-brine orchestra (Dresden’s Sächsische Staatskapelle) give us a solid, shapely Prelude, then are joined by a combination of the Sächsischer Staatsopernchor and Salzburg’s Bachchor in an exceptionally lovely and lingering rendition of the hymn. Then action commences, and solo voices enter, rapidly, in this order: Walther, Eva, Magdalene, and David. They will carry us through the first two scenes,^(I) till the arrival of Pogner, Beckmesser, Sachs, Kothner, and the other Mastersingers, these last serving as ensemble. As I listened, the first two scenes slid past without making a mark, and while at points Thielemann could have nudged the action forward to some advantage, that wouldn’t have been necessary had the voices registered. To take them as they come: