Metropolitan Opera Archives

Almost two years have elapsed since Die Meistersinger was last heard at the Metropolitan. For some time previously the work had been going downhill at this theatre. Therefore, when it passed out of the repertoire altogether there were hopes that when, sooner or later, it returned, it would be subjected to a thoroughgoing restudy, and might recapture some of the festival spirit it had when George Szell first conducted it at the Metropolitan some years back. The opera having passed into the hands of Fritz Reiner and being partly recast, one had grounds to anticipate a general freshening and a newly animating spirit.

These hopes were rather sorely disappointed when the great comedy came hack on Jan. 12. There had been little appreciable improvement since its last representation in the spring of 1948. Those who anticipated great disclosures from Mr. Reiner's treatment of the score were no more convinced than they had been by his Parsifal last season that Wagner is his province. His conception of Die Meistersinger lacks the sense of the Wagnerian design, the great, flowing line, the adjustment of detail to the grand, overall architecture, the lyrical sweep, and the freshness and vernal poetry. His tempos were here too fast, there too slow. The prelude was without spaciousness, the introduction to the third act without elevation and spirituality. The conductor conveyed little of the fragrance of the Flieder monologue, the tender loveliness of the music in the scene between Sachs and Eva, or the summer-night moods of the second act.

Mr. Reiner is to be thanked, however, for [restoring] David's matchless enumeration of the various tones and modes of the mastersinger catalogue. The second and third acts, however, more than paid for this restoration; and one noted with regret that Sach's lovely passage in E major, "Darf ich die Arbeit nicht entfernen," had once more been eliminated. The cuts in the third act were just as shocking as they were a few years ago. It is nothing less than barbarism to violate the scene between Sachs and Stolzing by cold-bloodedly eliminating those pages from "Mein Freund ! Das grad' ist Dichters Werk" to "Mein Freund, in holder Jugendzeit;" and it is indefensible to drop the second strophe of the Prize Song in the Festwiese episode, even if the Metropolitan has long made this a cynical custom.

Search by season: 1949-50

Search by title: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,

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