Featuring an international Australian cast, the new Melbourne Opera production will be conducted by internationally acclaimed Wagner maestro Anthony Negus and directed by Suzanne Chaundy, the team who delivered Australia’s award-winning first regional production of Wagner’s masterpiece, The Ring Cycle in Bendigo in 2023.

Four performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg will be given in an intimate theatrical setting specially designed to showcase the beautifully restored Royal Exhibition Building, creating a spectacular environment for Wagner’s epic work.

Wagner’s sublime and profound comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg)  premiered in Munich in 1868. The opera is set in 16th-century Nuremberg and revolves around a guild of amateur poets and musicians called the Mastersingers. The story follows the cobbler Hans Sachs, a wise and respected Mastersinger, who becomes entangled in a complicated love affair involving a young knight named Walther von Stolzing and a beautiful young woman named Eva. Talented and innovative, Walther, an outsider, impulsively decides to compete in the Mastersingers’ song contest in order to win Eva’s hand.  He is up against all sorts of musical pedantry, especially from rival contestant and Town Clerk, Sixtus Beckmesser. The visionary Sachs can see the worth and truth in Walther’s songs. Central to the work is Wagner’s belief that political parties come and go; leaders come and go but a community’s art provides the truest measure of its essential values. “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” is known for its rich and intricate music, which combines Wagner’s signature leitmotif technique with elements of German folk music and choral writing.

Meistersinger is central to understanding Wagner’s ideas on the role of music in society, on the renunciation of will and on the solace music can bring in a world full of delusion, folly, self-deception.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg occupies a unique place in Wagner’s oeuvre. It is the only comedy among his mature operas (he had come to reject his early Das Liebesverbot) and is also unusual among his works in being set in a historically well-defined time and place rather than in a mythical or legendary setting. It is the only mature Wagner opera based on an entirely original story, and in which no supernatural or magical powers or events feature. It incorporates many of the operatic conventions that Wagner had railed against in his essays on the theory of opera: rhymed verse, arias, choruses, a quintet, and even a dance.

Melbourne Opera and Richard Wagner

Now in its third decade of operatic performances in Melbourne and beyond, Melbourne Opera has regularly presented works by Richard Wagner. Prior to its ground-breaking presentation of the epic complete Ring Cycle in Bendigo in 2023, the company has also presented Rheingold (2021), Die Valkyrie (2022), Siegfried (2022, concert) The Flying Dutchman (2019) Tristan and Isolde (2018), Lohengrin (2017), Tannhauser (2016), and  Rienzi (2013, concert).

OPERA MAGAZINE
Interview with Warwick Fyfe