The world of MEISTERSINGER is a closed system not only in the master singers' pedantic and by-the-book guild ironised by Wagner, but also in Nuremberg's urban society as a whole: the new – embodied by outsider Walther von Stolzing – cannot bring about revolutionary change, but rather is incorporated into the system. For their new production, Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock and Sergio Morabito investigate the mechanisms of such a hermetic artistic society. Can art claim artistic liberty in a conservative and dogmatic environment? And what potential does it hold to overthrow the system? ...

About the work
DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG was Richard Wagner’s only light-hearted opera and remains one of his most popular works. This notwithstanding, MEISTERSINGER is also the musical manifesto of a German national art movement and, as such, has accumulated so much baggage over the years that people are apt to lose sight of the opera’s essence – a jolly and coherent comedy with its helter-skelter storyline centring on illusion and reality, love, ageing and the plying of one’s art – and this despite the core theme of a life dominated by music determining not only the cast of characters but also the action of the piece. The members of the master-singers guild have convened to make music in accordance with their strict rulebook. One of the singers, the wealthy Veit Pogner, has granted his daughter Eva the freedom to choose which suitor she will marry – with the proviso that it be a master singer, in other words the winner of a public singing competition. A pity, then, that Eva is in love with Walther von Stolzing, who is talented but devoid of formal training. Nonetheless he takes part in the competition, aided and abetted by master singer Hans Sachs, who has to forego his love for Eva in the process.

About the production
Richard Wagner’s DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG comes to the Deutsche Oper Berlin courtesy of a production trio made up of Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock and Sergio Morabito, whose slant on the material focuses on a “music-oriented society”, with Nuremberg’s late mediaeval guild of master singers transposed to the hermetic setting of a college of music. The institution is controlled by powerful professors and attended by their “lads” and “lassies”. The staff includes reformers like Hans Sachs and also pedants, one of whom, Sixtus Beckmesser, is likewise keen to win Eva’s hand in marriage. When new boy Walther von Stolzing, the only non-musical pupil, arrives in this ultra-regulated but at times oddball environment, the entire college is soon shaken to its core, with von Stolzing the instigator of the comic events that unfurl.