A man of musical theater stages Wagner—and brings humor to the stage. Matthias Davids is directing this year’s opening night at the Bayreuth Festival, staging Wagner’s Meistersingern von Nürnberg. And laughter is welcome, he says in a recent interview ahead of the festival’s start.
“The Meisteringers are commonly labeled a comic opera, and we’re looking at the form of humor that lives inside this work. I’m not trying to cram the entire history of reception into the staging, but to foreground the humor that’s so abundantly present in the piece,” he explains in an interview with a German news agency, shortly before the festival kicks off this Friday.
Davids: “We are seeking lightness”
“We’re chasing a sense of lightness in the Meistersingers—even in Hans Sachs, a figure who often comes off as a melancholic thinker and a grand explainer of the world. The man has his breezy, funny moments as well,” Davids says. With this, he—head of the musical-theater division at the Linz State Theatre—presents a markedly different approach from Barrie Kosky, who in his most recent Bayreuth production wrestled with Wagner’s antisemitism and even brought the courtroom of the Nuremberg Trials onto the stage.
“Now I feel the moment has come to return to the comic heart of the piece,” Davids tells the news agency. “The question is always: How much concept do you pour over a work, and does that bury the story? The plot is complex enough as it is.”
“Why does hardly anyone write new operas that are accessible?”
Overall, Davids is wary of the trend toward reinterpreting old operas with contemporary lenses. “I think it’s tough when you treat a classroom classic with students and they often don’t recognize the material once they see it onstage, because a director’s concept can obscure or partially obscure the real story,” he notes. “I think many people now feel that this approach is a bit stifling; the audience’s attitude has shifted. It’s no longer: I don’t understand it. It’s more: If you can’t bring it over to me in a way I can grasp, that’s on you.”
In his view, the operatic genre could borrow a page from the musical theater world. “Musicals have no problem weaving contemporary stories into new works—unlike opera,” Davids argues. “Rather than forcing new directing concepts onto old operas, why doesn’t someone write new operas that are accessible? There are thousands of gripping stories out there. But opera has, in his view, fallen somewhat behind.”
