Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg review – riveting restaging puts Wagner on trial

Bayreuth festival
Barrie Kosky’s mind-boggling production uses a giant puppet and the Nuremberg trials as a backdrop to ask: how far does the composer’s antisemitism taint his art?

Richard Wagner is directly responsible for two important buildings in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth. The first is the Festspielhaus theatre, to which Wagner devotees and the German elite flock each summer for the Bayreuth festival. The second is Haus Wahnfried, in which the composer and his family lived (and where he is buried in the garden) and which has recently reopened as an extended museum.

Barrie Kosky is not the first director to have the idea of putting the two icons together by placing Wahnfried on the Festspielhaus stage, as he does in his new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which opened the 2017 festival this week in front of an audience that included Angela Merkel.

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