State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
November 13, 2018

Kasper Holten’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his final production as Covent Garden’s Director of Opera, opened in 2017 to decidedly mixed reviews. A co-pro between the Royal Opera House, The National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing, and Opera Australia, it opened in Melbourne yesterday evening to much interest, compounded by the fact that OA was now onto its third Hans Sachs.

The cast of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Photo © Jeff Busby

While the production is undoubtedly flawed, there’s no denying that it’s full of intelligent ideas and moments of engaging theatre. Holten sets the action in a gentleman’s club, with costuming and set design suggesting the 1920s. The master singers have more than a whiff of the masonic about them, and their wives and girlfriends are swiftly shown to another room as their menfolk get down to business. Although doddering and benign on the surface, Holten makes it clear that this is an exclusionary male society all too comfortable giving out women as prizes – Veit Pogner offers his daughter Eva’s hand in marriage to the winner of...