At the Stuttgart State Opera, Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg unfolds a story between artistic utopia, tradition and social reflection - a work full of humor, seriousness and abysses.
Your own daughter's hand as a prize in a singing competition - imagine that! There could hardly be a stronger sign of the belief in the systemic relevance of art. And indeed, goldsmith Veit Pogner, who offers his daughter Eva as a prize, is just one of many masters from Nuremberg for whom their art is more than just a nice-sounding sideline: it is no less than a community-building and society-improving force. In the Meistersinger, we encounter a group of utopians who are not interested in their origins or money, but in innovation and the future.
How Eva herself feels about the whole thing is, as is so often the case, of secondary importance. She already knows who she would let herself be sung by and who she would rather not. Wagner initially conceived Die Meistersinger as a comic opera, and so everything ends on a superficially happy note: in the end, Eva's crush Stolzing wins the competition and the bride - an impoverished squire, of all people. The future comes from the past, not only in terms of the son-in-law's origins, but also with regard to the end of the utopia: the whole thing culminates in the Meistersinger Hans Sachs, who mentored the Junker Stolzing to victory, being crowned King of Art: "Heil Sachs!" and glory to the holy German art.
In Wagner's works, the monstrous often peeps through the tiniest of cracks. With the Meistersinger, Elisabeth Stöppler and Cornelius Meister also tell a piece of German history and mentality between awakening and restoration and, in this "German Midsummer Night's Dream" (Elisabeth Stöppler), focus on the relationship between the generations and the question of why what was is perhaps also what will become.
Premiere February 7
Further performances: February 15, March 1, 8, 14 and 22, 2026
