Barrie Kosky’s new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for the Bayreuth Festival has been met with widespread acclaim. Making history as the first Jewish director and first Australian director to work there, his Bayreuth debut has been praised for its nuanced interrogation of the composer’s anti-Semitism, and the questions of German nationalism that the opera raises.

According to reviews, Kosky has set the first act of Meistersinger in the composer’s Wahnfried house, with Wagner evolving into the opera’s central character, Hans Sachs. Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor who Wagner denigrated by saying he should be baptised before leading the premiere of Parsifal in 1882, also appears onstage – he visits Wagner at Wahnfried, where the role of Beckmesser, the opera’s victim who has been long read as a Jewish caricature, is forced on him. Such doubling occurs throughout the opera, with the young knight Walther also a younger Wagner, Eva also the composer’s second wife Cosima, and Pogner, Eva’s father, becoming Franz Liszt, Cosima’s father. “You need A-level Wagner to get the most out of this show”, writes Martin Kettle for The Guardian.

“This production…sits in judgement on Wagner…at the heart of this Meistersinger is an imaginative, subtle and serious...