Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

216 Joakim Tillman
The audience reactions
The Die Meistersinger premiere attracted both applause and attempts to
silence it. According to Adolf Lindgren, this showed that the backwash of
the European Wagner debate had reached the calm coasts of Sweden (AB
4/4 1887). He argued that the two extreme audience reactions made it difficult
to express a general opinion about how the audience received the new
work. Furthermore, it appeared to be rather passive and indifferent during
the first and second acts “except when once in a while a truly beautiful melody
refreshed their minds, or when Beckmesser’s parodist jokes provoked
laughter, or when the boldly magnificent realism of the scuffle increased the
tension.” One problem with such as evaluation is that the critic’s accounts
of audience reactions may be influenced by his own attitude towards the
work he is reviewing. The Svenska Dagbladet (4/4 1887) critic, who had a
more positive attitude to Wagner, writes that the audience was really enthusiastic,
and that it was only a “small clique of anti-Wagnerians” that tried
to silence the general bravos with some hushing noises after the first act.
Nevertheless, another source confirms Lindgren’s claim that some members
of the audience left the theatre after the second act: according to the
composer and critic Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942) in his Minnen
[“Memories”] (1943, p. 56), several of the most prominent families in the
musical life of Stockholm left during the interval between the second and
third acts, expressing crushing criticism.
The majority of the critics, including Lindgren, considered the third act
to be the best. Even though views differ about the audience response to
the first two acts, no critic was in any doubt about the enthusiasm during
and after the third: “after the magnificent quintet ending of the first scene
there was no end to the storm of applause. After the second scene, and the
end of the whole opera, curtain call after curtain call followed.” (GHT N 6/4
1887) Thus, even though Die Meistersinger is a continuous musical drama,
the audience behaved in the traditional manner and started to applaud after
something that resembled a traditional operatic number.
Die Meistersinger was performed six times during the spring of 1887,
but then disappeared from the Royal Swedish <strong>Opera</strong>’s repertoire until
1899/1900. Henrik Victorin (NDA 951107) writes in one of the reviews after
the first performance of Die Walküre that it would be unfortunate if
this work had to share the undeserved fate that Die Meistersinger suffered
ten years previously, and which showed that at that time the taste of the
audience in general was not receptive to the mature works of Wagner. Of
course, there may be many reasons for the disappearance of a work from