Free stream of Meistersinger

Starting on Tuesday, July 12, at 5:30 p.m. (Glyndebourne time) Wagner’s Die Meistersinger will be available to stream online at the Glyndebourne Opera site and at the Telegraph site. This is one of three productions that Glyndebourne is making available.

The production is from 2011 and takes a traditional approach. This is not to say it’s easy listening. Meistersinger will make your brain hurt in the best of possible ways.

This is Wagner’s “comedy” and it has a happy ending. However, as always, Wagner is pushing a serious-minded approach on us. Meistersinger is an opera about a guild of singers from the Middle Ages in a little town called Nuremberg.

In typical fashion, they are having a singing competition and the prize is the daughter of one of the meisters. Before we allow our sexist trigger to be pulled, the lead woman — the feminine energy — is usually the redeemer in Wagner’s dramas. Therefore, it is safe to say that whomever wins the singing contest — aka the greatest artist — is rewarded with redemption.

The wrinkle is that a young knight has fallen in love with the prize, but he is not a member of the guild of singers and is therefore not eligible for redemption. You see what’s going on here. Wagner is establishing the artist and the one able to find and receive redemption, not the aristocracy.

This young knight wants redemption — the girl — so badly that he endeavors to join the guild. Will he be accepted? If he does make it in, will his untrained voice be enough to win the prize? Is artistic endeavor and redemption open to everyone or only to the initiated in the guild of meistersingers?

Watch it unfold on Tuesday. Or just google it...get it over with and swipe your redemption off the edge of the screen on your smart device of choice. That's probably what I'll do.