We Are Schwarz
Die Meistersinger comes home.
By Chris Varias
Photograph courtesy Deutsche Oper Am Rhein
Evans mirageas needed something to convince him that the city would embrace Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the largest-scale production ever staged by the Cincinnati Opera. So he turned to the latest release from Cincinnati Bell. “You can learn a lot about a city by looking through its phone book,” says Mirageas, the Opera’s artistic director. “There are over 478 people in this year’s Cincinnati white pages—Foltzes and Schwarzes and Sachses—whose names are the last names of the people in the opera. Meistersinger is really about Cincinnati and its great early settlers.”
Of course, Richard Wagner’s classic comedy-love story isn’t literally set in Zinzinnati. But Mirageas likens the immigrant businessmen of 19th century Over-the-Rhine to the master singers of a 16th century German city, which comes to life on the Music Hall stage this month. “We had the set on stage for a test run, and I came into the theater just after they put Act Two up—the streets of old Nuremburg. I stood at the back of the theater and I gasped,” he says. The size of the German-built set, disassembled into thousands of pieces and shipped in five semi-truck loads from Düsseldorf (an additional semi contained costumes), is one reason that
Meistersinger is a once-in-a-generation production for most world-class opera companies. Reason #2: The production clocks in at more than six hours, including intermissions.
“The first time I went to Meistersinger was in Chicago in the 1980s,” Mirageas recalls. “It seemed like the shortest evening I had ever spent in the theater. If the story is told well and compellingly, time stops.”
Originally published in the June 2010 issue.