Warning: There's a sort of an opera review buried in here, but mostly we'll be talking about Wagner's Die Meistersinger itself (eventually)

Hear, you people, and let you be told,
the clock has struck ten;
take care of the fire and the lamps,
so that no one meets with harm.
Praise be to our Lord God.
--the Nightwatchman, making his rounds of the streets of Nuremberg in Act II of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg

We have to back up to last Thursday. As we rode down in the elevator together early that morning, the well-meaning gentleman said he didn't think I was going to need "that heavy coat" I had on, and I explained that I had to wear it just then because I didn't have enough arms for the assorted stuff I was carrying. I also pointed out that I would definitely need the jacket--and a "jacket" is what we northerners would call the "heavy coat" in question--at the other end of my flight, in New York.

It's a tricky business dressing for both Florida and New York climates in winter, especially when you're trying to carry as little as humanly possible. But at that early stage of the journey, I had to agree with my companion in the elevator at the senior residence where my mother is living--I still faced a fairly long walk to where I could get the Broward County No. 1 bus, which would take me to Fort Lauderdale Airport for a mere $1, one of my great remaining bargains. Even at that hour I expected to work up a sweat by the time I got on the bus. (I was aiming for the 7:45, but would still be okay with the 8:00.)

It was a strange start to a strange Thursday of a strange week. I'd been at home when I got the phone call from the doctor about 4am Saturday morning. While waiting for more information, I did a whole bunch of laundry I'd been putting off for ages. This accomplished three things: (1) It filled those several hours during which I wasn't going to get back to sleep anyway; (2) it got a lot of the damned laundry done; and (3) it meant that I would have some clean clothes if I needed to travel.

By 3pm I was at the hospital in Miami Beach. My mother's surgery, which the surgeon had said he hoped to start about 1, had only just started. He accomplished what he set out to, and contrary to the fears of the other doctors I'd talked to that morning, she'd made it through the operation.

After a couple of days, it seemed clear that, while she faces a couple of months of recovery and rehab that would be grueling for anyone, let alone an 87-year-old woman with the expectable roster of health impediments, I'd contributed all I could to the process, and in fact was probably in the way--since so much of her healing and regaining of function from this point on depends on her doing things that will involve a fair amount of screaming from the pain.

As if she didn't have enough to contend with, she feels bad for forgetting my birthday, which was last Sunday. Actually, she didn't forget. The nurses had told me she'd worried about it back then. Her short-term memory isn't very good anymore, though, and she didn't remember that.

I made my flight comfortably, and completed the trip without complications--unless you count fun 'n' games with TSA officials. I don't fly much these days, but when I do, it's always something with them. On the way down I was informed--kind of as if I'd won a door prize--that I'd been chosen for extra screening.

Not on the way back, happily. I did set off the metal detector this time, though, even though I'd emptied my pockets completely. All that left was my belt buckle, the same belt I'd been wearing on the way down (also known as my terrorist period). I whipped the damned belt off and walked silently through the metal detector.

That's when I found out that my toothpaste was verboten.

There's a story here. A pretty lame one, but a story nevertheless. I keep a few days' worth of essentials stored in my mother's apartment, so that when I make the trip, I can do it with minimal encumbrance. Under the bathroom sink I noticed a still-unopened (large-size) tube of toothpaste I vaguely recalled having bought on a previous visit. I used an old but open tube of my mother's brand while I was there, and then figured I might as well take the unopened tube home. As with the laundry, I tend to put of the new-toothpaste-buying chore to the last minute; for once, I would be a tube ahead!

Foolish me. The TSA agent waved the toothpaste box at me solemnly. I couldn't carry that! (What was I thinking?) Did I want to check it?

Can you actually check toothpaste? Even the large size, still in the carton? I guess you can. I declined the toothpaste-checking option. If all went well with the flight, I intended to head straight from the airport to work. Just what I needed was to wait the 45 minutes for our plane's luggage to be off-loaded, and then stand there watching for my tube of toothpaste to appear on the luggage carousel.

I guess it could have been worse. There's a kindly-looking gentleman doing his post-security-check reassembling right next to me. I mention my lost toothpaste. He tells me that on the way down, he'd had to yield up a bottle of after-shave lotion his little granddaughter had given him! A massive expenditure at her tender age. I venture that he mustn't let her know, and must tell her he uses the stuff all the time and loves it. He explains that he has already replaced the bottle.

Well, you have to, don't you? I realize that having the after-shave lotion confiscated is what keeps the terrorists from winning. But when it was a gift from your young granddaughter, you can't let her know that she's a terrorist aider-and-abettor, can you?

The flight itself was fine, and in fact arrived early, depriving me of an obvious excuse for heading home rather than to the office. However, because my unlimited-ride MetroCard had expired while I was away, as I verified when I tried it on the Q33 bus that came soon and it didn't work, and I hadn't had a chance to buy a new one before I left (and of course no thought has apparently been given to installing MetroCard machines at the arrival areas--the attitude of New York's airports toward travelers who have the temerity to encroach on our fair city is: "Count yourself lucky that we allow you to deplane here, and don't be fussing over welcoming amenities"), I had to dump in $2 in quarters, which I was prepared with.

But that meant I could do a free transfer to the subway, which you can only do with a MetroCard. If I had waited for an M60 bus, I could easily have transferred to another bus to get home. But I wasn't so sure about taking a bust from 125th Street into Midtown. And anyhow I'd gotten on the Q33 bus, from which for me meant completing the journey into Manhattan on the No. 7 IRT train. Assuming I'm able to find the train. It's a massive elevated structure that looms over the street the bus runs down, and it shouldn't be possible to miss, but trust me, I've missed it.

Not this time, though. When I got to the subway station, I bought the new MetroCard I should have bought in that tiny pissant month of February. It was March now, and my TransitCheck tax-free transit spending is screwed up for the rest of the year. Oh well.

For reasons unknown, the No. 7 train seemed to be traveling at about 2 mph, and at the end of the route I still had to make one more train change, for one stop, to get to my office, where it was great to be back at my desk. (Kidding.) The two people who knew where I'd been were appropriately sympathetic; nobody else seemed to notice I was gone. When I went to have my department head sign my "Request for Paid Time Off" form for the three days I'd missed (I had decided to live large and not raise the issue of the time I'd missed on Thursday), he said, "That's all Mr. Blank now." Mr. Blank is the guy who was hired a few months ago, obviously to replace my (now former) boss.

In some companies, when you have a new department head, they tell you. Especially if you have to have him/her sign your damned PTO form anytime you're not there. I was relieved to find, when I passed this news on to my immediate coworkers, that for once I was not the last person to know. Of course they had more serious things on their minds, like invoices and contracts and purchase orders that needed department-head approval.

My coworker Kathy had suggested I just go home. With every second that passed, I liked that idea better. But I wanted to get my PTO form filed that day, and it took me most of the afternoon to catch Mr. Blank in his office. When I finally did, I had to introduce myself. (We'd sort of nodded when we passed in the hall, but we'd never actually met.) He made a gesture of exasperation about the onus of the paperwork, but he signed the damned form.

By now it was past 4. I really wanted to go home, where I hadn't been, after all, since I blew out Saturday morning. I was already entering my pre-return panic mode: What could have gone wrong? Had I left my apartment unlocked? (I was less afraid that the place had been cleaned out than that some fiend had left even more junk.) By the time I got home, I would officially have missed dropping off my rent check on the 1st--would the marshal be waiting for me? Etc. etc.

One thing I knew was that I wouldn't be having dinner with my friends Richard and Leo, who now live upstate but often come into the city on Thursdays, when they have a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera. Sometimes, when one of them can't make a performance, I get to go. It's pretty much the only time I do these days.

I've known Richard and Leo for almost 35 years now, longer than any active friends except our DWT host Howie. Richard and I are the operaphiles, and when we were young(er), we dreamed about having Met subscriptions. By the time Richard finally did it, some years ago, the world's operatic standards, not to mention the Met's, had shrunk to near-nothing. Richard used to complain that I was overly critical of the performances of our younger years. Now he says he understands what I meant.

But he's been smart. He got hard-to-come-by seats in the Balcony, and by renewing regularly and early and ingratiating himself with the subscription office, he's upgraded his seats to the point where they're really terrific, dead center, almost front-row. Yes, you're a good way from the stage up there, but the sight lines are terrific, and the sound is really good--better than it is from many more "favored" locations. And best of all, when the performance sucks, as it does 90 percent of the time, you've only blown about $65 per ticket.

I still have difficulty believing I'm using the word "only" with "$65 per ticket." Then I look at the current price schedule, and am reminded that it is indeed "only."

Often when Richard and Leo come in on Thursday, we have dinner before they go to the opera. I knew that wasn't going to happen this Thursday because the opera was Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg. It is a long, long opera, especially the way Maestro Jimmy conducts it, and especially because he insists on doing it uncut.

Um, maybe you think of Maestro Jimmy as James Levine. I think of him as Maestro Jimmy, which is the least rude thing I can think of to call him. Maestro Jimmy insists on performing all the Wagner operas uncut, which is fine. The problem is that he doesn't insist on discovering where, in human terms, that music comes from. When he's at his worst--in Tristan, say, or in Parsifal--the result can be excruciating. Hours and hours, if not days and weeks, of pointless, purposeless, uninflected notes.

His Wagner isn't uniformly hopeless. I used to actually enjoy his conducting of Tannhaeuser, the second of the ten canonical Wagner operas. And before he conducted Lohengrin (the third of the ten) at the Met, there was a radio broadcast of a Cincinnati May Festival performance he conducted that I quite liked, enough so that I'm sorry to have lent out my cassettes, which of course never found their way back to me. And it wasn't a total loss when he first did it at the Met. (I've found that most things Maestro Jimmy conducts over a period of time get worse, as whatever life there may have been in them originally is squeezed out.) Certainly the cycle of the four Ring of the Nibelung operas hasn't been a total loss either, though it has unmistakably gotten worse over time--as has much of the singing.

Meistersinger is another matter, though. In some ways, even though its physical demands may exceed any other opera in the standard repertory, it's almost foolproof. (Assuming, that is, the company has the necessary performing resources to do the thing.) It's not just Wagner's only comedy (though hardly of the ha-ha variety), but maybe the deepest and most enriching tribute to the durability of the human spirit that's ever been created.

As it happens, I've never heard Maestro Jimmy conduct Meistersinger. But I've heard nightmarish accounts from just about the only sources I would believe. Both sources speak (independently) of music that over all those hours never moves, never goes anywhere, remains suspended in the middle of nowhere. I've tried to listen to at least one of the radio broadcasts but was too bored to listen for more than a few minutes.

Anyway, this mercifully is not my problem. It's Richard's. Speaking to him from Florida all week, I've been trying to nurse and encourage him through it. These days I pay so little attention to the schedule that I have no idea who's singing, but there's not likely to be much ground for hope there. As for Maestro Jimmy, well . . . I try to stress to Richard in my little pep talks that it is Meistersinger, after all. Something is bound to come through. And encountering the piece live just isn't the same as hearing it on records or seeing it on video--for the sheer scale of the piece, with the massive cast and chorus in full cry, especially in the joyous final scene.

I can say all of this, of course, because I'm not the one who's going to be stuck there from 6pm to darn near midnight! I try not to gloat when I think this evil thought.

So now, you'll recall, it's sometime past 4 on Thursday afternoon. Now I find out that Richard and Leo couldn't make it to the city. Their car broke down. Richard has contacted the Met, and both tickets are supposed to be held in my name.

This, alas, is my fault. For some reason, it never occurred to Richard that he could do that. All these years he's thought that unless he can physically hand the tickets to someone, they go down the drain if he can't make it to the opera. And all these years I've been fairly sure that the modern-day subscription department is prepared to accommodate him in a number of ways, depending on how far ahead of the performance he contacts them. At the very least, I'm sure they can arrange location passes or even replacement tickets. But for a long time I never mentioned this to Richard, for fear that I would start getting stuck with the tickets--and then also have to sucker some other poor soul into accompanying me.

I think the problem was that Richard and I both remember when the Met had a long waiting list for subscriptions and not a lot of tickets to sell for individual performances, the days when dealing with the box-office people was just a shade more pleasant than dealing with a clerk who was empowered to sign your execution papers. The fact that they allowed you to appear for a moment at their window and deigned to speak to you at all--their part of the conversation usually confined to some variant of "sold out" or "no"--exhausted their obligation to you.

No more. With all those super-priced tickets to sell, the Met now has to coddle its customers.

The mutual friend who has been charged with breaking the news to me that the car is kaput and I have to go to Meistersinger happens also to be one of my sources for the dire news about Maestro Jimmy's performance, dating from this production's premiere season (1993, as I recall). As long as we're breaking news, I inform Peter that he has to use the other ticket--it's only fair. (Well, it is, isn't it?) He says if he'd had more notice, maybe he could have taken a nap and blah-blah-blah.

I totally reject this nap song and dance. Did I get a chance to take a nap? How much notice am I getting? For goodness' sake, at 7:20 that morning I was still watching a JAG rerun on USA in Florida!

Apparently, though, there's no way of actually forcing a person to attend, no matter how clear the fairness issues are. So I'm on my own. I cease worrying about the second ticket. With the opera starting at 6, I've got to get up to Lincoln Center just to be sure of picking up the damned tickets.

Ah, my last hope. Picking up the tickets. A bunch of years ago a non-opera-going friend invited me to join him at a performance for which friends were supposedly leaving him their subscription seats at the pickup window. When he got to the window, they wouldn't give him the tickets because he didn't know the rightful owners' subscription number! He felt bad, but I didn't. I suggested we just walk down to Ralph's, a really hearty old-style Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue, and we had a grand time.

By the most amazing coincidence, just a couple of weeks ago I had occasion to walk down that block, and was able to see with my own eyes that Ralph's is still there! (In New York City, anyplace you haven't personally seen in the last several weeks is up for grabs.) They've moved up the block, to the corner.

This was my last shot. Maybe they won't give me the tickets! What is man, after all, bereft of all hope?

These days the Met box office has a window dedicated just to "tonight's performance," but even that line can get jammed up. Not tonight, though. Or rather this afternoon. It's only about 5 when I get there. I breeze through to the window. The S.O.B. not only hands me the tickets, but smiles! The dastard. He's probably thinking that along about when the performance starts, he gets to go home, while I'll be strapped into my seat.

The first act is unimaginably horrible, living down to the dire accounts I've heard, in fact underperforming my absolutely lowest expectations. The problem isn't even the cast, which is far from hopeless, but proves almost irrelevation. With the music in a permanent state of suspended animation, it wouldn't matter who was singing. It's fascinating in a morbid way: I would never have imagined that Act I of Meistersinger could be this thoroughly drained of all life.

And "drained" really seems the operative image. It's like an embalmer draining off all the blood and replacing it with embalming fluid. Except that the embalmed body looks sort of like the person. This alleged Meistersinger--uncut though it may be--doesn't even "sort of" look or sound like the real thing.

Well, it does sort of look like Meistersinger. While there's something bothering me about the sets, I can imagine the opera taking place on them, though not the way the current stage director is moving people around it. (I'm guessing that the original director, Otto Schenk, a perfectly competent old-fashioned director, hasn't seen the production since he first mounted it.)

I won't further tax you with the agonies of my decision: to flee or not to flee after Act I. Oh my, I want to get home, and start dealing with the various disasters I expect to find. In the end, though, I realize that even after an hour-and-a-half act, it's still only 7:30! When did I ever leave a performance at 7:30? Most performances haven't even started by 7:30. And Act II is shorter--usually not that much more than an hour. (The real test is Act III, whose two scenes run close to a full two hours, maybe more at Maestro Jimmy's motionless tempos.)

But Act II is a tad better. From the very opening, built out of music from Act I associated with the Midsummer Day festival of St. John and with the young apprentices to the "mastersingers" of medieval Nuremberg, there is suddenly a bit of definition in the orchestral playing, something that could almost pass for--my gosh--phrasing! Although the wasted Act I has given us no sense of the stakes involved in the crisis that has ruptured the intimacy between the mastersingers (tradesmen of wildly different economic status whose passion for the combined arts of poetry and music has caused them to master the almost endless intricacies of the rules of "mastersinging" and thus made them equals of a sort) and decades-long neighbors, the cobbler Hans Sachs (pronounced as if the Red Sox were not Red Sox but Red "Zox") and the goldsmith Veit Pogner, their early scenes aren't obliterated.

There's that make-or-break moment, as Pogner makes his way home with his daughter Eva, when he could equally well take the turn to Sachs's house. It's an automatic impulse. It's what Pogner always does in times of doubt. He knows he wants to talk to Sachs, who seems to be at home. Eva says she thinks she sees a light on inside. Pogner is so close, but finally can't do it.

For maybe the first time ever, he and Sachs are on opposite sides of an issue. At that morning's meeting of the mastersingers Pogner had presented his grand plan: to offer the hand of Eva, his only child, to the winner of the masters' song contest at the upcoming St. John's Day festivities. A glorious gesture indeed, until you break it down to the practicalities: a pool of potential suitors limited to the bachelors and widowers among this group of middle-aged men.

Naturally Sachs, a widower with no children of his own who has known Eva all her life, who held her in his arms when she was little, saw the flaws in the scheme. Just as Sachs heard the beauty and originality in the unheard-of "instant" application for "master" status sung that morning by the visiting young Franconian knight Walther von Stolzing, who had been instantly infatuated with Eva, and vice versa, at the time of a previous visit to the Pogners.

This is the state of crisis in which Act I should have left Sachs, Pogner and Eva. Even though the bass Yevgeny Nikitin seemed to have gotten no help in lending any shape, musical or dramatic, to his Pogner, there was still that quiet but cataclysmic moment when he decided that no, he better not consult Sachs, who after all failed to recognize the boldness of his plan. And then Sach's great "Flieder" monologue, while done no great favor by the current wreckage of James Morris's once highly serviceable, even beautiful bass-baritone voice, was conducted with some actual lyricism.

This adds up to a whole lot less than you expect to have gotten out of Meistersinger, but it's a whole lot more than I was expecting by the time the Act I curtain (finally!) dropped. And Act III, which I stayed for, presented a similar mix of low-level glimmerings of life amid long spans of frustrations.

In the end, what I think about most is the little joke Wagner built into the street scene of Act II, which culminates in a full-scale riot. Young Walther von Stolzing has tracked Eva down to her home, and he is bitterly recounting his humiliation at the song trial that morning when he's thrown by a sound, which she reassures him is just the sound of the Nightwatchman's horn. Soon enough this good gentleman appears in the flesh, and delivers the time check at the top of this piece. Then he blows his horn, which Wagner pitches a tone above his little song, giving an impression of tone-deafness.

The whole episode lasts little more than a minute, but establishes charmingly the bourgeois calm of medieval Nuremberg.

At the end of the act, as I mentioned, the entire neighborhood winds up engaged in a full-fledged riot. In little more than an instant, all of the rioters disappear, just in time for the return of . . . the good Nightwatchman, now declaring:

Hear, you people, and let you be told,
the clock has sounded eleven;
take care of yourselves against ghosts and apparitions,
so that no evil spirit troubles your soul.
Praise be to our Lord God.

Yes indeed, all's well, all's quiet on the streets of Nuremberg--and never mind that just a trice before everything was in a state of mayhem. It's a nice little joke, a clever stage moment, and a charming way to ring down the Act II curtain.

Now the Nightwatchman, as we've seen is onstage maybe a total of five minutes, with not much more than two minutes of actual singing. For that amount of work, no opera company can afford to hire high-price talent, adding to an already substantial budget for the large cast of principal and subprincipal singers.

But the thing about the Nightwatchman's song, or rather songs, is that the better they're sung--ideally by a bass singing in the upper part of his range rather than a baritone, who can reach the music more easily but with less striking vocal effect--the more they open up. With luck, the company has a rising young singer who can be shown off to good effect without adding too large a fee to an already large cast. And in fact the Met has a lovely Nightwatchman in the Canadian bass-baritone John Relyea, who did the best singing of the evening.

As it happens, not many weeks before I had looked at Acts I and II of a 1984 Meistersinger from the summer Bayreuth Festival (in the theater that Wagner himself had built for his later music dramas). It's one of the few Wagner performances formerly available on laserdisk that I'd never seen until just recently I picked up the DVD issue. And I recalled that in that performance there was an exceptional Nighwatchman, the soon-to-be front-line Wagner bass Matthias Hoelle.

A Nightwatchman of that quality has the curious effect of making a point about this community. Of course, the Nightwatchman isn't "protecting" the good burghers of Nuremberg. But in some sense his presence is a symbol of what does protect them: a sort of unspoken basic social compact whereby even when those burghers erupt in midsummer craziness, they do it within certain bounds. It will taking a great deal more working-through for Sachs, that most reasonable and rational of men, to make his peace with the craziness that he in fact inadvertently instigated. But for us lesser mortals, there is some comfort to be derived from the deep-rooted reasonableness even of our rioters.

I suppose this might once have gladdened the heart of law-and-order conservatives. But now that conservatives have given themselves over to unchecked greed and selfishness, to clawing and scratching their way up the food chain to the mortal peril of anyone who gets in their way, increasingly huddled inside gated or otherwise locked security zones, there's something amazingly simple and touching about Wagner's gently ineffectual Nightwatchman, who turns out to be, really, quite as effectual as he needs to be.

* * *

Yesterday afternoon I was trying to find the chapter on the DVD that contains the Nightwatchman's first appearance, and couldn't figure out how to do it, so I wound up watching all of Acts I and II, which are on a single disk. You know, it's a pretty darned decent performance. Horst Stein is hardly an illuminating conductor, but at least he conducts the damned piece, the cast is really quite strong, and the staging and set design by Wolfgang Wagner (the composer's surviving grandson, who ran the festival jointly with his far more daring older brother Wieland from its postwar reopening in 1951 until Wieland's death in 1966) are quite effective.

The Met has another Meistersinger performance tonight, with two more to follow. By all means go if you're so inclined. I just think you'd do better to rent or buy the 1984 Bayreuth video.