I saw my first Wagner opera yesterday at the Wiener Volksoper (Vienna People’s Opera, the second major opera house in Vienna). Wagner operas don’t have a very good reputation. They tend to be very long and not very easy to comprehend. At last this is what I had heard before.

I won’t say that I don’t understand this bad reputation, in fact yesterdays performance of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) took more than five hours, but I have to say that I enjoyed the evening. The production was very good and only during a lengthy scene in the third act I got a bit bored and my bum started to hurt. But this was bearable and the endurance was rewarded with a great final.