Saturday afternoon and Siruis Met radio is playing a wonderful 1995 Meistersinger: Levine; Weikl, Heppner, Matilla. Rene Papa was the Night Watchman. So he would have been 31.
Anyway, we're not at the start of Act III, Scene 2, where all the various guilds make their entrance. And it strikes me how very much like the scene with the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz. I wonder if Harburg and Arlen were conscious of this.
Die Meistersinger is very long. When I saw it at the Met over Thanksgiving weekend right after 9/11, many people left immediately after the great quintet at the end of the first scene of the last act. I hadn't anticipated how overwhelming all the stuff about "holy German art" would be.
Meistersinger is an exceptional work of art, but like others, I too wish it had ended without all the bombast.
The normal thing would be embed the terrifying 1924 Furtwangler Prelude to Act I. Instead, here's the cast I saw that evening in New York - Pape, who was Pogner in this production is not in this scene:
