278. Das Liebesverbot (Wagner)

• Opera in 2 acts
• Composer / librettist: Richard Wagner
• First performed: Stadttheater Magdeburg, Germany, 29^th March 1836, conducted by the composer

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Characters

FRIEDRICH, governor of Sicily	Bass-baritone	Gräfe
LUZIO, a young nobleman	Tenor	Ignaz Freimüller
CLAUDIO, a young nobleman	Tenor	Schreiber
ANTONIO, their friend	Tenor
ANGELO, their friend	Baritone	Friedrich Krug
ISABELLA, Claudio’s sister	Soprano	Karoline Pollert
MARIANA, novice in a monastery	Soprano	Mathilde Limbach
BRIGHELLA, captain of the watch	Baritone	Wilhelm Kneisel
DANIELI, an innkeeper	Bass
DORELLA	Soprano	Schindler
PONZIO PILATO, Danieli’s servant	Tenor
Nuns, judges, guards, townspeople, musicians	Chorus

Setting: Palermo [Sicily], 16^th century

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Here’s a fun party game: get a group of classical music enthusiasts who have never heard the work, and get them to guess which composer wrote the overture. It is completely unWagnerian: manic and catchy, molto vivace, allegro con fuoco; there are castanets, tambourines, and triangles galore.

Das Liebesverbot may well be Wagner’s most likeable opera, and should have been his most beloved work. If only its first performance had been a success! As it is, the première was a fiasco – sending the composer down the path of holy German art and 17-hour music dramas.

In 1834, the young Wagner, later the most Teutonic of composers, proclaimed that French and Italian composers, with their ‘catchy’ melodies and lighter, more flexible orchestration, wrote better operas than the Germans (‘too learned and too intellectual to create warm human figures’ – no comment).¹ His dream at this time was, like Meyerbeer, to go to Italy and learn how to write for the voice. He loved Bellini (and even wrote extra numbers for Norma). As an old man, he secretly went to hear Rossini’s Barber (but don’t tell his Wagnerites, he said – zitti, zitti, piano, piano.) He was an enthusiast of Auber, and later, when he discovered La Juive, of Halévy, whom he held up as an example for German composers to follow.

In Das Liebesverbot, Wagner set out to emulate Italian and French examples, with a view to having the work performed in Berlin and, ultimately, Paris. It is exhilarating in a way few Wagner operas are – the brilliant overture in the style of Herold’s Zampa (it out-Hérolds Hérold, so to speak), dancing rhythms, imaginative use of percussion, lots of big ensembles, and an impressive elaborate multi-section finale. There are passages of lyrical beauty, such as Isabella’s aria or her duets with Friedrich and Claudio. And the opera celebrates Italian pleasure in life and loving over German high-mindedness!

It also paid tribute to one of Wagner’s great heroes, Shakespeare. “Shakespeare was indeed the mightiest poet of all time, but his artwork was not yet the work for every age; not his genius, but the incomplete and merely will-ing, not yet can-ning, spirit of his age’s art had made him but the Thespis of the tragedy of the future.” Shakespeare was “a universal man, a very god”, a twain Prometheus to music’s Beethoven. Shakespeare, Wagner declared on another occasion, must have been rather like himself.

Wagner took Shakespeare’s problem play Measure for Measure, and moved it from Vienna (an apt locale for a work so full of sexual hysterics, Harold Bloom thought) to Sicily. “I robbed it of its prevailing earnestness, and thus remoulded it after the pattern of Das Junge Europa; free and frank physicalism gained, of its own sheer strength, the victory over puritanical hypocrisy.”²

The opera, Wagner³ wrote, boldly exalted “‘unrestrained sentimentality’. I took care to understand the grave Shakespearean theme only in this sense. I could see only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, his heart aflame with the most passionate love for the beautiful novice, who, while she beseeches him to pardon her brother condemned to death for illicit love, at the same time kindles the most dangerous fire in the stubborn Puritan’s breast by infecting him with the lovely warmth of her human emotion.

“The fact that these powerful features are so richly developed in Shakespeare’s creation only in order that, in the end, they may be weighed all the more gravely in the scales of justice, was of no concern of mine: all I cared about was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of such cruel moral censure. Thus I completely dropped Measure for Measure, and made the hypocrite be brought to justice only by the avenging power of love. I transferred the theme from the fabulous city of Vienna to the capital of sunny Sicily, in which a German viceroy, indignant at the inconceivably loose morals of the people, attempts to introduce a puritanical reform, and comes miserably to grief over it.”

So, alas, did Wagner. Das Liebesverbot was performed by the Magdeburg opera troupe, the company he conducted, and which had recently gone bankrupt; to please their conductor, the singers and orchestra rehearsed Wagner’s ambitious work in 10 days. “And since we were concerned not with a light comedy or farce, but with a grand opera, and one which, in spite of the trifling character of its music, contained numerous and powerful concerted passages, the undertaking might have been regarded almost as foolhardy.”⁴

The singers worked hard to learn their rôles, but were still uncertain on opening night; the tenor singing Luzio had not learnt his rôle, and threw in bits of Fra Diavolo and Zampa, and some stage business with a plume of feathers; and the publishers had not printed the libretto for the audience. “With the exception of a few portions played by the lady singers, which were favourably received, the whole performance, which I had made to depend largely upon bold, energetic action and speech, remained but a musical shadow-play, to which the orchestra contributed its own inexplicable effusions, sometimes with exaggerated noise.”⁵ “The representation was like a dream to us all: no human being could possibly get so much as an idea what it was all about; yet there was some consolation in the fact that applause was plentiful.”⁶

The second performance was a disaster, and really needs the Marx Brothers to do it justice. Wagner charged ‘full’ prices for the opera company’s farewell performance, so only three people came. (One was “a Polish Jew in full dress”.) “Suddenly the most incredible commotion occurred behind the scenes. Herr Pollert, the husband of my prima donna (who was acting Isabella), was assaulting Schreiber, the second tenor, a very young and handsome man taking the part of Claudio, and against whom the injured husband had for some time been nursing a secret rancour born of jealousy. It appeared that the singer’s husband, who had surveyed the theatre from behind the drop-scene with me, had satisfied himself as to the style of the audience, and decided that the longed-for hour was at hand when, without injuring the operatic enterprise, he could wreak vengeance on his wife’s lover. Claudio was so severely used by him that the unfortunate fellow had to seek refuge in the dressing-room, his face covered with blood. Isabella was told of this, and rushed despairingly to her raging spouse, only to be so soundly cuffed by him that she went into convulsions. The confusion that ensued amongst the company soon knew no bounds: they took sides in the quarrel, and little was wanting for it to turn into a general fight, as everybody seemed to regard this unhappy evening as particularly favourable for the paying off of any old score and supposed insults. This much was clear, that the couple suffering from the effects of Herr Pollert’s conjugal resentment were unfit to appear that evening. The manager was sent before the drop-scene to inform the small and strangely assorted audience gathered in the theatre that, owing to unforeseen circumstances, the representation would not take place.”⁷

Wagner had intended Shakespearean high comedy on-stage, not knockabout farce behind the scenes. Perhaps it was the inspiration for the brawl at the end of Act II of Meistersinger.

“That was the end of my career as director and composer in Magdeburg, which in the beginning had seemed so full of promise and had been started at the cost of considerable sacrifice,” Wagner⁸ wrote. “The serenity of art now gave way completely before the stern realities of life. My position gave food for meditation, and the outlook was not a cheerful one. All the hopes that I and Minna [his wife] had founded upon the success of my work had been utterly destroyed.”

Das Liebesverbot’s three hours are divided into 11 numbers; Wagner, in his second work, thinks in enormous scenic units. The Act I introduction (No. 2) opens with a tavern brawl, and the arrest of several characters; the Viceroy (a German) has abolished carnival, and drunkenness and lechery will be punished by death. The laughing chorus “Der deutsche Narr” is striking. Claudio is condemned to death; his sweet aria, “Du kennest jenen stillen Ort”, leads into a big stretta. The next three numbers are all duets. That for the two nuns Isabella and Mariana (No. 3), “Göttlicher Frieden, himmlische Ruh”, which opens with pealing bells, combines bel canto (vocal lines a third apart) with Wagnerian religiosity; one orchestral phrase recurs in Tannhäuser a decade later. Brighella’s comic scene (No. 5) is Rossinian: an aria for buffo bass, and a sprightly, even Donizetti-ish, duet with the coquettish Dorella; it ends in another stretta. The finale (No. 6) is quite possibly the longest ever in opera, running to 178 pages. Just as in Rienzi Wagner would attempt to outdo every other grand opera, this seems like his attempt to surpass every opéra-comique and opera buffo finale. It is exhausting to listen to, and no doubt exhausting for the singers. Nevertheless, both the adagio passage in which Isabella implores Friedrich to be merciful, “Kennst du das Leid”, and the adagio section of the ensemble, “Sie schweiget in stummem Schmerz”, are quite beautiful. The stretta itself, however, seems unending, and rather commonplace.

Act II begins (No. 7) with Claudio alone in the prison garden; his aria “O meine Julia” is lovely if short; it is the prelude to a grand duet with his sister Isabella: Claudio is at first resolved to die for his sister’s honour, but brother and sister part on bad terms. The Terzett (No. 9) contains some pretty passages where the voice rises by semitones; at 30-odd pages, it again shows Wagner writing ‘big’. Friedrich’s Scene and Aria (No. 10), “Ein Hauch von ihrem warmen Atem nur”, is one of the score’s most serious pieces: the cabaletta (expressing his joy that Isabella has agreed to meet him) goes with a swing, but darkens, sounding more like mature Wagner. Indeed, the translation anticipates Tristan: “Oh cruel joy, delicious torture, when death is one with love’s delight, I’ll taste with her the cup of rapture, and sink in love to endless night.” Wagner obviously had Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in mind when he wrote the finale (No. 11): characters hide in bushes to spy on others, there is a rendez-vous in a pavilion, the villain meets a woman who is really his wife in disguise, and his public disgrace puts things to rights. There is a brilliant allegro vivace chorus, “jubelt in das Fest hinein”, while Luzio’s couplets celebrating hedonism is as racy as anything Offenbach wrote: “Let law and order go to bed… We’ll know no law but our delight! We keep the carnival tonight, we claim our pleasure as our right.” The opera ends with the unmasking of the viceroy, the return of the king, and an oompah march played by stage band.

When Wagner came to Paris in 1839, he hoped to have Das Liebesverbot staged there, in French translation. Meyerbeer had arranged to have it put on at the Théâtre de la Renaissance – which went bankrupt. (The cunning Jew planned it that way, Wagner muttered.) Three pieces were performed before the Opéra director Édouard Monnais and Eugène Scribe – but by then, Wagner considered it “superficial”.

Indeed, musicologists have tended to agree. Hadow⁹ snootily dismisses it as “a péché de jeunesse of no account in our estimate of Wagner’s career”; Jacobs¹⁰ finds it “garish”; and Newman does not discuss it at all.

Yet it is Wagner’s equivalent of Benvenuto Cellini, a comic opera, full of invention, whose failure haunted his career. While not in the same class as Berlioz’s work, there is much to enjoy. Oh, and it’s funnier (and shorter) than Meistersinger.

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Recordings

Listen to: Raimund Herincx (Friedrich), April Cantelo (Isabella), Alexander Young (Luzio), and Elizabeth Young, with the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Edward Downes, London, 1976.

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Works consulted

• Richard Wagner, My Life, authorised translation, London: Constable, 1963.
• Richard Wagner, “Autobiographical Sketch”, in Wagner on Music and Drama, trans. H. Ashton Ellis, New York: Dutton, 1964.
• Sir W. H. Hadow, Richard Wagner, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1934.
• Robert L. Jacobs, The Master Musicians Series: Wagner, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974.
• Phil’s Opera World.

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1. Jacobs, p. 11. ↩︎
2. Wagner, “Autobiographical sketch”. ↩︎
3. Wagner, My Life, pp. 101–102. ↩︎
4. Wagner, My Life, p. 139. ↩︎
5. Wagner, My Life, p. 140. ↩︎
6. Wagner, “Autobiographical sketch”. ↩︎
7. Wagner, My Life, pp. 147–48. ↩︎
8. Wagner, My Life, p. 148. ↩︎
9. Hadow, p. 36. ↩︎
10. Jacobs, p. 13. ↩︎