Richard Wagner's opera Das Liebesverbot is performed…
March 1836 CE
A comic opera in two acts, with the libretto written by the composer after Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, it was composed in early 1836 and Wagner conducted the premier
Poorly attended and with a lead singer who forgot the words and had to improvise, it is a resounding flop and its second performance has to be cancelled after a fist-fight between the prima donna's husband and the lead tenor breaks out backstage before the curtain has even risen; only three people are in the audience.
It will never be performed again in Wagner's lifetime.
Restrained sexuality versus eroticism plays an important role in Das Liebesverbot; themes that recur throughout much of Wagner's output, most notably in Tannhäuser, Die Walküre and Tristan und Isolde.
In each opera, the self-abandonment to love brings the lovers into mortal combat with the surrounding social order.
In Das Liebesverbot, because it is a comedy, the outcome is a happy one: unrestrained sexuality wins as the orgiastic carnival of the entire population goes rioting on after curtain-fall.
Wagner's second opera, and his first to be performed, has many signs of an early work: the style is modeled closely on contemporary French and Italian comic opera.
It is also referred to as the forgotten comedy, in that only two of Wagner's works are comedies, the other being Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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