Das Liebesverbot
| Das Liebesverbot | |
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| Opera by Richard Wagner | |
1922 vocal score with illustration by Franz Stassen
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| Librettist | Richard Wagner |
| Language | German |
| Based on | Shakespeare's Measure for Measure |
| Premiere | 29 March 1836 Magdeburg |
Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, WWV 38), is an early opera in two acts by Richard Wagner, with the libretto written by the composer after Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Described as a Große komische Oper, it was composed in 1834, and Wagner conducted the premiere in 1836 at Magdeburg. Poorly attended and with a lead singer who forgot the words and had to improvise, it was a resounding flop and its second performance had to be cancelled after a fist-fight between the prima donna's husband and the lead tenor broke out backstage before the curtain had even risen; only three people were in the audience. It was never 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 modelled 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.
The opera was rarely performed in the following hundred years. In the United Kingdom, the first performance was given on 16 February 1965 at the Collegiate Theatre of the University of London. In North America its most successful revival was in 1983, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, but its fully staged premiere took place on 19 July 2008 at the Glimmerglass Festival in a production by Nicholas Muni. The cast was led by Mark Schnaible as Friedrich and Claudia Waite as Isabella; Corrado Rovaris conducted. In 1994 Das Liebesverbot was performed at the Wexford Opera Festival. The first fully staged performance in the United States was at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY, in the summer of 2008. In 2009, a concert production was presented at the International Festival of Young Singers at the Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsberg plus a staged production at the Staatstheater Braunschweig in October. In 2013, 200 years after the composer's birth, it was performed in Bayreuth for the first time. A production of the Oper Leipzig was shown in the Oberfrankenhalle, a hall for sports, because Wagner had banned his early operas from the Festspielhaus. It was staged by Aron Stiehl with elements of operetta and revue; Constantin Trinks conducted the Gewandhausorchester. Since 2011 a production of this work has formed part of the repertoire of Helikon Opera Moscow. In Romania it was staged at the Cluj-Napoca Hungarian Opera (premiere 24 September 2015). In 2016 it was staged by the Teatro Real, Madrid.
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