Forbidden Pleasures: Michael Fuller enjoys the first French production of ‘Das Liebesverbot’

Review of Das Liebesverbot, directed Clément, conducted Trinks, Mulhouse, 2016.

November 2016, Volume 10, Number 3, 76–7.

‘The reader is hardly likely ever to see a performance of Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot or Rienzi’, wrote Ernest Newman in 1949. How times are changing. The last four years have seen performances of Das Liebesverbot in Frankfurt, Leipzig and London (the first available on CD, the others reviewed in The Wagner Journal, viii/2 and x/1 respectively): now, hot on the heels of Kasper Holten’s recent production in Madrid, comes this French première of Wagner’s grosse komische Oper, from Opéra National du Rhin. Wagner may later have dismissed this work as ‘atrocious, abominable, nauseating’, but after 180 years of neglect audiences are now being given the opportunity to make up their own minds.