From Magdeburg to Leipzig, via Palermo: Mark Berry assesses Leipzig Opera’s bicentenary staging of ‘Das Liebesverbot’

Review of Das Liebesverbot, directed Stiehl, conducted Foremny, Leipzig, 2013.

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 70–73.

If only in one respect, Das Liebesverbot, Wagner’s second completed opera, marked a signal advance upon his first, Die Feen. It was performed in his lifetime – once, in Magdeburg, on 29 March 1836, in what Wagner, in Mein Leben, would describe as a ‘totally muddled performance’, such that the ‘material […] remained utterly obscure to the public’. For the second performance, there appeared to be only three people in the stalls, ‘Frau Gottschalk with her husband and a very conspicuous Polish Jew in full costume.’ Drama of a rather different kind, however, ensued behind the stage ...