Shipshape in Lübeck: David Ames is impressed by a Hanseatic ‘Tristan’ despite some unfortunate cuts

It was in Lübeck that the adolescent Thomas Mann first became acquainted with the music dramas of Wagner, a composer about whom he would have a lot to say in his maturity. However, by 1908, when opera performances moved from an older venue to the newly-built Theater Lübeck, Mann had long since cleared off to Munich. Fortunately the conflagration of 28–9 March 1942 (the first of a series of firestorms in medieval city centres initiated by RAF Bomber Command), which cut a 300-metre-wide and 900-metre-long swathe through the ancient town, stopped a couple of blocks short of this stolid building, so one can still get some sense of what opera attendance might have been like for the immediate post-Buddenbrooks generation.