Wagner worked out the drama of his first opera, Die Hochzeit ("The Wedding"), in 1833, but his sister Rosalie\'s antipathy to the gory and gruesome subject turned him against the work after he had written only some thirty or forty pages of the score—an Introduction, chorus and septet. The style has little individuality, though the chorus of female voices is not without charm. The septet, however, is an excellent piece of work for a boy of nineteen,—lucid, freely written, and with a certain amount of dramatic differentiation in some of the vocal parts.
His first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), was written during his stay at Würzburg in 1833. The story, which may be read in Mein Leben or any of the biographies of Wagner, has long lost any interest it may once have possessed. In psychology and in structure alike the drama is very primitive. The magic element in it is fit only for the nursery, though it has to be observed that here we have for the first time that notion of "redemption" that plays so large a part in Wagner\'s thinking to the very end of his life. The construction is formal and cumbersome: the two chief lovers have as a foil two subordinate lovers, while set off against these is a third pair, who provide a sort of comic interest; the whole past, present and future are explained in recitatives; everybody of any importance has his aria or his share in a concerted piece, and each Act ends with an imposing ensemble. The stage apparatus is romantic to the last degree. The music, however, is decidedly interesting. The third Act, in spite of a few strokes that get home, is much inferior to the other two, for which the fact that it was written in a month may be answerable. But the first two Acts and the overture are full of striking things. There is no question as to the thorough competence of Wagner\'s technique at this time: everything flows with the utmost ease and clearness from his pen. The opera has indeed a poise of manner and a unity of style that we do not find in some of the more mature works of his first period. In the Flying Dutchman, for example, there is a good deal of almost hobbledehoy awkwardness,—a sort of cubbish clumsiness, though any discerning observer could have seen even in those days that this was a cub of a leonine breed, that would some day swallow up most of the other animals in the menagerie. There is nothing of this cubbishness, this stumbling over his own good intentions, in The Fairies. Such as the ideas are,—and of course they never rise to anything like the height of the best things in the Flying Dutchman—they are expressed without effort, in an idiom and with a technique precisely congruous with them. Aria, duet, ensemble, dramatic contrast, dramatic transition,—the young composer is equal to whatever problem may be set him. The musical style as a whole reminds us of Weber and Marschner, but there is plenty of unmistakable Wagner in it. We are constantly meeting with progressions, turns of phrase, and devices that have been made familiar to us by the later operas. How like a score of melodies in Tannh?user and Lohengrin is the following, for example—
When he wants to work up the excitement at the entry of Arindal he does it precisely in the way he whips up our interest in the coming of the hero in the second Act of Tristan and Isolde—by a series of breathless reiterations of the same figure—
When he has joy to express, he does so by means of the same ascending, bubbling phrases that he uses in the duet between Tannh?user and Elisabeth (vocal score, p. 157, &c.) [397]—
LORA: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden, und alle
ARINDAL: So viele Not im Heimatlande, &c.
MORALD: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden,
And although the duet between Drolla and her lover Gernot is subcomic in intention, their manner of rushing into each other\'s arms is precisely that of Tristan and Isolde—
DROLLA: Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! \'tis thou, \'tis thou!
GERNOT: Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! \'tis thou, \'tis thou, \'tis thou, \'tis thou, \'tis thou, \'tis thou, &c.
The style is frequently mature beyond the composer\'s actual years,—the admirable finish to the scene between Arindal and the others, for example (full score, p. 111), where the vocal themes are taken up by the orchestra and played out in a beautifully managed diminuendo; or the perfect little picture of the fairy garden at the commencement of the first Act (I question whether so imaginatively conceived and skilfully coloured a garden scene is to be found anywhere in previous or contemporary opera); or the expressive scoring of Ada\'s cavatina (full score, pp. 114 ff.); or the septet at the end of the first Act; or the fine management of the chorus of beaten warriors at the beginning of the second Act, with the reiterated calls in the bass horn and trumpet; or the fine Schwung of the trio between Lora, Arindal and Morald (pp. 219 ff.); or the big aria of Ada in the second Act (pp. 251 ff.); or the charming theme that is used when the children are introduced. The born musical dramatist is seen in the variety of expression he can command even at this age; and one is struck by the first signs of the faculty that is so noticeable in the later Wagner,—that of always having something in reserve when a new and cumulative effect is needed. The larger the canvas to be covered, as in the final ensembles, the more resource does he show himself to possess. There is a good deal in The Fairies that is quite boyish,—much that is conventional, many things to provoke a smile. But it is equally certain that there was not another young man in Europe capable of writing such a work at that time. The overture, which was written a few days before the last touches were put to the third Act, is excellently handled throughout; the invention never flags, the technique never fails; it is his best work of this order until we come to the overture to the Flying Dutchman,—finer in idea, closer in texture, and surer in touch than the King Enzio Overture of 1832, and far beyond the Columbus, the Polonia, or the Rule Britannia. Altogether one imagines that, in spite of the old-fashioned quality of the libretto of The Fairies, one could listen to a stage performance of the opera with at least as much interest as to Rienzi. It was given for the first time in Munich under Hermann Levi in 1888, and between then and 1895 it ran to over fifty performances.
As we have seen, Das Liebesverbot ("The Ban on Love") was a product of the wild days of 1834-5, when he had momentarily turned against sobriety both in life and in art. In framing his libretto he passed over everything in Shakespeare\'s Measure for Measure that had a touch of moral gravity in it: he transports the action from Vienna to Sicily, brings the strait-laced viceroy Friedrich into the same focus as the other amorists, and makes the whole play an attack on "puritanical hypocrisy" and a laudation of "unrestrained physicalism." In the music he does his best to forget that "German style" in which, as he says, Die Feen had been written, and copies to the best of his ability the more sparkling style of the lighter Italian and French opera. The work is in two Acts,—the only opera of Wagner\'s in this form—and in its structure follows the ordinary pattern of the day. Occasionally the spoken word takes the place of recitative.
In 1866 Wagner gave the score of the opera to King Ludwig, prefacing it with a stanza in which he spoke of it as a sin of his youth, for which he hoped to find pardon in his protector\'s grace. Apparently he always adopted this depreciatory attitude towards the work in later life. Glasenapp tells us that Wagner liked the overture to Das Liebesverbot better than that to Die Feen, but thought the rest of Das Liebesverbot "horrible," except the "Salve regina c?li."[398] A perusal of the score, however, will convince most people that he underrated the interest and the value of it. It almost invariably fails when it aims at expressing serious feeling; but the gay and humorous scenes are admirable, and the youthful gusto of the whole thing is irresistible. The general idiom may be a borrowed one, but for the most part Wagner uses it very skilfully, making at least as good a show with it as the ordinary French or Italian opera writer of the time. He has every trick of the trade at his finger-tips, every recipe for froth and foam and sparkle. He is as expert as any of them at lashing up the interest by the device of repeating a piquant figure a score of times: this, for example............