|
Mature or Immature?
RODERIC DUNNETT asks some questions
about 'Die Feen', a Wagner rarity performed
recently by Chelsea Opera Group
Die Feen ('The Fairies') is the Wagner opera that got away. Wagner started it while still nineteen, and had composed it, mostly in Würzburg where he was briefly chorus master, before his twenty first birthday. He never saw it performed, although it reached a production, in Munich, in the later 1880s, shortly after his death.
The Fairies is harder to classify than Das Liebesverbot (1835-6, Magdeburg), based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which does have occasional outings -- Brigitte Fassbaender directed it for Innsbruck, for instance, and it has occasionally featured as a sideshow at Bayreuth...
Copyright © 7 April 2013
Roderic Dunnett,
Coventry UK
|
