Problem Plays and Flawed Operas

In order to understand the adaptation, it may be useful to first summarize Shakespeare's plot. A tale of ‘mortality and mercy in Vienna’ (I.i.44), Measure for Measure begins when Duke Vincentio leaves his city in the hands of the puritanical deputy Angelo, with the more senior official Escalus as his aide.Footnote ¹⁶ The young and otherwise upstanding nobleman Claudio becomes the first victim of Angelo's crackdown on vice when he is sentenced to death for engaging in premarital sex with his fiancée. Lucio, a friend of Claudio's, successfully convinces nun-to-be Isabella to temporarily return to the secular world and plea for her brother's release. Angelo agrees to show mercy, but only if he is permitted to take her virginity. She consents to the arrangement after consulting with ‘Friar Lodowick’, the disguised duke who has in fact not left the city, and who proposes to resolve the issue with one of the ‘bed trick’ ploys popular in many other early modern comedies. By swapping Isabella for Angelo's own abandoned fiancée Mariana, he suggests, they will manage to get the regent to fulfil his marital obligations (common-law views at the time held consummation to be one way of satisfying a marriage contract) while simultaneously exposing his hypocrisy and demonstrating Claudio's sentence to be unjust.Footnote ¹⁷

Vincentio ‘returns’ to the city as Angelo attempts to renege on his promise (unaware that he has actually slept with the disguised Mariana). He hears Isabella's case and metes out judgement in the form of marriages for everyone. Claudio is freed and reunited with his fiancée, Angelo is forced to follow through on his proposal to Mariana, Lucio is to marry the prostitute he impregnated (a minor subplot) and, lastly, the Duke proposes to Isabella, whose curious silence at play's end leaves her fate in the hand of stage directors. Because none of the characters save Claudio is particularly pleased by these affairs, and Isabella herself seems ambivalent at best about the unexpected proposal, the ending has left audiences past and present somewhat baffled.

Measure for Measure has elicited a remarkably wide range of opinions since its earliest performances. In one of the first recorded comments on the work, John Dryden laments that it was ‘so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment’.Footnote ¹⁸ Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765, found ‘the light or comick part[s]’ to be ‘very natural and pleasing’ but thought the ‘grave scenes’ to evince ‘more labour than elegance’. Coleridge found it more thoroughly and profoundly disturbing. Its comic elements he called ‘disgusting’ and its serious ones ‘horrible’; to use J.W. Lever's paraphrase, he considered it to be ‘the most painful of Shakespeare's dramas’.Footnote ¹⁹ The work is frequently grouped amongst the author's so-called ‘problem plays’, a term originally coined by F.S. Boas in Shakespeare and His Predecessors (1896) to foreground the seemingly unsolvable moral problems featured in a number of the playwright's works written around 1600.

This early definition might strike us as surprising, considering that Shakespeare's works are frequently associated with these sorts of moral complications even among the general public, but there were particular issues regarding the plays’ endings and overall moods that sat differently for Boas (and others) and which caused particular unease for early spectators. Besides Measure for Measure, the scholar included All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet – this last ‘distinguished from the others by its tragic ending, but … akin to them in its general temper and atmosphere’. At the ends of these plays, Boas asserts, ‘our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome’.Footnote ²⁰ With Measure for Measure specifically, he cites its ‘deeply reflective tone, its brooding sense of the pollution spread by lust in the single soul and in society at large and the shivering recoil of the man of phantasies from the mystery of the unknown hereafter’ (all issues, moreover, shared with Hamlet). Along these lines, he suggests also that ‘Claudio's gloomy meditations on death sound like an echo from the soliloquies of the Danish Prince’ and that ‘this wealth of philosophic thought, this concern with the deepest issues of life here and beyond the grave’ give Measure for Measure ‘a massive weight which the original framework of plot might well have seemed too slight to bear’.Footnote ²¹

Later scholars have stressed similar issues. Richard Wheeler notes that the play ‘open[s] onto psychological conditions central to tragedies contemporaneous with them’ and Yvonne Nilges suggests that at times it offers even more ‘radical’ and ‘disillusioned’ reflections on death and the theatrum mundi topos than can be found in Macbeth.Footnote ²² Writing more recently, E.L. Risden notes a tendency for the idea of the problem play to be linked with issues of genre classification, showing how critics will also use the term to ‘indicate plays that defy easy categorization’.Footnote ²³ Risden's monograph also raises other significant points. He argues that despite the ambiguous nature of the very term ‘problem play’, the concept remains useful since it points our attention to ‘immediate interpretive difficulties’ we experience in the course of studying certain plays. He suggests, furthermore, that it remains useful not only when we find a certain work ‘elusive or difficult or because we must struggle to unpack its themes, but rather when we find difficulties in the play that inhibit us from understanding the generic clues that direct our emotional as well as intellectual responses’.Footnote ²⁴ Notwithstanding its ambiguity, then, the idea of the problem play in fact resonates well with Wagner's adaptation and might well help explain the similar reactions its critics have had.

The issues begin with Wagner's radical alterations to the plot. The Duke, a central player in Shakespeare's original, is entirely absent from Das Liebesverbot. We are told instead of an unnamed king who returns to Palermo (Wagner moved the play to Italy, for reasons discussed below) only during the closing bars of the opera: he takes no part in the prior stage action. As a result of this change, Isabella becomes much more central in plotting the downfall of the deputy, now the Viennese governor (Stadthalter) Friedrich. In addition to outlawing sexual licentiousness and revelry, however, Wagner's Friedrich decides to cancel the impending Carnival festivities, too, symptomatic as they are of the city's moral degeneracy. Meanwhile Lucio – now Luzio – takes on a more central role, appearing as a sort of revolutionary leader for the people. He champions Claudio's cause in a larger attempt to expose the flaws of imposing cold, puritanical (here standing in for a larger Germanic) bureaucracy upon the fiery, sensual (Italian) people. Isabella is still a devout novice at the nearby convent, where Mariana now also resides.Footnote ²⁵ Her wooing of Friedrich plays out largely as in the original, with a few nods along the way to Le nozze di Figaro. Many of the lower-class characters are cut, remoulded and recast, as we shall see. In the absence of the true ruler, justice is carried out in the end not by the sovereign, but by the people, who collectively enjoin Friedrich and Mariana to wed, here played out amidst the resumed Carnival festivities. Although there was now no Duke to propose to Isabella, Wagner still felt that the leading lady was entitled to her own happy ending; he chose to couple her off with a pining Luzio.

His adaptation seems to have been doomed from the start. After only a single performance, for which the libretto had not been printed in time for audience members to follow along, it was cancelled shortly before curtain on day two (ML, I: 147–8). Several of the cast members got into a violent altercation backstage as the result of a love affair recently come to light, and there were only three audience members that day anyway, two of them Wagner's creditors, hoping to collect in wake of the opera's anticipated success. It then went unstaged for nearly a century, until 1923. It has enjoyed a modest amount of attention from performers recently – at least ten professional, staged productions in seven countries within the last decade or soFootnote ²⁶ – but academic discussion remains scant, and largely focused on only two issues.Footnote ²⁷ Some scholars look for early signs of the composer's later techniques. The two leitmotifs that appear within the work (one for Friedrich's ban on love and the other for the Carnival) are frequently mentioned in this regard, as is the Salve Regina Coeli melody Wagner gives to Isabella in the opera's second scene. Associated with the ‘Dresden Amen’, the melody's later reappearance in Tannhäuser and Parsifal was remarked upon even by Wagner himself.Footnote ²⁸ Other writers critique the work along the lines applied to Wagner's other early operas, which are not deemed Wagnerian enough, often by dint of their clearer indebtedness to contemporary operatic practices and conventions when compared to the composer's later output. Alternatively, as a mere adaptation of a great work of (capital-L) ‘Literature’, it is inherently imperfect and therefore incomparable to the original. The latter attitude can be discerned in the reception histories of countless other operatic (and, later, filmic) adaptations of Shakespeare.

Wagner's classification of Das Liebesverbot as a ‘Große komische Oper’ suggests a different perspective. On its face, it may seem to leave little doubt as to the composer's classification of his work, but it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the designation more carefully. After all, with only one exception, Wagner assigns each of his completed operatic projects a classification that is at least marginally different from each of the others.Footnote ²⁹ Considering also the central role that titling or naming serves within the plots of many of the works themselves (Lohengrin, Siegfried and Parsifal most obviously), it is clear that finding the proper nomenclature for things is important to Wagner. Indeed, he addresses the question of genre naming explicitly in his essay ‘On the name “Musikdrama”’ (1872), where he reacts negatively to the term as it had come to be applied to his works. His latter-day ambivalence on the question of genre is summed up rather well when he asserts that

He adds on the following page the by-now famous line about gladly wishing he could refer to his works as ‘deeds of music made visible’ (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik) but ‘that would have been quite an art-philosophical title, fit to grace the catalogue of the future Polonii of our art-struck courts’.Footnote ³⁰ The references here to Polonius, who speaks of ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene indivisible, or poem unlimited’ (and more besides if we look to the Folio edition of the play), signals Wagner's sympathy for Shakespeare's skewering of those who might be pedantic about questions of classification.Footnote ³¹

But if a later ambivalence about genre points towards what Lydia Goehr describes as Wagner's encouragement ‘to cease thinking about names and titles as merely descriptive or classificatory and to start thinking about them as pointing towards an unnameable ideal of a form of art that was preferably left unnamed’, we are less likely to find such a logic in the pre-Dresden period of the composer's life.Footnote ³² Indeed, even with the work which was to follow Das Liebesverbot, Wagner admits that ‘as far as my Rienzi I had it only in my mind to write an “opera”’. He suggests, in his ‘Communication to My Friends’ (1851), that he was opting in his first three pieces to focus on ‘ready-made stories … as had already been fashioned with deliberate attention to artistic form’ (PW, I: 362). It is of course also important to bear in mind the composer's penchant for self-fashioning. Such retrospective explanations of his earlier working methods were not uncommon at the time, when Wagner was already trying to distance himself from his earlier compositional practices and was thus somewhat revisionist in nature when compared with writings closer in time to his work on the opera such as his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ written a decade prior. Still, given Wagner's distaste for German opera at the time of his work on Das Liebesverbot, it is likely that the Große komische Oper designation was a nod to the French and Italian traditions rather than German comedic opera. The language of his librettos notwithstanding, Wagner's early works are saturated with references to both French grand opéra and opéra-comique, as Thomas Grey has persuasively argued. With Das Liebesverbot in particular, Grey sees a ‘more a semiseria work than a comic one, and of distinctly “grand” proportions at that’. The ‘sunny, southern “local colour” of the choral-ensemble tableaux, chœurs dansés and ballet movements’ point to such influences, he suggests.Footnote ³³ As noted above, however, the ‘ready-made’ form of Measure for Measure was already questionable in its own time, and Das Liebesverbot did not do much to resolve matters. For the time being, it is perhaps best to see the designations of Wagner's first three works as nods to their ‘necessary dependence upon inherited conventions and recognizable idioms’, in Alessandra Campana's words, even if their unique classifications by the composer point towards the operatic equivalent of Friedrich Schlegel's assertion that ‘every poem is its own genre’.Footnote ³⁴

Shakespeare in Translation

If these tendencies towards genre dissatisfaction and reform begin to hint at another connection between playwright and composer, we should also bear in mind that Wagner's experiences with Shakespeare were fundamentally shaped by issues of translation – in some cases, fairly free translation. In his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ of 1843, Wagner writes of his youthful determination to ‘become a poet’. He recounts trying to learn English ‘so as to gain an accurate knowledge of Shakespeare’ and, while he admits to soon setting that language aside, Shakespeare still ‘remained [his] exemplar’ (PW, I: 4).Footnote ³⁵ Telling here is his confession of ‘leaving English to one side’. The composer was never to master the playwright's native language, despite his dreams of doing so: even later in life Cosima was still writing in her diary about her husband's ‘frustrating afternoon … spent trying to read Shakespeare in English’ that prompted him, with a characteristically dismissive attitude, to assert that ‘Italian was undoubtedly more suited to Dante's genius’ than English was to Shakespeare's anyway (CD, I: 942; 31 October 1882). Of course, the idea of a ‘German Shakespeare’ representing an improvement upon the original was not unique to Wagner's thinking or solely the product of a bruised ego; the publication of the so-called Schlegel–Tieck translations of the playwright's corpus spurred authors and critics alike to champion the idea of a ‘German Shakespeare’ for well over a century thereafter.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, Hermann Ulrici, whose work on Shakespeare Wagner owned, once wrote of attempts to Germanicize (verdeutschen) the playwright as an effort ‘to do our utmost to make sure that he becomes more and more what he already is: a German poet, in the truest and fullest sense of the word’.Footnote ³⁷ Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that, as Yvonne Nilges puts it, Wagner's ‘lifelong fascination with Shakespeare’ inevitably runs parallel with an equally ‘long-lasting dependence on second-hand sources’.Footnote ³⁸ Much as his tenuous grasp of Middle High German resulted in his reading works like Parzifal and the Nibelungenlied in modern German ‘translations’, Wagner's understanding of Shakespeare was similarly mediated through the act of translation rather than through a direct engagement with the English-language works themselves.

Though Wagner owned the Schlegel–Tieck translations of Shakespeare's plays, Nilges suggests that the composer acquired the 1839 second edition of Measure for Measure rather than the 1831 original and thus it was not the source he consulted in preparation for Das Liebesverbot.Footnote ³⁹ Several other translations of the play existed at the time, however, including Christoph Martin Wieland's Maaß für Maaß (1763), Friedrich Ludwig Schröder's similarly named translation from 1777 (published 1790), and Johann Joachim Eschenburg's Gleiches mit Gleichem, published the following year.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Simon Williams notes, the play in Schröder's translation enjoyed a brief run of success on the German stage – running for six performances in Hamburg the year it was published – but afterwards it by and large disappeared from the repertoire, ‘not to appear in Germany again, at least as a recognizably Shakespearean play, until well into the nineteenth century’.Footnote ⁴¹ Despite Williams's claim elsewhere that the edition is ‘relatively faithful to the original’, Schröder's version is still somewhat of a radical translation, with numerous cuts and copious modifications throughout (Mistress Overdone's character is cut entirely, for example).Footnote ⁴² The title page in fact lists the play much like a libretto might: nach Shakespear [sic] von Schröder, signalling that Shakespeare was more a point of departure than basis for a strict translation. Thus, despite Wagner's recounting of the many Shakespeare plays he saw from an early age thanks to his sister Rosalie's work with the Dresden Court Theatre (ML, I: 43–4), Measure for Measure would only have been familiar to him in print.

Nilges sees particular resonances between Wagner's opera and Wieland's translation, and suggests that version as the basis for Das Liebesverbot. Wieland's choice to designate Pompey as ‘Harlequin’ in speech-prefixes and his subsequent characterization of the bawd along the lines of the commedia dell'arte tradition clearly resonated with Wagner, as when the composer draws upon those same concepts in inventing Brighella, based on another stock character typical in commedia scenarios. A fixation on the play's lighter side might also account for Wieland's unique designation of the play as a Lustspiel (comedy) in his translation's subtitle – it was the only edition of the play so labelled at the time Wagner wrote his opera – and could have proven early justification for the composer's choosing to focus on those aspects of the play rather than the more serious ones. Certainly, young Wagner's interest in the commedia is well documented. Die Feen (1833), the composer's only other completed stage work at the time, was based on Carlo Gozzi's La Donna Serpente (1762), for instance, and Gozzi was a rigorous promoter and defender of the artform. Several of Wagner's later prose works endorse the form, too.Footnote ⁴³

David Trippett considers Nilges's proposition unfounded, countering that since the translation ‘is neither contained in [Wagner's] libraries nor mentioned in his correspondence, the circumstantial evidence must render the claim unsubstantiated’; he proposes instead the Schlegel–Tieck translation as Wagner's primary source.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, none of the extant Shakespeare translations in Wagner's libraries can be dated back to the period during which he was working on Das Liebesverbot: the 1851–52 Schlegel–Tieck editions currently a part of Wagner's Dresden library collection postdate the time period in which the composer sold off that library's contents to Heinrich Brockhaus in 1849.Footnote ⁴⁵ In light of such an incomplete picture of Wagner's personal effects, Nilges's assessment should not be dismissed quite so readily, especially since the rigorous attention paid to metre in the Schlegel–Tieck edition (as opposed to the freer prose translation offered in Wieland) was, at least later in life, frequently lambasted by Wagner himself.Footnote ⁴⁶ And it should also be remembered that, while Wagner was to praise Schlegel's work as a translator, he was critical of others whose work appeared in those volumes, including Tieck and Hermann Ulrici (who, with the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, edited a later 1867 edition of the collection, also owned by Wagner). Wolf Graf von Baudissin, who was actually the translator of Measure for Measure in the Schlegel–Tieck collections, is left unremarked upon. As we cannot know whether or not Wagner was aware of the particular translator behind this edition's version of the play, it would be problematic to state definitively whether or not he had found it wanting. The question must admittedly remain open, then, with further studies being needed.

The Act II courtroom scene (and its analogue in Wagner's opera) best demonstrates how these works interrogate the idea of law and order within broader religious and ethical debates of the time. Though the play's (and the opera's) central characters do not participate in the proceedings directly, nearly all of the important secondary characters appear therein to speak to matters of law and justice, sexual and moral corruption, political and personal responsibilities, and other topics besides. The scene features an authority figure (Escalus in Shakespeare, Brighella in Wagner) interrogating the perpetrators against the city's new laws. By giving voice to those who have transgressed against the sexual, moral and legal codes of Angelo's Vienna (or Friedrich's Palermo), as well as to the authorities responsible for enacting and enforcing those codes, Shakespeare and Wagner thematize explicitly the broader debates and ideological questions that preoccupy the main storylines of Isabella, Angelo, Marianna and the Duke. Wieland's version of the courtroom scene also provides a perfect example to support Nilges's abovementioned claims about Wagner's source material.Footnote ⁴⁷

There are in fact many similarities between Wieland's text and Wagner's opera aside from the shared allusions to the commedia dell'arte tradition discussed above. In both cases, translator and composer alike evidence a distaste for Shakespeare's bawdier humour, for example. ‘Whenever he picks up unmistakable sexual overtones in puns, dialogues or even whole passages of what he calls “disgusting immorality”’, Norbert Greiner asserts, ‘the translator usually takes a radically simple line – he just leaves them out.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Wieland's handling of the second-act courtroom scene omits mention of Pompey's ‘bum’, for example, in line with what Roger Paulin terms the translator's tendency to simply leave out instances of ‘gross coarseness’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Pompey's subsequent description of Mistress Overdone having nine husbands and being ‘overdone by the last’ (II.i.194) is similarly modified by Wieland, who opts rather to mistranslate; the Clown instead says that ‘Overdone was the last’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Wagner, too, decided to significantly modify the courtroom scene, substituting instead a confrontation between Brighella, who essentially replaces Escalus in the operatic version of the story, and two newly invented characters.Footnote ⁵¹ The first is Pontio Pilato, more or less the Wagnerian equivalent to Pompey. After the officer Brighella interrogates the bawd, he turns to Dorella, a character similar to Mistress Overdone but who serves in the composer's scenario as a love interest for him. In Shakespeare's original, the confrontation between Escalus and Pompey runs as follows:

Which becomes in Wagner:

The coarseness of the joke is smoothed over, unlike in the Schlegel–Tieck edition but much like in Wieland (where Escalus does not even ask the bawd about his last name), and the subsequent details of the city's licentiousness are curtailed, as they are throughout.Footnote ⁵³ Whereas Pompey does not receive his reprieve and take his exit for another thirty-plus lines in Measure for Measure, Wagner's Pontio Pilato is quickly sentenced to banishment and is summarily dismissed. Though Schlegel was to demonstrate a keen understanding of the comic characters and subplots in Shakespeare's plays, both Wieland and Wagner were either ambivalent or downright hostile to them.

In the case of Wieland, Simon Williams explains the edits as a product of the cultural prudishness of the times: eighteenth-century audiences were ‘generally squeamish’ when confronted with ‘any material that was in the slightest degree specific about sexual matters’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Wieland's translation bears this assertion out, with references to bawding, licentiousness and brothels frequently censored out of the text with only a hint of the meaning remaining. Within the courtroom scene, for instance, a self-redacted catchall term, H** Haus stands in place for Shakespeare's more varied references to ‘common houses’ and ‘bawd's houses’, while talk of bawding as a profession becomes H** Wirth or H** Wirtschaft – the omitted word in all cases being Hure (‘wench’, ‘prostitute’, ‘whore’). Other words and phrases are also altered to be less sexually suggestive.Footnote ⁵⁵

Over the course of Wieland's courtroom scene, prostitution is explicitly named only twice in the text. The first instance occurs where Elbow speaks of his wife, who, ‘if she had been a woman cardinally given, might have been accused in fornication, adultery and all uncleanliness’ at Overdone's brothel (II.i.75–77). The translator retains an uncensored reference to Hurerey, Ehebruch, und alle Unreinigkeit (p. 31), though perhaps because of the line's biblical allusions: the same ‘works of flesh’ are given in Galatians 5:19, where Luther's bible translates ‘adultery, fornication and uncleanliness’ with the exact same words. The second instance corresponds to Pompey's earlier-quoted interview with Escalus, where he suggests the magistrate, taking orders from ‘drabs and knaves’, need not fear ‘bawds’, either; the term in Wieland becomes die Kuppler und Kupplerinnen (‘pimps and whores’, p. 39). Elsewhere in the play, Wieland simply declares Pompey's vulgar wordplay untranslatable.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the case of Wagner's opera makes clear, such sentiments were also in evidence during the following century.

In a diary entry, Cosima reports on her husband's reading of Much Ado About Nothing, noting that the constables' scene was read ‘with less enjoyment, on account of the verbal jokes’ (CD, II: 474; 7 May 1880), and Margaret Inwood in her monograph mentions Wagner's ‘tut-tutting’ at other times about similar parts in other Shakespeare plays, ‘remarking what a pity it was that the great man should have been reduced to such a level by the low tastes of his audiences’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Wagner's assumptions about Shakespeare's alienation from his own bawdy humour once again resonates with Wieland's sentiments: the translator's commentary on another emended scene of low-class revelry in Henry IV, Part 1 suggests that ‘one must be an Englishman, see these scenes acted by Englishmen, and have a good amount of punch [wine] to the head to enjoy’ Falstaff's antics.Footnote ⁵⁸ In an earlier translation of King Lear, he even omitted a line of the Fool's because of its reference to a codpiece, declaring it something ‘so miserable that the translator cannot bring himself to savour it’. He does not demure quite as much in Measure for Measure, but the term is still partially redacted there, too.Footnote ⁵⁹

Though Wagner's similarly prudish remarks would come much later in his life, the composer's aversion to such comedy remains surprising given his stated aims in creating Das Liebesverbot. As we will see in more detail below, Wagner explains in his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ that he sought to ‘rob [the play] of its prevailing earnestness’ and have ‘free and frank physicalism [Sinnlichkeit]’ gain, ‘of its own sheer strength, the victory over Puritanical hypocrisy’ (PW, I: 10). But perhaps Wagner's embrace of physicalism and rejection of low humour are less contradictory than they appear. Even the toned-down version Wagner presented to his audiences was still deemed offensive by some. As Trippett notes, a colleague of the composer's in Leipzig refused to stage it at that city's Stadttheater ‘solely on account of its indecency’, and some of Wagner's wordplay – especially coming from the saintly Isabella – ‘proved unpalatable to a more conservatively minded social stratum’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nevertheless, as Brian Morris suggests, the composer's decision to omit ‘almost everything that has to do with prostitution’ (another trait shared with the Wieland edition, we might add) demonstrates that Wagner's ‘idea of free and uncloaked sensualism does not include total sexual license; his ideal society was not a permissive society’ and contained ‘a deep residual puritanism’ of its own.Footnote ⁶¹ Chris Walton similarly argues the opera ‘isn't really a paean to free love and unbridled sex in the southern sun’ but a plea for monogamy. The characters all ‘have a past that they want to put behind them’ he suggests, and the ending offers a ‘new start for everyone’.Footnote ⁶² Thus we can begin to see how Wagner, through Wieland, was able to take this problem play and turn it into an expression of liberation and subversion of contemporary German sexual mores, offering audiences a carnivalesque atmosphere of humour and revelry while at the same time still evincing an ethos of modesty and monogamy.

In tracing the affinities between Wieland's Maaß für Maaß and Wagner's opera, one other character is also worth bearing in mind: Lucio. As opposed to the coarse ‘Fantastic’ who speaks of ‘purchas[ing] many diseases’ (I.ii.45) under the roof of ‘Madam Mitigation’ (which is to say, at Mistress Overdone's brothel), Wieland describes him as a ‘Libertine’ in his dramatis personae listing. In his autobiography, Wagner similarly characterizes his Luzio as a ‘young Nobleman and scape-grace’ (junger Edelmann und jovalier Wüstling) (ML, I: 114; German ed., I: 122). In Das Liebesverbot, he falls in love with Isabella at first sight and repeatedly proposes to her. She accepts him by the end of the opera, but only after testing him; à la Figaro, Luzio is kept in the dark over the Isabella/Mariana ‘bed trick’ and is distraught at the possibility that she is actually willing to sleep with the regent to free her brother. This lovesick Luzio is a far cry from Shakespeare's Lucio who, upon receiving the news that he is to be wed to Kate Keepdown (with whom he had conceived a child), begs for mercy. He insists that ‘marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and hanging’ (V.i.520). But the downplayed vulgarity and coarseness in Wieland's translation resulted in a more sympathetic reading of the character than in Shakespeare's original. Indeed, this final act of protestation against marrying the ‘punk’ is omitted in the German translation of the play altogether! The softer characterization is already suggested by the more ambivalent classification of Lucio as a ‘Libertine’ from the very start of the play. By Wieland's time, Nilges asserts, this term came to carry additional connotations of a ‘free spirited’ person.Footnote ⁶³ It is this mischievous but ultimately harmless figure rather than the bawdy ‘Fantastic’ of Shakespeare's play that appears in Wagner. With these medial shifts in mind, let us now consider the opera itself in more detail.

Courtroom and Carnival: Authority in Das Liebesverbot

We earlier observed the contrast between Wagner's Luzio and Shakespeare's Lucio, noting Wieland's modified characterization as a possible source for the composer's own adjustments. I have likewise commented upon a portion of Shakespeare's second-act courtroom scene (the fifth number in Wagner's first act) for the purposes of analysing the subsequent removal of the coarse jokes and malapropisms uttered by Shakespeare's lower-class characters. But the second portion of Wagner's version of the scene – Brighella's confrontation with Dorella – is also worth further scrutiny. Just as Shakespeare's courtroom scene provided a forum for the work's secondary characters to discourse upon matters of moral, sexual and legal interest to the playwright, Wagner's version of the courtroom scene situates his own preoccupation with Young German ideologies and his more general anti-authoritarian leanings. Here, Wagner taps into the play's underlying carnivalesque atmosphere as a way of promoting his version of the ‘free and frank’ sexuality espoused by his literary contemporaries.

After Brighella sentences Pontio Pilato to banishment, the police bring in Dorella, the next offender against Friedrich's ban, here expanded beyond Angelo's original prohibition in Measure for Measure to include all sorts of licentiousness and merry-making, including, most importantly, the impending Carnival festivities. Dorella, it should be noted, contains traces of Mistress Overdone's character, despite persistent scholarly claims to the contrary.Footnote ⁶⁴ Though she is not actually the proprietress of the shop in the opera (Wagner allots ownership to Danieli, a bass role he invents) she does work there, and Brighella suggests that she ‘goes around everywhere seducing men’ and ignoring the ban on ‘love, carnival and wine’ imposed upon the city of Palermo by the German regent. In what is likely a nod to Overdone – ‘a bawd of eleven years’ continuance’ (III.i.454) with nine previous husbands to her name – Dorella begins trying to seduce the captain of the watch in an attempt to escape punishment. This scene is entirely fabricated by the composer; the brothel owner hardly factors into the story at all after the first act in Shakespeare. Yet the duet is clever, encapsulating many of the issues of the play within miniature and also serving as a bit of foreshadowing for the similar ‘higher class’ confrontation between Friedrich and Isabella shortly thereafter.Footnote ⁶⁵

During this confrontation in Measure for Measure Isabella tries Christian and, later, moralist and humanist arguments against the regent to persuade him to let her brother go, though these tactics are likely not what Claudio had originally envisioned. ‘Acquaint her with the danger of my state’, he asks of Lucio,

In his gloss, Lever proposes that Claudio is getting at an ‘application of psychology to the art of rhetoric’, but here his earlier point that the words prone, move and play all suggest sexual provocation seems more accurate. Certainly Lucio himself understands his friend's suggestions to imply that sexual advances, rather than rhetorical or psychological tactics, would be effective. When he fulfils his promise and asks Isabella to intercede for her brother, he prompts her to

The many asides he makes during Isabella's actual entreaty with Angelo drive the point home all the more, especially his ‘Ay, touch him: there's the vein’ (II.ii.74) and ‘O, to him, to him, wench! He will relent, He's coming: I perceive't’ (127–128). Though Isabella does not choose to take the sensual approach in Shakespeare, it is significant that her Wagnerian counterpart is more inclined to do so, perhaps in part thanks to Dorella's influences. Wagner justifies her presence in the opera by explaining that she was once in service to Isabella. After the latter vowed to enter the convent, Dorella seeks new employment in the ‘wine house’. Along these lines, it is suggestive to see the ‘prosperous art’ and the ‘prone and speechless’ dialects ‘such as move men’ are shown in Wagner's opera first by Isabella's (former) servant in advance of the novice's entrance. Dorella captures not only the essence of that carnivalesque, ‘free and frank’ sensuality Wagner saw at the centre of his adaptation, but also suggests that Isabella has learned a thing or two from her worldly servant. If this exchange calls to mind Despina's role in Così fan tutte, it would not be the only Mozartean reference the duet evokes. Much like ‘Là ci darem la mano’ in Don Giovanni, the seducer offers their would-be lover an enticing melody too catchy to pass up, and the seduction's success is proved musically when Dorella gets Brighella to sing to her tune, as can be seen in Example 1.

Ex. 1 We know the seduction has succeeded when the victim begins singing to the seducer's tune. Dorella makes her victory a bit more obvious than Don Giovanni does. Reproduced from Otto Singer's piano-vocal score (Weisbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1922): 178

This moment also points towards another strategy Wagner may have seen as latent in Shakespeare and magnified to extreme proportions: the theme of the carnival. As James Brophy has demonstrated, carnival festivities played an important role in the development of a ‘political public sphere’ in the early Vormärz period; state authorities were becoming increasingly concerned with the ‘free-thinking attitude that mocked social conventions’ and often took measures to censor aspects of carnival revelry.Footnote ⁶⁶ Prussian officials forbade masking during public carnivals in small towns and villages in the late 1820s, for instance, and in 1834 – only two years before the premiere of Wagner's opera – a more extensive attempt to curtail carnival festivities severely cut down the number of officially sanctioned festivals, with a greater degree of censorship and correspondingly higher police presence accompanying those which did occur.Footnote ⁶⁷ The ban on Carnival in Das Liebesverbot was more than just a timely coincidence, then. The contemporaneous real-world clampdown on such activities in fact served as the perfect context for Wagner to ‘uncover the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of such cruel moral censure’ (ML: I, 102). The opera thus served to drive home to his opera-going audience his own impression of Germany as both politically and morally repressive.

In the opera's courtroom scene, we see Dorella, a servant, completely get the better of the authority figure – a device certainly not unheard of in the comic genre (spoken or operatic), but significant in light of the other topsy-turvy, carnivalesque features of Das Liebesverbot and, to an extent, in the original play. What's more, Brighella himself can be seen to evince a carnivalesque role reversal, as his commedia dell'arte namesake was in fact the cunning and lusty tavern owner in many scenarios. Here, then, is a sort of double role reversal: the clever commedia character is elevated in Das Liebesverbot to a position of authority, only to be brought down once again by a woman who evinces those same tendencies his earlier counterpart tended to display in the Italian tradition. The literal staging of the carnival at the close of the opera offers of course the clearest example of revelry and role reversal. But Shakespeare's original, set in Vienna rather than Palermo, provides no equivalent scene, either at the end of the play or anywhere else. Indeed, as one scholar asserts, no one, ‘not even those who find no problems with this problem play’ would ‘fault the finale of Measure for Measure on grounds of excessive festivity’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Still, this is not to say that the idea of the carnivalesque is absent from the work.

Das Liebesverbot and the Carnivalesque

In his classic study of the topic, Bakhtin notes a ‘temporary suspension … of hierarchical rank created during carnival time’ as a ‘special type of communication impossible in everyday life’. This suspension of rank leads to the ‘creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating them from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The phrase ‘frank and free’ resonates with similar words used by Wagner to describe the mood he sought to depict in this opera, as we have seen above.Footnote ⁷⁰ In fact, Wagner draws much of his inspiration for the opera's carnivalesque atmosphere from subtler allusions in Shakespeare's original.

The Duke, speaking to a friar early in the play, remarks upon the degenerate state of Vienna in language that repeatedly references the overthrown hierarchies of law and order:

Because Vincentio has given his people ‘too much scope’ (I.iii.35), he admits, society has been completely overturned. Lucio gets at something similar in the following scene, too, when he insists that ‘use and liberty’ have ‘for long run by the hideous law/as mice by lions’ (I.iv.62–64). Kenneth Gross thus hits the mark when he suggests that the rituals of law in the play acquire the colouring of ‘a slightly frenetic, vengeful carnival’.Footnote ⁷¹

Bakhtin, who numbered Shakespeare amongst those Renaissance writers who made use of such themes, speaks of characters being degraded, brought down to earth and ‘turn[ing] their subject into flesh’ during the revelry of Carnival.Footnote ⁷² This degradation is precisely what Lucio attempts to inflict on Vincentio, who in turn tries to distance his image from the ‘fleshmonger’ (V.i.332) he is painted as by the Fantastic. Earlier in the play, Lucio suggests that if the (supposedly) absent Duke were still around, he would have ‘paid for the nursing of a thousand’ bastards ‘ere he would have hanged a man for the getting’ of one hundred. ‘He had some feeling of the sport’, Lucio claims: ‘he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy’ (III.ii.379–383). Vincentio (as ‘Lodowick’) replies, astonished, insisting that he had ‘never heard the absent Duke much detected for women’ (384–385). As a character who consciously attempts to distance himself from the action of world around him – ‘I have ever loved the life removed’ (I.iii.8) – the Duke is repeatedly reminded of his corporeal essence and all-too-human desires by way of Lucio, who, if Mistress Overdone is to be believed, had himself fathered a baby born on the eve of the previous years’ Carnival.Footnote ⁷³

Richard Wheeler comments of the Duke that his actions ‘pose problems regarding his place in the play that the comic design provides no coherent way of addressing’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Perhaps anticipating such criticism of this sort, or at least feeling the same way on an intuitive level, Wagner decides to excise Vincentio from the stage altogether. Though doing so may have resolved one problem of how to deal with some of the heavier aspects of this ostensible comedy (recall that he spoke of ‘robbing [the play] of its complete earnestness’ in his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’), the fact remains that the work does still often touch upon ‘psychological conditions’ that might be ‘more central to tragedies’, to return to an earlier point of Wheeler's about problem plays and Measure for Measure specifically. Friedrich's self-interrogation in Act II presents us with a glimpse of the regent's desires – a nexus of the sacred, sexual and criminal passions – that, when coupled with his stated inclination to redemption through death at the end of the opera, would seem to anticipate the characterization of many of his later dramatic heroes (the Dutchman, Kundry and others) rather than fitting with the themes Wagner seemed to espouse elsewhere in his große komische Oper.Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, Friedrich's characterization in Act II also calls to mind the ‘deeply reflective tone’ and ‘brooding sense of the pollution spread by lust in the single soul’ Boas discerned in Shakespeare's text and cited as one of the reasons for its designation as a problem play in the first place.Footnote ⁷⁶ The seeming disconnect between the young composer's desire to promote ‘free and frank’ sensuality (in line with his friends and colleagues who were associated with the broader Young Germany movement) and his desire to excise much of the bawdier merry-making and licentiousness of the original also offers another connection between the idea of the problem play and Wagner's own presentation of conflicting impulses and mixed moods throughout.

But since the Duke is the prime mover of much of the action – especially from the third act onwards – his excision meant that the composer had to significantly alter the plot structure for his opera, which would in turn effect the characterization of Isabella relative to her Shakespearean counterpart and alter some of the very themes of the play itself. Isabella, already a central character in Shakespeare's original, now gains an even more prominent role, becoming the active force for change in Das Liebesverbot. Wagner is very explicit about this in his ‘Communication to My Friends’, admitting that the character of Isabella was his primary interest in the play. He goes on to praise her ‘chaste soul’, her ‘entrancing warmth of colour’ and declares her a ‘superb woman’ (PW, I: 295). Wagner's Isabella effects change not so much through her saintly virtue (though some of that remains), but through an aggressiveness that might outmatch some of Shakespeare's most ambitious female characters, especially those in the comedies (Beatrice, Rosalind and Katherine come to mind). After discovering Friedrich's plan to have her brother executed, she exclaims ‘Ah, the rogue, the scoundrel! God give me strength to destroy him!’Footnote ⁷⁷ While Cosima recorded her husband's thoughts on Isabella being ‘divine’ in the play (CD, II: 472; 3 May 1880), this seems rather far from Wagner's characterization of her in the opera. It is she, not the Duke, who devises the so-called ‘bed trick’, here augmented into a Figaro-esque double-duty deception, both on the lecherous authority figure who shirks his marital obligations for a chance at bedding a virgin, and on her other (by now earnest) suitor Luzio, for whom she admits to having feelings but whose doubting of her fidelity makes her want to teach him a lesson, too.

This all plays out, of course, in the massed crowd scenes of Wagner's carnival. The extensive final scene of Wagner's opera, accounting for nearly twenty percent of the score, begins with music that is by now familiar. It first appears in the overture and, as remarked upon earlier, serves as an indicator of the banned carnival and its festivities throughout the work (see Ex. 2).

Ex. 2 The ‘carnival’ motive is immediately followed by the ‘ban on love’ motive when it first appears in the overture (p. 2 of the piano-vocal score)

For Brian Morris, Wagner's crowd scene represents the composer's ‘most important addition’ to Shakespeare's original. ‘The citizens and the people of Palermo of all classes’, as well as serving a more traditional choral function, ‘represent the voices of democratic good sense, and high spirits, and happiness, and resistance to all forms of tyranny.’ He also points out that Wagner makes Luzio the ‘ringleader and inciter of the people's revolt’, emerging later as ‘the people's leader’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Wagner was to comment on this change himself, underscoring its socio-political implications in his later ‘Communication to My Friends’:

Comments such as these underscore the Young German propensities which underlie some of the changes to Shakespeare's story: the effects of the July Revolution were still strongly felt amongst progressive Germans of the time, and, in Gail Finney's words ‘revolution’ was the ‘catchword of the day’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Along these lines, the Duke's marriage proposal at the end of Measure for Measure is removed, with Wagner inserting the more democratically approved suitor for Isabella. Though it may be tempting to discern parallels with Die Meistersinger here – the carnival scene serving as a precursor to the völkish ideology Wagner would showcase in his later comedy – such an interpretation would be anachronistic and misguided. Indeed, it was precisely his disillusionment with Germanic propensities – musical, cultural and otherwise – that he was seeking to foreground in this youthful opera.

Though Wagner gets at this anti-German topic in several of his earliest published writings, all appearing in print around the time he was working on Das Liebesverbot, none better raises the issue than his 1834 essay ‘On German Opera’. Its opening is worth quoting at length.

He returns to the idea in his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ in the following decade. Describing the impetus for Das Liebesverbot, he writes of his budding worldliness and how he began around this time to turn away from provincialisms:

He continues, suggesting in a passage cited earlier that, when it came to his opera, he ‘robbed [Measure for Measure] of its prevailing earnestness, and thus remoulded it after the pattern of Das Junge Europa; free and frank physicalism gained, of its own sheer strength, the victory over Puritanical hypocrisy’ (PW, I: 10). Later still, in My Life, Wagner explains his desire to juxtapose the ebullient Italian disposition with the cold iciness of German Puritanism once again: ‘I transferred the theme from the fabulous city of Vienna to the capital of sunny Sicily, in which a German viceroy, indignant at the inconceivably loose morals of the people, attempts to introduce a puritanical reform, and comes miserably to grief over it’ (I: 109).

It is worth pausing to dwell on the details of what may have motivated Wagner's thinking. Heinrich Laube, a close friend of the composer's and one of the authors Wagner explicitly names as a source, was a member of the Junges Deutschland literary movement, a group of young writers active in the early 1830s whose work, calling for an ‘emancipation of the flesh’ along with broader-scale socio-sexual and political freedoms, became so incendiary that the Bundestag issued an edict banning their writings on 10 December 1835. Other writers named in the ban included Heinrich Heine, Karl Gutzkow, Ludolf Wienbarg and Theodor Mundt. As Marilyn Chapin Massey summarizes, they were charged with being ‘anti-Christian, immoral and subversive to the state’, and many of those who did not flee to France (like Heine) inevitably served time in prison.Footnote ⁸⁰ Wienbarg was the one who coined the phrase ‘junges Deutschland’ in his writing, giving name to the movement, but Gutzkow, whose novel Wally, der Zweiflerin (1835) was the tipping point that prompted the ban, is often considered as its leader. Heine and Ludwig Börne were seen as chief sources of inspiration for the group, along with the writings of French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon.

The explicitly French influences of Saint-Simonianism on these writers, as well as on Wagner, was considerable, and the movement's aforementioned desire for an ‘emancipation of the flesh’ – a concept Heine imported from French writing into Germany – was one of the key elements prompting German authorities to balk at the foreign (especially French republican) influences increasingly holding sway within Vormärz Germany. Another attempt at banning carnival activities in the mid-1840s stemmed from the fact that many liberal, politically minded youths were using the guise of carnival revelry as a means to disseminate their viewpoints to a broader audience. In an anonymous pamphlet published the same year as Das Liebesverbot, another author critical of the movement laments that ‘a foreign morality now threatens German morality, which is the foundation of German freedom’. The tract further complains of ‘the hysterical propagandizing of French virtue’, which, if left unchecked, would mean the ‘moral suicide of Germany’.Footnote ⁸¹ Though such comments would seem prophetic of the xenophobia expressed in Hans Sachs's closing monologue in Die Meistersinger (commented on above), Wagner was of course busily fighting against what he perceived to be narrow-minded German provincialism of this sort in Das Liebesverbot.

Wagner's championing of ‘free and frank sensuality’ and his critique of ‘Puritan hypocrisy’ should thus be read in the context of the broader Young Germany movement. I have already remarked upon his close ties with Laube, with whom he had also collaborated on an abandoned opera libretto and other projects. But Mundt's attack on German prudishness, evident in his Charaktere und Situationen (1837), Wienbarg's advocacy of greater sexual freedoms in his Äesthetische Fieldzüge (the same 1834 volume wherein he coined the term ‘junges Deutschland’), and the call for sexual and political emancipation evident in Gutzkow's Wally are also all of a piece with Wagner's outlook at the time. He had already met Heine and Börne at this point, and his own writings and Cosima's diaries testify to his knowledge of the work of Gutzkow and others; indeed, Laube helped introduce him into this circle of writers in Dresden the following decade as well.Footnote ⁸² The composer's own pro-Italian writings of the time, critical of German music-making as prudish and unmelodic, should thus be read with these other authors in mind.

Rather than taking this carnival setting as a prototype for the Festwiese-like nationalism on display in Die Meistersinger, then, it would be more appropriate to see a direct connection to the ideas of the carnivalesque discussed above. Bakhtin insists that ‘because of their obvious sensuous character and their strong element of play, carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the spectacle’. He is quick to qualify this claim, noting that it is not a ‘spectacle seen by the people’, however: they ‘live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people’.Footnote ⁸³ Though the opera and its carnival scene are of course spectacle for audience members, it is clear that all of Wagner's characters embrace sensuality and the carnivalesque. Indeed, the whole of Palermo seems to weigh in on Friedrich's hypocrisy, offering a more democratic (not to mention festive) leniency than Shakespeare's Duke. As Friedrich prepares to be condemned by his own laws (‘so richtet mich nach meinem eigenen Gesetz’), the crowd responds by declining and pardoning him, as well as all the other would-be revellers: ‘No, we'll show greater mercy than you! … We'll set the prisoners free.’Footnote ⁸⁴ After the regent's reconciliation with Mariana, Brighella is pardoned for his own hypocrisy and allowed to propose to Dorella; together with Luzio and Isabella, the couples lead the carnival procession to greet the otherwise absent King who is about to return as the opera closes. Again, as with Wieland's translation of the play, there seems to be a prevailing conservative slant to Wagner's ending. Despite the overt endorsement of ‘free’ sexuality and revelry, everyone is here contentedly paired off in orderly fashion and into a seemingly monogamous relationship – a far cry from the ambiguous reactions at best offered by the Duke's forced couplings and own marriage proposal at the end of the play, and of the pimping and bawding so endemic to Shakespeare's Vienna writ large.

Others have also been quick to discern a longer-lasting influence of the Junges Deutschland worldview on the composer's later musical output. Paul Lawrence Rose claims that Rienzi marks ‘the high point’ of this phase in Wagner's career, ‘when his revolutionism was at its most universal and least German’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Dieter Borchmeyer, by contrast, sees parallels between the shared ideological underpinnings of Das Liebesverbot and Tannhäuser. He speaks of Wolfram's ‘ethos of renunciation’ triumphing over Young Germany's ‘cult of Eros’ and claims the opera represents many of their ideologies at their most unadulterated.Footnote ⁸⁶ James Garratt likewise sees Tannhäuser as indebted to the movement owing to its ‘all-pervasive conflict of the sensual and spiritual realms’. Much like the exiled or imprisoned writers Wagner was reading, so too does the titular hero of this work ‘return to society with a message of liberation’ only to find himself ‘banished and disgraced’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Mary Cicora suggests an influence that was longer lasting still, seeing in the Ring cycle ‘an amalgam of the world-views’ of Young Germany and the earlier Romantics, and Borchmeyer even offers comparisons with Parsifal, pushing the connections yet further.Footnote ⁸⁸ That said, the literary trope of pitting spirituality against sensuality also has a long lineage, from the medieval romances that would serve as the basis for some of Wagner's later operas through to the writings of the young Nietzsche that had initially impressed the composer. While it may thus be an oversimplification to suggest that the trope's presence in Wagner's mature music-dramas evinces a clearly continuous line of influence on the part of the Young German ideologues mentioned above, it can at the very least serve as a reminder that the theme, which manifested itself in so many of his compositions, found expression in Das Liebesverbot too, despite his later decision to renounce the work as too dissimilar to his subsequent endeavours.

A Cosmopolitan Score

But to speak of the aftershocks of Das Liebesverbot within the composer's œuvre is to paint only part of the picture. Though I have commented on the socio-political mores of Vormärz Germany that helped shape Wagner's outlook at the time, the question of the opera's musical influences has come less to the fore thus far. The opera's scoring and dramaturgy contribute just as much to the overall cosmopolitan flair on offer here. In much the same way as the scholars cited above have been able to discern a vast array of Liebesverbot-isms in later Wagner, so too have they found a diverse assortment of musical precedents the young composer seemed to be drawing on in writing the score. Their analyses and conclusions have been quite varied. While there are occasional instances wherein a direct influence or imitation seems clear – compare the overture of Hérold's Zampa (1831) with that of Das Liebesverbot, for instance – most other connections are harder to pin down. Indeed, when looked at comparatively, one begins to get the feeling that Wagner was drawing less on specific sources and that the score reflects more of an absorption or amalgamation of larger trends within the bel canto tradition and those of grand opéra and opéra-comique, as well as a number of home-grown idioms discussed below.

Auber's operas are frequent points of comparison, as is the Meyerbeer of Robert le Diable, though these are not necessarily separate from the more Italian-leaning propensities of the score, such as the Rossinian coloratura of Isabella and Mariana's Act I duet and the cantabile–cabaletta form that follows Friedrich's scena in the second half of the work. Friedrich's number in particular seems an equal mix of Donizetti and Auber, for example. Bellini is another candidate others have discerned in the Liebesverbot score, likely owing to how extensively the composer had been praising his works during the 1830s. However, the much higher frequency of dissonances in the score, when compared with those in the Italian composer's operas Wagner was known to admire, argues against such a reading. Indeed, Friedrich Lippmann insists that the chromaticism to be found Friedrich's aria surpasses even Donizetti's and Auber's more adventurous moments, suggesting Alphonse's aria in La muette di Portici as a point of comparison.Footnote ⁸⁹ Hans Engel likewise pushes against seeing too much Bellini in Wagner's work. Similarly drawing comparisons with La muette, he notes parallels between the French opera's third-act market chorus and Wagner's carnival scene, discussed above, but he also suggests a coarser and harsher number of dissonances than those to be found in the French opera.Footnote ⁹⁰

Alfred Einstein reminds us that German traits remain, too, despite Wagner's renunciation of them at the time … but then again, the ‘Marschner-like melody’ he discerns in the motive associated with Friedrich's ban on love should also be considered in light of the fact that the governor represented that element of German prudishness that was to be vanquished by the end of the opera in order that Italian sensuality may triumph.Footnote ⁹¹ Still, while Wagner insists that his youthful enthusiasm for Beethoven and Weber could not be found in his score (PW, VII: 8), the spectres of both composers remain. Surely the second act, opening in a prison with a captive tenor musing on his fate, owes a debt to the famous second act of Fidelio, which begins similarly. Danna Behne also points towards parallels between the opening scene in Wagner's opera, with its raucous laughter in defiance of the carnival ban, to that of the derisive laughter that greets Max early on in Der Freischütz.Footnote ⁹² It may be hard to reconcile the anti-German stance Wagner took towards operatic compositions at this time with his seemingly contradictory desire to embrace a more cosmopolitan outlook on life. Despite these echoes of his predecessors within the score and dramaturgy of the work, I would suggest that the cosmopolitanism Wagner embraced at this time did allow for Germanic influences, though they are more easily discerned in the ideological realm (the Junges Deutschland authors discussed above, for example) than the musical, where France and Italy reign supreme.

A number of authors have already helped elucidate the Franco-Italian strains running through the opera. Thomas Grey, for instance, discerns aspects of Auber's La muette di Portici and Fra Diavolo, as well as Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, and also draws the same comparison between La muette's market chorus and Wagner's carnival scene as Engel did. He also highlights the Rossinian coloratura and chromaticism remarked upon by Lippmann. Where he differs, however, is in favouring the Bellinian connection denied by the German scholars, seeing in Wagner's ‘tendency to linger on the third degree, approached from the lower fifth or from above by appoggiatura’ a distinct line of influence from the Italian composer to the German one.Footnote ⁹³ Writing elsewhere, he continues this line of argument, suggesting that Das Liebesverbot represented a synthesis of ‘Bellinian lyricism’ with ‘the taught rhythmic energy of post-Rossinian choruses’ and the ‘supple, discreetly accompanied parlando dialogue of Auber's comedies’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Given the connection to Young German socio-political ideas Tannhäuser shares with Das Liebesverbot, commented on earlier, Grey's discerning of shared musico-dramatic forms between the two solidifies the link between these operas even further. If musical, dramaturgical, literary and philosophical ties all link Wagner's early, ‘anti-German’ opera with one more popularly seen as echt-Deutsch, it suggests the composer's penchant for the cosmopolitan was indeed harder to shake off than he would have us believe. Perhaps he simply got better at integrating those themes and structures into the service of Germanic myth and legend.

Of course, Das Liebesverbot need not attract our attention solely because of the fact that the worldview underpinning its conception proved more enduring than traditional readings of early Wagner suggest, or that its musical influences demonstrate a more cosmopolitan Wagner than the deutsche Meister has come to represent within the popular imagination. His clever transformation of Measure for Measure into a carnivalesque opera that endorses sexual freedom and licentiousness while simultaneously stifling coarser revelry and promiscuity is in itself a notable feat, especially when coupled with his retention of the original's ‘deeply reflective tone’ and ‘brooding sense of pollution spread by lust’ in the character of Friedrich. In so doing, Wagner is able to highlight many of the same, seemingly contradictory impulses and themes audiences past and present have discerned in Shakespeare's play. As I have noted above, this Wagner–Shakespeare connection has remained comparatively understudied, despite the composer's continued interest in this play and others even in his final years; pushing this line of inquiry further can also help unsettle the predominantly Nordic and/or Germanic focus on the composer's literary borrowings.Footnote ⁹⁵ The socio-political, musical and dramatic influences shaping this opera all clearly continued to preoccupy Wagner throughout his career; a more nuanced look at this early work thus helps to further the goal of re-evaluating his relationship to foreign operatic, literary and political movements, as well as our understanding of his sexual politics and perceived progressivism; it also helps further unsettle his own self-crafted image as das deutscheste Mensch, der deutsche Geist.