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I produced the overture to my Feen with very satisfactory results at a concert given by the Logengesellschaft, and thereby earned considerable applause. On the other hand, news came from Leipzig confirming the shabby action of the directors of the theatre in that place with regard to the promised presentation of this opera.
When I say there is no hint of Wagner in it I do not mean that the phraseology does not resemble that of the later Wagner one could hardly expect that; I do mean that from Die Feen onward there is always atmosphere, always emotion and colour, in his music; while the symphony is as bald, as unpoetical, as any mean street in Kennington.
Wagner wanted effective airs, duets, trios, choruses and marches; and no libretto-monger ever went to work in a more deliberate, matter-of-fact and business-like way to provide opportunities for these. Both in Die Feen and in Das Liebesverbot his purpose had been more definitely, more disinterestedly, artistic. Now he set to work to manufacture for the Paris market.
I wish now to pass rapidly over two fresh adventures the conductorship at Magdeburg and that at Königsberg; but first let me point out how the boy's was changing to a man's character. It is plain that he worked very hard at Würzburg, for the score of Die Feen is a big one, and teaching his chorus must have occupied many hours a day.
When Wagner wrote 'Die Feen' he was under the spell of Weber, whose influence is perceptible in every page of the score. Marschner, too, whose 'Vampyr' and 'Templer und Jüdin' had been recently produced at Leipzig, which was then Wagner's headquarters, also appealed very strongly to the young musician's plastic temperament.
After Die Feen, a story of magic, he went to Das Liebesverbot, a story of lust; then he went on to a drama of warring ambitions, with the outer brilliant show of armed men, gorgeous processions, conflagrations and what not in the way of spectacle. After that we have the Dutchman, strange and remote and mysterious, with some pages of passionless ecstasy as its culminating point.
His music is the logical development of that of Gluck and Weber, purified by a closer study of the principles of declamation, and enriched by a command of orchestral resource of which they had never dreamed. Wagner's first opera, 'Die Feen, was written in 1833, when the composer was twenty years old. Wagner always wrote his own libretti, even in those days.
'Die Feen' consequently has little claim to originality, but the work is nevertheless interesting to those who desire to trace the master's development ab ovo. Both in the melodies and rhythms employed it is possible to trace the germs of what afterwards became strongely marked characteristics. Wagner himself never saw 'Die Feen' performed.
In a similar German style I wrote the music to my Feen in the course of the year 1833.
Die Novize van Palermo, which was the new title, had nothing suspicious about it, and was therefore approved as correct without further scruple. I fared quite otherwise in Leipzig, where I attempted to introduce this work in the place of my Feen, when the latter was withdrawn.
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