About the work
Das Liebesverbot was Richard Wagner's second completed opera, for which he wrote his own libretto after Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. It premiered on 29 March 1836 at the Magdeburg theatre, where Wagner, as music director, himself conducted after only ten days of rehearsal.
Plot
In sixteenth-century Palermo, a governor bans love-making during carnival and sentences a young nobleman to death because his lover is pregnant by him. The nobleman's sister, a novice nun, tries to save him and in doing so exposes the governor's own betrayal. A popular uprising overturns the ban and restores the carnival festivities.
Cultural significance
The premiere was chaotic: the singers barely knew their parts, and a backstage scandal derailed the planned second performance. Wagner later distanced himself from this early work, yet it is now seen as an early expression of the themes of love, redemption and resistance to authority that recur throughout his output.