About the work
Historical opera in four acts by Ruggero Leoncavallo, commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II after he was impressed by Leoncavallo’s opera "I Medici", as part of a planned tetralogy of operas on the Hohenzollern dynasty. Leoncavallo wrote both music and libretto after Willibald Alexis’s 1840 novel, with a German translation by Georg Dröscher. It premiered on 13 December 1904 at the Royal Court Opera Unter den Linden in Berlin.
Plot
In fifteenth-century Berlin, the weaver Mollner loves the mayor’s daughter, but class boundaries keep them apart. Chosen to lead an uprising against the patrician council, he is hailed as "Roland"; while trying to open the city gates for the Elector during the siege, he is killed by accident.
Cultural significance
The premiere became a Berlin social event but remained musically controversial: Leoncavallo openly quoted Wagner motifs from "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" alongside Italian and operetta-like passages. After around 37 performances by 1908 the opera vanished from the repertoire and, apart from a 1987 concert performance in Berlin, fell into obscurity.