Even if the Bayreuth festival persists in ignoring everything Wagner composed before The Flying Dutchman, Wagnerians generally acknowledge that his career began with his first two completed operas, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot. But even those works are not the beginning of the story, for Wagner composed a wealth of orchestral music from his student days onwards. Four of the scores from the 1830s are included in Jun Märkl’s collection, alongside the overtures to the first two operas. Die Feen, based on a Gozzi play, was not performed in full until five years after Wagner’s death in 1883, but the overture was played in 1835, the same year that Das Liebesverbot, which used an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, reached the stage.
This disc features two concert overtures, in D minor and C, from 1831 and 1832 – while Wagner was studying in Leipzig – plus the overtures from two suites of incidental music, for Raupach’s historical drama König Enzio, also written in 1832, and for Apel’s Christopher Columbus, from 1835. None of these works is an unrecognised masterpiece, but they offer perspectives on the origins of Wagner’s musical language and where he looked for what he might absorb into his expressive world.
The main sources are predictable enough – Beethoven (the Egmont and Leonore overtures) and Weber (Der Freischütz) – but others are unexpected, especially the Italian (Bellini) and French (Auber) influences, tambourines, castanets and all, in Das Liebesverbot. Hints of Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and Hebrides overtures come through in the seascapes of Christopher Columbus, although it is that piece’s incessant fanfares for six trumpets, surfing over the strings, that really catch one’s attention (and perhaps anticipate some of the brass writing in Lohengrin more than 10 years later).
Some of Wagner’s scoring is precociously striking and one can only imagine what a top-flight orchestra might make of it, for on this evidence the Leipzig Radio Symphony isn’t quite that. It is a decent ensemble, though, and Märkl’s performances are suitably nimble. The routine account of Siegfried Idyll that bulks out the disc is neither here nor there.
