Early Wagner piece offers ample charm
Nimble Pocket Opera makes little-known comic bauble sparkle as ‘No Love Allowed’
Before proceeding to recast German music in his own image, the young and ambitious Richard Wagner tried his hand at the various operatic traditions that were in fashion around him. He sampled Italian romantic comedy, French grand opera and more, and though none of it stuck, the effort was not truly wasted either.
Among these early undertakings was a broad, unwieldy and largely irresistible comedy called “Das Liebesverbot,” or “The Ban on Love.” It’s a piece that is almost never performed, and though the reasons for that neglect may be understandable, a charming new production by the everresourceful Pocket Opera gives evidence of just how much we’ve been missing.
In a big, boisterous performance at the Legion of Honor on Sunday, May 22 — the second of three consecutive Sunday matinees at various Bay Area locations — the piece emerged as a winning comic bauble, full of tuneful melody and intricate plot turns. No one would mistake it for a fully assured creation, but it’s equally foolish to dismiss it outright.
Donald Pippin, the company’s late founder and longtime guiding spirit, first tackled the work in 1990, giving it a characteristically buoyant English translation under the title “No Love Allowed.” In this long-awaited revival, stage director Nicolas A. Garcia — Pippin’s handpicked successor as the company’s general director — and music director Jonathan Khuner have smoothed out most of the rough spots and created a witty, handsomely sung entertainment.
Wagner was just 22 when he wrote the piece, adapting Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” to tell a rather pointed tale about the unquenchability of love and desire. He shifted the action from Vienna to Palermo — making it easier to subtweet the contrast between dour, buttoned-down Germans and hedonistic Italians — and crafted a score that draws largely on the melodious grace of Bellini and Donizetti.
The plot is simultaneously tangled and conventional. The German viceroy Friedrich (baritone Spencer Dodd) has imposed a draconian measure forbidding love — which is to say premarital and extramarital sex — on pain of death. But of course like all religious hypocrites, Friedrich has his own lustful urges to contend with.
Those suffice to get him entrapped by Isabella (soprano Leslie Sandefur), a young nun who leaves the cloister in hopes of freeing her condemned brother Claudio (the sweet-toned tenor Justin Brunette). Isabella winds up finding love herself, in the person of the rakish Luzio (tenor Michael Dailey), and Friedrich’s abandoned wife (soprano Aléxa Anderson, in a beautifully luminous performance) also emerges from the nunnery to pointlessly reclaim her husband’s love. Ample comic relief is provided by Friedrich’s captain of the guard (baritone Michael Grammer), a young lady of easy virtue (mezzo-soprano Sonia Gariaeff ) and the unfortunately named Pontius Pilate (the wonderful tenor Michael Mendelsohn), who has
only his parents to blame for saddling him with such off-putting nomenclature.
Immediately, one reason for the opera’s difficulties comes into view — there’s just too much of it. Some skeptics might say the same about Wagner’s mature work, but in those cases the excess is handled with the assurance of an experienced artist. “No Love Allowed” frequently trips over its own feet.
What splendid feet they are, though! In scene after scene, Wagner spins out music of emotional urgency and tenderness, built around long Italianate melodies. He sets the comic characters jostling and sparring vividly (“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” is categorized as a comedy, but only “No Love Allowed” can actually make you laugh). And if I were an orchestra conductor, I would certainly consider programming this opera’s overture as a standalone opener to my next symphonic concert.
As with most juvenilia of great composers, it’s hard to hear this work except through the lens of what comes later. An alert listener will hear foreshadowings of “Lohengrin” above all, but even musical gestures that point as far ahead as “Siegfried” or “Tristan und Isolde.” It’s like looking at the baby pictures of someone you only know as an adult.
Yet none of this musing interferes with the more immediate pleasures of the production itself, or the musical and dramatic alertness of the large cast. Bringing littleknown work like this to our attention is one of the key things a company like Pocket Opera can do, and in this case all concerned have risen nobly to the task.