Wagner - Concert Overtures

The Guardian 60

MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra/Märkl
(Naxos)

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.