ABSTRACT
The names of Gaetano Donizetti and Richard Wagner are not frequently uttered in the same breath. They echo the pairing of Rossini and Weber or of Puccini and Strauss, or even the more common separation of Germany and Italy embodied in Verdi and Wagner himself. When Donizetti and Wagner found themselves in the same city for the first time it was not the first time that their artistic paths had inadvertently crossed, although neither knew it: both composers had been reading Bulwer-Lytton's Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes in the summer and autumn of 1837 with a view to turning it into a libretto. L'eau merveilleuse spawned a number of operas de genre during 1839 that well illustrate the wide range of works that the theatre felt able to promote under its generic title.
