Law, government, and the state

Wagner’s second opera, Das Liebesverbot, written at the height of Laube’s influence, evinced a negative portrayal of state and government. Laube’s – and Wagner’s – high regard for Heinse’s Ardinghello is no coincidence: the book’s eponymous hero had foretold a day when, having suffered too dearly from legal constraints, man would finally cast off his shackles and attain full humanity as a free, creative artist. ¹ Wagner recalled that Das Liebesverbot had pitted ‘openly expressed sensuality’ against ‘puritan hypocrisy’. ² The symbolism is none too subtle, with Friedrich, the viceroy, opposing the people’s natural urges. He is exposed as an aspirant adulterer whilst preaching family values, yet the good Volk – or carnival, since we are in sixteenth-century Palermo – mercifully allows him to disappear during the celebratory, anarchistic finale. This vehement opposition towards law, by its very essence hypocritical and stultifying, would remain with Wagner throughout his life and ceuvre. Indeed, we see him writing, in the notes he made for a projected essay he did not live to complete, On male and female in culture and art: ‘Plato: – his state defective and impossible.’ ³