“The Emperor of New German Music”

After the scandal in Paris, the Wagner front was generally quiet for some time. There were performances but mainly in German theaters. In his letter to the publisher Franz Schott, Wagner listed all the towns that had sent him royalties by 20 November 1861, and the list of forty-six cities includes only a few from abroad. The composer, in fact, expresses his hope that the interest of outer-German, “ausser-deutsche,” theaters, such as those in Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen, would increase in the future. Riga was, for Wagner, clearly a German center.

In Sweden the only Wagner opera performed in the 1860s was Rienzi, and in Riga none of the composer's operas were premiered in that decade. At the beginning of the 1860s, the German Theater of Riga had drifted into a crisis on both the economic and the artistic levels, which brought all experimental efforts with new and unknown works to a halt. On 6 April 1861, the Rigasche Stadtblätter addressed this problem, noting that under the pressure of prevailing circumstances the orchestra had been reduced to twenty-four musicians. After the departure of Franz Thomé, the theater had rapidly fallen into decay. The decline was, however, temporary, because the building of a new playhouse, to be opened in 1863, was to reenergize the theater.

Tannhäuser, which had been the Livonians’ perennial favorite, was occasionally staged: according to Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, the performance figures for Tannhäuser were as follows: it was performed twice in 1861, six times in 1864, twice in 1866, three times in 1867, and twice in 1869. The statistics clearly do not indicate any signs of enthusiasm for Wagner. The repeat premiere of Der fliegende Holländer in November 1864 could be seen as a more vigorous attempt to revive interest in the composer. Apparently, interest in Wagner waned in the 1860s, for relatively small audiences attended the performances of Der fliegende Holländer. On 19 November, the Rigasche Stadtblätter reported that “Despite the good production of this opera in our theater, the first and second repeats of the work have been poorly attended, and the work is now in danger of being excluded from the repertoire.”