Early in 1833, as Wagner turned 20, he answered his brother Albert Wagner's invitation to Würzburg. Albert, stage manager and leading tenor of the Opera, secured for Richard a position as chorus master and regisseur, thus relieving their sister, Rosalie, a popular actress at the Leipzig Theater, of the burden of supporting Richard while enabling him, in the move from Saxony to Bavaria, to avoid conscription. Gaining intimate acquaintance with the operatic hits of the day—including Meyerbeer's Robert le diable and Marschner's Der Vampyr (one whose arias he recomposed for his brother)—was an inestimable bonus. Probably translated by Albert, Carlo Gozzi's drama La Donna serpente (which was to furnish the matter of Alfredo Casella's eponymous 1931operatic masterpiece), made a deep impression and Wagner immediately began adapting it as a libretto for his first completed opera, Die Feen. A previous effort, Die Hochzeit, begun the year before, upon which Wagner had made an extensive compositional start (still extant), was abandoned at Rosalie's shocked insistence and her objections to its excessive morbidity. Despite tavern crawling, woman chasing, and his duties at the opera (curtailed for the fall season), the score of Die Feen proceeded apace—Wagner finished it on January 1, 1834, adding the overture a few days later. From Die Hochzeit, he salvaged the names of the leading characters—Arindal, Ada—making for confusion in the discussion of his early works. With Die Feen's completion began the task of attempting to have it staged. Ada's second-act aria, sung by an amateur, and a second-act Terzet were given at a concert of the local musical society on December 12, 1833, without provoking much interest. Meanwhile, Rosalie attempted to use her popularity with Leipzig audiences as leverage toward a production there, a proposal seconded with such persistence by Wagner, himself, on his return to Leipzig with the new year that he soon became a pest that the theater management placated with stalling and promises—the work was even announced for performance. In the summer of 1834, Heinrich Bethmann, director of a Magdeburg theater troupe, asked Leipzig impresario Ringelhardt to recommend a conductor and Wagner was suggested. He left for Magdeburg in mid-summer with the composition of Das Liebesverbot well under way to register an aesthetic volte face from the German model of Weber's Der Freischütz to the simplicity, warmth, and lyricism of Italian opera, Bellini's in particular, whose I Capuleti ed I Montecchi he had just heard. Die Feen was not performed in Wagner's lifetime, achieving its premiere on June 29, 1888, in Munich.

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