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Warner Classics release this legacy recording of Sir John Barbirolli heading the Hallé Orchestra as part of their Barbirolli 78 RPM Era Collection. The release features a programme of orchestral works from the legendary Operas of Wagner. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a music drama (or opera) in three acts. It is among the longest operas commonly performed, usually taking around four and a half hours. The opera occupies a unique place in Wagner's oeuvre. It is the only comedy among his mature operas and is also unusual among his works in being set in a historically well-defined time and place rather than in a mythical or legendary setting. It is the only mature Wagner opera based on an entirely original story, devised by Wagner himself, and in which no supernatural or magical powers or events are in evidence. It incorporates many of the operatic conventions that Wagner had railed against in his essays on the theory of opera: rhymed verse, arias, choruses, a quintet, and even a ballet. Lohengrin is a Romantic opera in three acts, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the "Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach and its sequel "Lohengrin", itself inspired by the epic of Garin le Loherain. It is part of the Knight of the Swan legend. Many consider the Act I prelude Wagner's greatest single composition, an inspiring free-variation curtain-raiser on one soaring theme starting and ending softly on divided violins in high register, then building to a mighty climax with full brass and two climactic cymbal crashes in a classic orchestral crescendo-diminuendo, gradually approaching the one climax and then just as gradually receding, to end as ethereally as it started in the high divided violins, and representing the descent of the Holy Grail (the cup out of which Christ legendarily drank out of in the Last Supper the night before his crucifixion) from Heaven back down to Earth. Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen is an early opera, with the libretto written by the composer after Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel of the same name (1835). The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzi (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles' rebellion against the people's power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.