Interestingly, the most well-known piece from this opera (relatively speaking, as it is quite obscure) is one of light rather than darkness: the lilting chorus "How beautiful they are," which describes the ethereal, sparkling fairies of the hollow hills: "They have faces like flowers and their breath is a wind that blows over summer meadows filled with dewy clover...." We mortals never do get to see the land whence Etain came and to which she returns, but between this chorus and Midir's harp songs, we have a fair notion of what extraordinary vision Eochaidh was permittted to glimpse for a year, when married to his fairy queen.
Wagner's first completed opera was Die Feen (which dates from 1834, when the composer was 21, but was not staged until 1888). Even back then, this composer was writing his own libretti, and adapted the plot from a Gozzi comedy called La Donna Serpente, changing the "serpent woman" to a more traditionally Germanic sylphlike creature, and adding a distinctive shading of the Orpheus myth to the overall plotting.
The three-act opera opens with the situation that the mortal Arindal, King of Tramond, has been married to the fairy Ada for eight years, and they have two children. However, Ada was always under promise to the king of the fairies to keep her heritage a secret: Were Arindal to ask who she was, they would instantly become separated. This has indeed come to pass at the eight-year mark: Ada has vanished, and Arindal has been left on a craggy rock far from home. In protest over their treatment, Ada, whisked back to fairyland, has sworn to leave off being a fairy and return to her husband. The fairy king assigns two fairies, Farzana and Zemina, to do everything they can to prevent Ada's reunion with Arindal. (In essence, he considers Ada's relationship with a mortal to be beneath her, rather in the way earthly royal families have turned up their noses at permitting their members marriage to commoners.)
Two of Arindal's countrymen are influenced by the two bad fairies: Gunther, in the guise of a priest, insists that Ada was only a witch keeping the king from his duties; while Morald (not to be confused with Murold!), pretending to be Arindal's father speaking from beyond the grave (a very Hamlet-like moment), also tries to exert pressure upon Arindal to return home to defend his homeland. Both are transformed back to their true selves by Ada's powers of love for her husband. However, Arindal still decides to go home to sort out the genuine political mess that has erupted within his country during the time he has been stranded on that rock.
