Reading Notes: My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner
About the Work
Richard Wagner’s autobiography, My Life, represents one of the most extraordinary personal documents in musical history. Composed through dictation to his wife Cosima over several years, this work was never intended for immediate publication—Wagner explicitly noted that the value lay in its “unadorned veracity” and that specific names and dates justified keeping the work private until after his death. Volume 1 spans the years 1813-1842, covering his formative period through his establishment as a composer and conductor. The narrative demonstrates Wagner’s characteristic intensity applied to his own life story, revealing not only biographical facts but the psychological and artistic development of one of music history’s most influential figures.
Family Origins and Early Childhood
Wagner was born Wilhelm Richard Wagner in Leipzig on May 22, 1813, just two days before his baptism at St. Thomas’s Church. His father, Friedrich Wagner, served as a police clerk but died later that same year during the turbulent aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, falling victim to nervous fever. This early loss proved pivotal—within a year, his mother Rosalia had remarried the actor and portrait painter Ludwig Geyer, who became a loving stepfather to the children. Geyer moved the family to Dresden and assumed responsibility for their upbringing and education with great affection.
The young Wagner’s earliest memories center on Geyer, and he recalls appearing as an angel in a tableau vivant during celebrations for the King of Saxony’s return from captivity. His formal education began at age six with a country clergyman named Wetzel in Possendorf, where he absorbed stories of Robinson Crusoe, Mozart’s biography, and accounts of the Greek War of Independence—material that profoundly stirred his imagination. When Geyer died in 1821, the eight-year-old Wagner returned to Dresden, where his mother maintained the household with practical efficiency despite limited education and resources.
Wagner’s mother, from Weissenfels where her parents were bakers, had attended a prestigious Leipzig boarding-school with support believed to have come from a Weimar prince. She possessed keen humor, religious devotion, and passionate appreciation for poetry, music, and painting—though she was determined to shield her children from theatrical life, viewing it as beneath their station. Her elder siblings, particularly Rosalie, were pursuing theatrical careers under the guidance of Carl Maria von Weber, who frequently visited their home.
The Theatre and Musical Awakening
From earliest childhood, Wagner experienced a powerful fascination with the theatre that bordered on the pathological. He describes how even lifeless furniture seemed alive when he concentrated upon it, and nightly ghostly dreams produced frightful shrieks that disturbed the entire household. Yet this terror simultaneously created an irresistible attraction to the fantastic atmosphere of theatrical performance—scenery, costumes, and stage elements appeared to come from another realm entirely. He first explored this connection through amateur performances of Der Freischütz with playmates and through puppet shows constructed from his sisters’ discarded materials.
Carl Maria von Weber made a profound impression on the young Wagner. While Sassaroli, the Italian male-soprano who also visited their home, horrified him with his “high effeminate voice” and “incessant screeching laughter,” Weber’s refined, delicate appearance excited “ecstatic admiration.” Wagner describes Weber’s narrow face and finely-cut features, his vivacious eyes, and even the bad limp with which he walked—all stamped the great musician in his imagination as an exceptional, almost superhuman being. When Weber died in 1826, the news struck the young Wagner with devastating force, and the longing to learn his music to Oberon intensified his passion for the art.
A pivotal moment came when Wagner first heard Beethoven’s overture to Fidelio. Learning of Beethoven’s recent death, he felt a strange anguish nearly akin to his childish dread of ghostly fifths on the violin. He describes how the oboe’s long-drawn A seemed like “a call from the dead to rouse the other instruments,” raising all his nerves to “feverish pitch of tension.” From this moment, Beethoven became his musical ideal, conceived as a “sublime and unique supernatural being” alongside Shakespeare in his imagination.
Student Years in Leipzig
At age fifteen, Wagner left the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden through a calculated deception, feigning a family summons to avoid formal discharge. He had already composed his tragedy Leubald und Adelaïde, a work drawing heavily upon Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. The drama centered on a hero driven to fearful deeds of violence by his murdered father’s ghost, eventually going mad—a scheme clearly modeled on Hamlet but with the protagonist carried away by violent action rather than philosophical reflection.
His uncle Adolph Wagner, a philologist who had visited Schiller regarding theatrical business, took him in at Leipzig. This uncle, with his dark courtyard study filled with books and distinctive pointed felt cap, profoundly influenced the young Wagner’s intellectual development. Their daily constitutional walks ranged over the entire realm of knowledge, and the uncle encouraged Wagner’s enthusiasm while inadvertently fostering his rebellious attitude toward formal education. However, when Wagner revealed his completed tragedy, the uncle wrote a discouraging letter that wounded him deeply—yet Wagner secretly knew the work could only be rightly judged when set to the music he intended to write.
The Leipzig student world of the early 1830s was marked by political turbulence following the July Revolution in Paris. Wagner describes how undergraduates, denied their traditional associations by police prosecutions, formed national clubs with colorful banners and elaborate codes of conduct. The ‘Comment’ represented for the young Wagner the idea of emancipation from school and family. When rebellion spread across Europe and into Saxony, where actual street fighting occurred in Dresden, Wagner composed a political overture depicting “the triumph of Friedrich und Freiheit.”
Early Musical Studies and Compositions
Wagner’s formal musical education remained rudimentary during his youth. While his sisters received music lessons, his mother deliberately excluded him from such training, fearing it might arouse longing for the theatre. Only at twelve did he receive lessons from Tutor Humann, though these were “of a very mediocre description.” He progressed enough to play Weber’s overtures in duet form, and when he finally could perform the Freischütz overture himself, he felt his goal had been attained and had no inclination to perfect his technique further.
The revelation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert produced an “indescribable” effect on the young Wagner. He describes how the symphony’s complexity initially seemed beyond comprehension, leading him to turn toward “clearer, calmer musical forms.” Yet the work haunted him—its first movement’s sustained pure fifths especially captivated him, seeming “the spiritual keynote of his own life.” He laboriously copied the entire score, and the mysterious work became for him “the secret of all secrets.”
During this period, Wagner composed his first Sonata in D minor and began a pastoral play developing text and music simultaneously rather than separately. A walking tour to Magdeburg to present his works to his brother-in-law ended in dismissal—“there is not a single good note in it,” declared conductor Kuhnlein while extolling Mozart and disparaging Weber. Yet the journey yielded a precious copy of Beethoven’s String Quartet in E-flat major, which Wagner treasured.
Conducting Career and Romantic Entanglements
Wagner’s professional career began in earnest with conducting positions at provincial theatres. He describes how he first conducted Don Juan for Bethmann’s theatrical enterprise, a debut that proceeded adequately despite his having never previously conducted opera. His relationship with Minna Planer, a young actress he met at Lauchstadt, developed during this period. She possessed, he recalls, a “certain majesty and grave assurance that lent captivating dignity to her pleasant expression.”
The path to their eventual marriage in November 1836 was marked by complications. Minna had been seduced by a Herr von Einsiedel at seventeen and bore a daughter she hid from her father. She saw the stage merely as economic survival rather than artistic fulfillment, developing a code focused on maintaining popularity with directors and critics even at cost to self-respect. Wagner describes how their relationship was complicated by his growing doubts about her character, particularly upon discovering her prior intimacy with a man named Schwabe, leading to violent quarrels that would permanently undermine their marriage.
His various conducting positions—in Riga, Königsberg, and Magdeburg—brought constant financial difficulties and professional disappointments. In Riga, Wagner was betrayed by his friend Heinrich Dorn, who secured Wagner’s position before departing with confidential information about Wagner’s financial troubles. The experience of crossing the Russian frontier illegally with Minna, fleeing toward Prussia in a journey of “countless unheard-of hardships,” would later prove prophetic regarding the exile that awaited him.
Paris and the Path to Dresden
Wagner’s sojourn in Paris from 1839 to 1842 represented one of the most difficult periods of his life. He arrived with theatrical ambitions and preliminary contacts with Meyerbeer, but found the Parisian musical world largely closed to him. He describes surviving on hack-work for publishers, arranging opera excerpts for piano and cornet—a degrading necessity that laid “the foundation for a gastric malady” that would trouble him lifelong.
Yet Paris also provided crucial artistic development. The rehearsals of Habeneck’s performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony restored to Wagner the idealized, vivid impression of the work he had held since youth, revealing layers of “touching, heavenly melody” he had previously failed to perceive. This experience reversed years of degraded musical taste and compared in transformative power to his adolescent awakening watching Schröder-Devrient perform in Fidelio.
The news that his opera Rienzi had been accepted for Dresden reached Wagner in Paris during the winter of 1841-1842. He describes feeling as though he were “leaving the world behind” as he traveled toward the German border. His arrival in Dresden in April 1842 marked a new beginning—and the beginning of the end of his comfortable German existence.
Dresden Triumph and the Path to Revolution
Wagner’s early years in Dresden brought professional success but mounting personal difficulties. The premiere of Rienzi on October 20, 1842, proved a triumph that lasted from six o’clock until past midnight. Tichatschek, singing the title role, declared the music “so heavenly” he refused to allow any cuts. The opera established Wagner’s reputation, and his subsequent appointment as royal conductor in February 1843 brought permanent position and income.
Yet Wagner quickly grew dissatisfied with theatrical routine and bureaucratic limitations. His efforts at orchestra reform and theatre management were repeatedly thwarted, and his conflicts with Director Lüttichau intensified. The success of Tannhäuser in Dresden brought cultured recognition but failed to achieve popular appeal—Wagner observed that educated audiences embraced his work while “general opera-goers” remained inaccessible.
The revolutionary atmosphere of 1848 drew Wagner into political activity. He participated in Vaterlands-Verein meetings, delivered public speeches at barricades, and wrote pamphlets on art and society. His involvement in the May 1849 uprising proved catastrophic—crossing the frontier illegally once again, this time as a political fugitive rather than a musician seeking opportunity, he fled to Weimar and eventually Zürich.
Exile and Philosophical Development
The exile that began in 1849 marked a turning point in Wagner’s intellectual development. In Zürich, he encountered the works of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose emphasis on sensory reality and critique of idealism profoundly influenced his thinking. He began writing philosophical essays on art and society, producing works like Kunst und Revolution and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft that articulated his developing vision of the integration of art and social reform.
Wagner’s personal life remained complicated. His wife Minna joined him in Zürich, but their marriage had been severely strained by his political actions and their financial desperation. The couple struggled with limited income and uncertain futures. Yet this period also brought new friendships and intellectual stimulations—the friendship with Jakob Sulzer in Zürich especially sustained Wagner during difficult months.
The final sections of Volume 1 conclude with Wagner’s plans for future works, including the Nibelungen material that would occupy him for decades. His escape from Dresden marked not the end but the beginning of a new phase in which exile would become not merely personal circumstance but artistic condition.
Key Themes and Observations
The Theatrical Instinct: From earliest childhood, Wagner demonstrates a pathological fascination with theatrical atmosphere that shaped his entire career. This fascination, rooted in fear and escape from reality, became the foundation for his revolutionary theories of music drama.
Musical Influences: The shaping forces of Wagner’s musical imagination include Weber’s Freischütz, Beethoven’s symphonic works (particularly the Ninth Symphony), Shakespeare’s dramatic power, and Greek tragedy. His early aesthetic preferences—German over Italian, serious over trivial—established positions he would elaborate throughout his life.
Family Dynamics: Wagner’s complex relationship with his mother, siblings, and later his wife Minna reveals a pattern of dependence and conflict that would characterize his personal relationships. His marriages and friendships were marked by intensity that often exceeded conventional boundaries.
The Revolutionary Impulse: Wagner’s political engagement in 1848-1849 was not merely incidental but rooted in deep convictions about art’s relationship to social reform. His flight from Dresden was both political catastrophe and artistic liberation, freeing him from the limitations of court theatre to pursue his revolutionary vision.
The Path to Exile: The patterns established in Volume 1—the combination of artistic ambition with personal difficulties, professional frustration with creative determination, and the interplay of political engagement with aesthetic theory—would define Wagner’s entire subsequent life.
This autobiography provides invaluable insight into the early development and influences that shaped one of music history’s most influential composers. Wagner’s unadorned approach to recording names and dates establishes historical accuracy as the work’s primary justification, while his intense personal reflections reveal the psychological foundations of his revolutionary artistic theories.