My Life — Volume 1

Part 37 / Part 40

In Paris, Wagner continued his journalistic grind to survive, writing for Schlesinger’s paper a long article on Halévy’s latest work, in which he praised Auber and gently censured Rossini—though the editor Édouard Monnaie quietly struck the Rossini passage, explaining that a music journal could not afford to print such a thing. For the Dresden Abendzeitung he penned a longer piece in which he gleefully mocked the conductor Lachner, whose Parisian libretto from St. Georges had collided, to everyone’s great amusement, with Halévy’s Reine de Chypre. The work brought Wagner into closer intimacy with Halévy himself, whom he found a good-natured, modest man, and incorrigibly lazy; his indifference to applause was eventually explained by the news of an imminent wealthy marriage. A final meeting in 1860, at the Palais de l’Institut, left Wagner with a depressing sense of moral and aesthetic decline in one of the last great French musicians.

During this period of hack-work, Wagner’s thoughts turned wholly to his return to Germany. Lehrs had reawakened his appetite for serious study; the Greek classics were forbidden him, but Raumer’s History of the Hohenstaufen fired his imagination, particularly the figure of Emperor Frederick II., whose appreciation of purely human qualities beyond nationality struck Wagner as the German ideal at its highest. He planned a five-act dramatic poem about Frederick’s son Manfred, with a Saracen heroine named Fatima—the child of Frederick’s love for a noble Eastern maiden, whose vow of chastity both saves and ruins her. He adorned the theme with gorgeous scenes, yet could never rouse the enthusiasm needed to complete it, for another subject, the Venusberg, had already seized his imagination after a pamphlet on Tannhäuser fell into his hands. He studied the Wartburg legend through Lukas’s report, felt a Lohengrin image live imperishably within him, and sketched plots for the ailing hypochondriac Dessauer, including Bergwerke von Falun and, in a moment of despair, an oratorio on Mary Magdalene that he never quite began.

News at last came that Rienzi would be ready in Dresden by autumn 1842. The Fliegender Holländer had been accepted by Count Redern in Berlin, but a sour discovery awaited him: Redern was retiring, and the man succeeding him was none other than Küstner of Munich, who had previously refused the work. Family wealth, slow to awaken, began to flow toward him—his brother-in-law Avenarius surprised him with a five-hundred-franc note from a Leipzig merchant named Schletter, concealed in a Christmas goose. Friedrich Brockhaus, who had repulsed him a year before, now supplied travelling money, and the six-hundred-mark loan from Hermann Brockhaus and his wife gave him a true sense of relief.

On 7th April, 1842, the Wagners turned their backs on Paris. Farewells to the elderly Anders, to Lehrs, and to Kietz—who forced a final five-franc piece and a packet of French snuff upon them—left them blinded with tears. The journey through the German frontier was a torture of snow and storms, but the sight of the Wartburg, gilded by one hour of sunlight, transfigured the weary miles. He christened a neighbouring ridge the Hörselberg, and sketched the scenery for the third act of Tannhäuser in his mind. On 12th April he reached Dresden, found Minna’s parents in straitened lodgings, and installed his wife in cheap rooms in the Töpfergasse.

From Leipzig he visited his mother, now peacefully aged, and sought out Mendelssohn in Berlin, who received him with polite coldness; a glimpse of Meyerbeer, who was, as ever, “going away”; and Rellstab, who would not concern himself with his affairs. In Berlin he felt only desolation, and breathed a hope that his lot might be cast in Paris rather than in that “sordid” capital. Back in Leipzig, the home of his brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus moved him to a fit of weeping: here was unruffled content, illuminated by mental life, and a tender sister who understood his homeless soul at last. A loan of six hundred marks, tendered as a family duty, tided him over the anxious months.

In Dresden, the chorus-master Wilhelm Fischer greeted him with a shout and an embrace, having read the Rienzi score and fought for its acceptance. The actor Ferdinand Heine, a friend of his stepfather’s Geyer circle, became another anchor. Their evenings were spent at Heine’s over potatoes and herrings, in hopeful conversation. Tichatschek, briefly seen before his holiday, declared himself enchanted with the role of Rienzi, fired as much by the promise of new silver armour as by the music; the loss of his part in a subsequent production would drive a small Italian singer into denunciation at the time of the 1849 rising—a debt Wagner would long feel.

To shorten the monstrous score, Wagner played and sang it through to the astonished Fischer with such frantic vigour that the older man grew concerned for his chest; as sops, Wagner flung him the second-act pantomime and most of the ballet. That summer he stayed at Toplitz with Minna and his mother, rambled through the Bohemian mountains, and on the romantic Schreckenstein, in a room strewn with straw, drew up in his pocket-book the detailed plan of a three-act opera on the Venusberg, and worked out its composition thereafter in strict accordance with that sketch. Climbing the Wostrai, he heard a goatherd whistle a merry dance tune he could never afterwards recall. The pilgrimage-greeting scene of Tannhäuser crystallised before him in that instant.

By July he was back in Dresden, lodging in a queer house facing the Maximilian Avenue, and moving in closer intercourse with his operatic stars. Hearing Schröder-Devrient in Grétry’s Blaubart revived his very first operatic memory, of a paper helmet and the song “Ha, die Falsche!” that he had sung at five years old. He found the Dresden orchestra thin in strings, the staging materially deficient, and the repertoire a mean affair; he felt degraded again, and wondered how he could hold his ground between disgust and desire.

It was the sympathy of those endowed with exceptional gifts that enabled him to triumph over these scruples, above all Schröder-Devrient, whose defects—the maternal stoutness ill-suited to male attire, the dragging time, the limited repertoire, the painful jealousy, the painful study of new parts—were eclipsed for him by an incomparable greatness he was uniquely fitted to appreciate. Tichatschek, by contrast, was an easy pleasure: he could sight-read the most difficult music, and poured himself into his role with childlike enthusiasm, picking up clerical errors with incorrigible pertinacity and dismissing all expostulation with “Ah! that will be all right soon.” To coax Reissiger into frequent piano rehearsals, Wagner offered him a versified libretto from his old romance Die Hohe Braut, only to discover that the suspicious conductor and his wife feared some trap; he regained the text and later helped Kittl with it in Prague as Die Franzosen vor Nizza.