My Life — Volume 1

I quickly ran afoul of my colleagues too. Reissiger, who’d hoped for a musical director under him, got an equal colleague in me instead, and his ambitious wife stirred up his jealousy. He was never openly hostile, but I soon noticed indiscretions in the press tied to him. The arrogant orchestra leader Lipinsky, who played too loud, too early, resented that the orchestra’s playing improved under my baton. I made a catastrophic error on a contrabass vacancy: Lipinsky pushed me to hire an outsider from Darmstadt instead of promoting an orchestra senior, I agreed, and the entire orchestra turned on me, Lipinsky accusing me of undermining their hard-earned seniority rights. Lüttichau was panicking, I calmed him, promised I’d handle the musicians, kept my word, never clashed with Lipinsky again, won the devotion of every player in the orchestra. But I knew right then I would never die as Dresden’s court conductor; the post was already a burden, even with the occasional excellent performance.

I did find two lifelong friends in Dresden, however. August Röckel, the musical director assigned to me, was a Bavarian musician whose father had sung Florestan in Fidelio’s premiere, known Beethoven personally, and brought German opera to Paris, giving Schroder-Devrient her debut there. Röckel came to Dresden full of ambition to write popular operas, but after I played him my Rienzi and Fliegender Holländer, he was so overwhelmed he gave up his own mediocre Farinelli opera entirely, declaring his vocation was to be my helper, shield me from the unpleasantness of my official position, not compose his own works while living in my friendship. I tried to get him to write operas, gave him a detailed plot for Cromwell’s Daughter, but his desperate poverty, his wife and growing children wore down his creative talent. He remained my most intimate friend, the only person who ever truly understood the impossible position I was trapped in. Dr. Anton Pusinelli, a young physician who lived near me, became my family doctor, and his own wealth let him give me substantial, life-saving financial support when times were hardest. I also made a small, ultimately meaningless connection to high society through the von Konneritz family, who invited me to their salons, where I met the famous soprano Sontag, but found I had nothing in common with the aristocracy, their empty, frivolous lives a waste of my time. The only high-society woman who ever touched my soul was Ida von Lüttichau, the director’s cultured, gentle, desperately ill wife, the first person to appreciate my Fliegender Holländer when all of Dresden was puzzled by it; I dedicated the opera to her, but our rare, awkward meetings never moved beyond small talk, no real intimacy to change the course of my days.

My only real social circle was my old friends Heine and Gaffer Fischer, plus the tenor Tichatschek and his strange domestic set, and my work with the Dresden Glee Club, run by the ambitious Professor Lowe who wanted to use the club for his own ambitions: transferring Weber’s remains from London to Dresden, and hosting a huge Saxony choral festival. I wrote the Liebesmahl der Apostel (Lovefeast of the Apostles) for the festival, a 30-minute choral work for 1,200 unaccompanied male voices depicting the Pentecost outpouring of the Holy Ghost. When we performed it in the Frauenkirche, the sheer weight of 1,200 voices was a weak, muddy mess that disappointed me; I decided right then I’d never attempt a huge choral work again. I escaped the Glee Club by passing it off to the ambitious Ferdinand Hiller, and only looked back once for the 1843 transfer of Weber’s ashes to Dresden, a triumph I’d organize later that year. That summer, I was also commissioned to write a festal male chorus for the unveiling of King Frederick Augustus’s statue in the Zwinger, alongside Mendelssohn, who wove the national anthem “Heil Dir im Rautenkranz” into his counterpoint so skillfully no one in the audience could tell why the brass was playing a different tune than the singers. I got a gold snuffbox with a badly engraved hunting scene as a reward, the metal cut through in several places from the poor engraving.

Secure in my lifetime appointment, Minna and I set up a proper home in a spacious house on Ostra Allee, furnished with a concert grand piano, a stately writing desk, and the only possession that would stay with me my whole life: a Cornelius title page for the Nibelungen in a Gothic frame. I built a systematic library of German medieval literature, world history, poetry, hoping to finally do serious, productive study now that my official duties were light, Lüttichau gave me unusual consideration. I took a holiday in Toplitz that summer with Minna and my mother, who needed the baths for her gout, and read J. Grimm’s German Mythology, a scattershot collection of perished medieval legends that sparked my imagination for Tannhäuser. I sketched the Venusberg music in my head, had fits of excitability and brain rushes, took a trip to Prague to recover, came back and finished the first act of Tannhäuser in January 1844.

When I got back from Hamburg, dispirited and worn out from constant colds, I finally got to conduct Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for the famous Palm Sunday concerts in the chapel, a dream I’d had for months. The orchestra seating was a disaster, leftover from the Italian conductor Morlacchi who’d favored it over Weber, but we got a performance beyond expectations, the first time I truly felt Beethoven’s prolific strength, my friend Kockel cheering me on from the wings. It was the only bright spot in a month of drudgery, forced to conduct inferior, unrehearsed performances of Mozart and other repertoire pieces that left audiences disappointed, Reissiger comfortingly telling me I’d soon get used to the “inevitable fate of a conductor” and have a belly as round as his. I’d also gotten a close look at Mendelssohn’s terrible interpretation of his own St. Paul earlier that year, and when he nodded at me during Reissiger’s butchered tempo of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony minuet, taken at a waltz pace instead of a proper minuet, I realized he had no real feeling for the music at all, an opinion later confirmed by Schumann.