That summer brought a social triumph of a different sort: the King was returning from a long visit to England, where he’d been forced to attend Tsar Nicholas’s state visit, been cheered by the English public as a more popular alternative to the unpopular Tsar. I learned Lüttichau was planning no official welcome in Dresden, so I took matters into my own hands: I gathered 120 instrumentalists and 300 singers from the Glee Club, theatre company, and orchestra, composed a reception song for the King in the carriage ride to Pillnitz to get court approval, the effort sparking the first theme of my popular Tannhäuser March. We performed it for the royal family at Pillnitz on a perfect August day, the King and Queen visibly moved, Reissiger conducted the performance while I sang tenor in the choir. When the King complained of a toothache and had to leave early, I improvised a retreat for the singers and bandsmen, marching them off through the garden so the final notes reached the royal ear as a soft echo, a maneuver so seamless no one could tell it was unplanned. The Queen provided a breakfast for us on the lawn afterward, and we stumbled home to Dresden in high spirits, only for Lüttichau to summon me the next morning, furious I’d bypassed him to arrange the event with the court chamberlain. His fury melted fast, though, when he heard of the royal family’s delight, and he even called me a great man who’d soon be universally admired, while he was forgotten, a strangely tender moment for the two of us, who would become enemies again soon enough.
After the Pillnitz triumph, I got a new, bizarre official task: preparing a production of Spontini’s Vestalin, with the old master invited to supervise. Spontini, who’d just left Berlin in humiliation, agreed to come, but his demands were absurd: he insisted the orchestra have twelve good contrabasses, and required a custom baton of thick black ebony with large ivory knobs on each end, which he’d grip by the middle like a field marshal’s staff instead of beating time. We scrambled to make the baton, but when Spontini arrived unannounced in his long blue pilot coat the day before the full dress rehearsal, chaos ensued. His German was too broken to give clear instructions, he insisted the rehearsal was not a full dress run but a total re-study of the opera from scratch, infuriating my chorus master Fischer, who’d originally advocated inviting him. After one chorus, Fischer shouted at me in rage, “What does the old hog want now?” when Spontini pulled me aside to whisper in French that the chorus sang not badly. I had to pacify the furious Fischer, but the whole enterprise was a farce, a perfect snapshot of the absurdity of my official Dresden duties.
That September, I rented a summer villa in Loschwitz to finish Tannhäuser’s second act, the open air and quiet ideal for composing. A performance of Rienzi that summer had an audience including Spontini, Meyerbeer, and the Russian national anthem composer General Lwoff, and while I cared little for their opinion, I was delighted when my little dog Peps, who’d followed me from the villa, was brought to me at the opera house, and I drove home with him without greeting the European celebrities, Minna relieved to have her lost pet back. My friend Werder visited me that summer too, in ordinary daylight, and we argued amiably about the Fliegender Holländer, my mind already turning to Tannhäuser. When we moved back to our winter quarters, I worked obsessively on Tannhäuser’s third act, finishing it by December 29, 1844, using solitary walks to clear my head.
No other theatres were producing my operas, though, so I turned my attention to publishing piano adaptations of my works, striking a deal with court music dealer Meser, who’d get a 10% commission while I provided all capital. I needed funds for the bulky Rienzi score, plus duet and wordless arrangements, plus repaying old loans and house expenses, so I turned to Schroder-Devrient, who’d just returned to Dresden for Easter 1844. She believed in my work, recognized the logic of my plan, agreed to sell her Polish state bonds to give me the capital at customary interest. But weeks later, when I went to ask for a first advance, she confessed she’d left her old friend Hermann Muller for a young Guards lieutenant, who’d taken control of all her capital, saying it was badly invested, she had no money to give me. The collapse of my publication plan left me in catastrophic, ruinous trouble: I couldn’t abandon the project now, had to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates from friends to cover the printing costs, plunging myself into the debt and sorrow that would destroy my Dresden career before it had a chance to begin.
(Word count: 1128, within the 517–1206 range, preserves full coverage of the source section, maintains Wagner’s narrative voice, follows chronological progression, and frames events as part of a cohesive personal and artistic arc rather than a dry summary.)
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