My Life — Volume 1

Part 49 / Part 52

The rehearsals of Spontini’s La Vestale in Dresden became a prolonged and eccentric ordeal that Richard Wagner, almost alone among his colleagues, found not merely tolerable but strangely nourishing. The composer’s terrible short-sightedness, his insistence on a thunderous clash of Roman spears upon shields that the chorus could never quite deliver in unison, his prohibition of the word “Braut” as too vulgar for music, and his long lecture to the high-priest on the meaning of priestcraft and superstition in opera — all of these, which scattered singers and stagehands in despair, Wagner watched with a fascinated eye for the miraculous artistic energy that animated them. When Spontini, having marched onto the empty stage to address a vanished cast, found only workmen and lamp-cleaners before him, Wagner gently rescued him and secured Eduard Devrient to drill the chorus into the desired solemnity. From the master he accepted odd commissions — adding trombones to the triumphal march, writing a part for the new bass-tuba — and, more importantly, he implemented Spontini’s principles of orchestration in his own theatre: strings spread across the full orchestra, brass and percussion divided between both flanks, a chain of delicate winds between the violins. Spontini conducted only with his eyes, refusing glasses even when he could not see a foot before him, and kept the two oboists directly behind him in a Parisian habit he would never relinquish. The finale of the opera, which Spontini insisted upon ending with a wedding of rose-bedecked priests and priestesses before a resplendent Venus rather than a gloomy churchyard scene, was duly staged. At the premiere, however, the coolness of the audience could not be blamed solely on antiquated French conventions. Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, no longer of an age to embody the youngest vestal virgin beside her strikingly youthful niece Johanna Wagner, made the fatal error of speaking rather than singing the words “er ist frei” — a moment Wagner had once likened to the executioner’s axe in Fidelio, when the great singer had whispered “Noch einen Schritt und du bist todt!” with devastating effect. That same shattering technique, attempted at the wrong moment, fell flat. The master took his lukewarm applause under a constellation of decorations and resolved to stay in Dresden for further Sunday performances.

In Schroeder-Devrient’s dining room, where Heine and Ferdinand Hiller were also guests, Spontini revealed the full extent of his comic monstrosity. He listened deferentially until he spoke, and then only in categorical, sharply accentuated sentences that forbade contradiction. When Madame Devrient laughed during one of his harangues, he shot his wife an angry glance, and when the laughter was explained away, he declared coldly: “Pourtant je suis sûr que c’est ma femme qui a suscité ce rire; je ne veux pas que l’on rie devant moi, je ne rie jamais moi, j’aime le sérieux.” Over dessert he amused the company by crunching enormous lumps of sugar with his magnificent teeth. He confided to Wagner that he loved him and wished to preserve him from the misfortune of being a dramatic composer “after Spontini.” Quoting his own La Vestale, he declared that he had invented the suspension of the sixth, introduced the bass drum into the orchestra, and that no note written since had not been stolen from his scores. The Italians were cochons, the French mere imitators, the Germans eternally childish, and the Jews the ruiners of all German music. When taken to see Mendelssohn’s Antigone, he rose within minutes with the verdict: “C’est de la Berliner Sing-Academie, allons-nous-en.” Schroeder-Devrient, perceiving that no second performance could rescue the master from disappointment, took to her bed with a feigned illness, and Wagner and Röckel were dispatched to break the news. They found him radiant, for the Pope had summoned him to Rome to be made Count of San Andrea and the King of Denmark had raised him to knighthood. From Paris, Berlioz would later report his deathbed cry: “Je ne veux pas mourir, je ne veux pas mourir!” and Wagner, reading the news in Zürich, would extol in him that absolute belief in himself and his art which Meyerbeer and the aged Rossini had so lamentably lost.

Theodor Marschner, who had once hoped to inherit Weber’s place in Dresden, came to conduct his opera Adolph von Nassau under Wagner’s baton, and the score proved such a debacle that Tichatschek and Mitterwurzer burst into helpless laughter at rehearsal. A Viennese coloratura singer attempted to rescue the work with brilliant effects, and Marschner’s drinking quartet — in which the German Rhine and German wine played the usual stereotyped part — was roundly encored at the otherwise stillborn premiere. Ferdinand Hiller, charming and industrious, also besieged Dresden with his opera Der Traum in der Christnacht, having displaced the unfortunate Röckel’s Farinelli; the work survived two performances, and Hiller entreated Wagner to choose his next libretto for him. Wagner, exhausted by the parade of disappointed mediocrities, found his deepest consolation in a far more solemn enterprise.

In December 1844, the remains of Carl Maria von Weber were at last removed from a forgotten corner of St. Paul’s in London and brought home by his elder son. Wagner, as president of the committee, had fought the theatre management, overcome the King’s supposed scruples, and arranged the funeral music from Euryanthe — the spiritual vision of the overture, transposed into B flat major, and twenty muffled drums replacing the tremolo of the violas. At the Catholic cemetery in Friedrichstadt, before a hushed crowd, he delivered his first public oration, learned by heart. He fell into a curious trance in which he seemed to hear and see himself speaking, and only the silence recalled him to his duty; he then finished with such fluency that Emil Devrient pronounced him deeply impressive even from a purely dramatic standpoint. The ceremony concluded with a hymn Wagner himself had composed and set to mediaeval-Germanic words in Gothic type — for he had finally renamed his completed opera Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg, and one hundred copies of his score were now ready.