My Life — Volume 1

The summer of 1845 took him to Marienbad, where the volcanic soil of Bohemia set his imagination ablaze. Walking in the woods with Wolfram von Eschenbach under his arm, he sketched the whole of Lohengrin in a fever of inspiration and, as a counterweight, outlined the comic scheme of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg — Hans Sachs holding up his chalk-marked shoes opposite the Marker with his slate. The doctor bade him give up the waters. Back in Dresden by mid-August, he threw himself into Tannhäuser rehearsals with renewed vigour, even as Schroeder-Devrient warned him plainly that Tichatschek, for all his metallic voice and perfect delivery, lacked the dramatic seriousness for the role, and that she herself could no longer impersonate Venus — “After all, I cannot be clad in a belt alone.” Mitterwurzer, the reticent young baritone with a soulful voice, laboured devotedly over Wolfram, and Johanna Wagner, with her tall slender form and childlike purity, prepared to enchant the audience as Elizabeth. The scenery, ordered from Paris, arrived in fragments; the Hall of Song was delayed until Wagner had almost despaired, and on 19 October 1845, the first performance of Tannhäuser took place amid considerable anxiety.

Part 55 / Part 58

The winter of 1845-46 found Richard Wagner navigating Dresden’s tightly wound creative circles, a world that was at once intellectually stimulating and deeply dispiriting. His closest confidant that season was Dr. Hermann Franck, a comfortably well-off Breslau scholar and critic whose sharp, tactful judgment made him a rare counterpoint to the performative posturing that dominated most of Wagner’s artistic acquaintances. Franck’s scathing critiques of overhyped peers quickly became a balm for Wagner: the pair bonded first over exposing the myth of Felix Mendelssohn’s artistic self-sacrifice, which Franck had previously lauded as the composer’s noble renunciation of a 9,000-mark Berlin conducting post for a lower-paid Leipzig role. Wagner pulled back the curtain on the ruse: Leipzig district governor von Falkenstein had lobbied the king to grant Mendelssohn a secret 6,000-mark annual stipend on top of his public 3,000-mark salary, an arrangement kept hidden to avoid offending lower-paid conductors and framing Mendelssohn as a paragon of artistic altruism. Franck was left reeling, and the pair soon moved on to tearing down other empty figures: Ferdinand Hiller, the era’s chief exponent of musical “good-natured” platitudes, and the vaunted Düsseldorf School painters, including Eduard Bendemann, whose royal palace frescoes Franck dismissively deemed “bedaubed” by a hack.

Weekly gatherings organized by Hiller at Engel’s restaurant near Postplatz brought together Dresden’s artistic elite: painter-poet Reinecke, sculptors Ernst Hähnel and Ernst Rietschel, architect Gottfried Semper, and Munich museum director J. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, whose vivid German historical cartoons enchanted Wagner. The conversations were rarely productive, however: Semper’s default position of treating Wagner as a reactionary medieval Catholic sparked heated, fruitless arguments until the pair bonded over shared love of Germanic pagan myth, isolating them from the rest of the group. The appointment of writer Karl Gutzkow as the court theatre’s head dramatist, instead of Wagner’s old friend Heinrich Laube, proved a final straw for Wagner’s patience with the circle. Gutzkow’s insistence that the orchestra be deployed as a mere noise machine to cover actors’ unapplauded exits left Wagner writing him off entirely. The only bright spot was Berthold Auerbach, the Jewish Black Forest pastoralist writer, with whom Wagner could speak freely about Jewish identity and art; though he later grew frustrated by Auerbach’s obsessive focus on the “Jewish question” to the exclusion of all other cultural concerns.

Amid the social noise, Wagner was hard at work on the Lohengrin libretto, which he read to friends that November to near-universal praise, save for Franck’s critique of its tragic ending: Franck balked at Elsa’s punishment via Lohengrin’s departure, arguing it lacked dramatic realism. Wagner wavered briefly until Frau von Lüttichau, the general director’s wife, wrote to insist his original vision was the only poetically valid one, shoring up his confidence. A later similar critique from Adolf Stahr sent him into a brief panic, but he quickly reaffirmed his choice, sending Franz Liszt a terse note: “Stahr is wrong, and Lohengrin is right.”

That spring, Wagner poured energy into preparing the Dresden premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the annual Palm Sunday Pension Fund benefit, a choice that horrified the orchestra’s trustees, who feared the then-unpopular, poorly received work would tank donations. Wagner won over General Director Lüttichau, wrote a popular accessible programme guide to the symphony, and placed anonymous enthusiastic ads in the Dresden Anzeiger to build public interest. He made painstaking interpretive choices to fix long-standing performance flaws, and the packed, rapturous performance set a new earnings record for the Pension Fund, leaving Wagner convinced of his power to shape public artistic taste, even as he despaired at the ongoing struggles to get his own work recognized beyond Dresden.

His peace was short-lived, crushed by a sudden financial crisis. A failed omen—he and his nominal publisher C.F. Meser served tarragon vinegar instead of Sauterne at a meeting to plan Easter Fair earnings—convinced him the fair would not rescue him from debt. The final blow came from Madame Schröder-Devrient, the celebrated soprano who had lent him 3,000 marks when he first arrived in Dresden. Jealous of his niece Johanna and convinced Wagner had pushed for her dismissal, she handed his IOU to a lawyer and sued for repayment, forcing Wagner to confess his full debt load to Lüttichau and beg for a royal loan from the Theatre Pension Fund. The loan came with brutal terms: 5% interest, plus a 3% annual fee for a life insurance policy to secure the fund’s capital. With the help of his friend Dr. Pusinelli, who vouched for his health, he secured the policy, and made a final trip to Leipzig to meet veteran composer Louis Spohr, who sought reconciliation after his opera Die Kreuzfahrer was rejected by the Dresden theatre. The meeting was warm: Spohr, a tall, dignified man, confessed his artistic conservatism stemmed from his childhood awe of Mozart’s Magic Flute, and expressed enthusiasm for Lohengrin to Wagner’s brother-in-law at a post-meeting dinner. Wagner then obtained a three-month leave to recuperate in a peasant’s cottage in Gross-Graupen, on the edge of Saxon Switzerland.