My Life — Volume 1

Part 67 / Part 70

For seven years I held the post of conductor at Dresden, and throughout that tenure the quiet hostility of the court and the theatre director seeped into every corner of my work. The orchestral concerts I had spent the previous winter building were stripped from my control and handed to Reissiger, and they at once plummeted to the dull, ordinary standard of routine court performances. Public interest dried up almost immediately, and the concert series barely survived. Opera fared no better: my plan to revive Der fliegende Holländer, with the talented Mitterwurzer in the title role and my niece Johanna as Senta, was dead before it started. Johanna refused the part, complaining it offered no chance for the showy costumes she craved; she preferred the flashy roles in Zampa and Donizetti’s Favorita, partly to curry favor with her new patron, the former Rienzi fanatic Tichatschck, partly because those roles came with three lavish costumes apiece. Tichatschck and Johanna had formed a quiet rebellion against my artistic authority, and when they learned of my falling out with the director and my obvious loss of influence at court, they saw their chance: they forced me to conduct Favorita myself, a work I had once refused to arrange for Schlesinger in Paris, even though the lead suited Johanna’s voice perfectly. My days were mostly spent conducting Flotow’s Martha, a tedious opera overproduced solely because its cast was convenient, and I left each night humiliated, knowing that if I walked away from Dresden, not a single trace of the energy I’d poured into the court theatre would remain. Even if the King favored me in any dispute with the director, I knew the courtier would win every time.

The only bright spot that winter came on Palm Sunday 1849, when we performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The orchestra had pulled out all the stops to make it our best performance yet, and the public responded with real enthusiasm. Michael Bakunin, hiding from the Austrian police, had attended the public rehearsal, and after it ended he walked straight up to me in the orchestra pit, loud enough for everyone to hear: if every piece of music ever written were lost in the coming worldwide conflagration, we had to pledge to save this symphony, even at the risk of our lives. We had become friends in the months prior, introduced by Röckel after the latter had embraced republicanism. Bakunin had fled to Dresden to escape Austrian persecution for his role in the 1848 Prague uprisings and the preceding Slav Congress, and I had first met him at Röckel’s modest home, immediately struck by his towering, primal presence. He was a Russian noble who had renounced his family’s fortune and status, once giving away his last two francs to a beggar on a Paris boulevard because he hated being tied to material cares. He had studied Hegel so thoroughly he had bested the philosopher’s most famous disciples at their own dialectic, wandered Europe preaching communism, and believed the Russian peasantry, uncorrupted by civilization, would rise up to burn down the entire old world order. He cared nothing for idle intellectual chatter, only for men of reckless action, and would argue for hours in Socratic style for the total annihilation of all existing civilization, insisting that even the most enlightened European thinkers would agree all modern misery stemmed from the institutions he wanted destroyed. He baffled me: he was tender enough to shield my sore eyes from harsh light for an hour when we first met, and loved the snippets of Der fliegende Holländer I played for him, calling them “stupendously fine,” but he wanted me to rewrite my planned Jesus of Nazareth tragedy so the chorus spent the whole opera yelling for Christ’s execution. He ate his meat by the handful instead of cutting it into bread, drank brandy by the gulp, and scoffed at moderation, saying the only real pleasure worth a man’s time was love. I swung between horrified repulsion and fierce attraction to him, taking long walks with him through the countryside around Dresden, unable to sway him from his single-minded focus on destruction when I tried to talk to him about my artistic vision for a remade society.

By spring 1849, I knew my artistic career in Dresden was finished, and I drifted in a dull, restless haze, waiting for the pressure of political events to set me free. Tension was boiling across Germany, and I found myself half-hoping, half-dreading that the coming clash would swallow up my personal fate entirely. Then Liszt wrote: he was staging Tannhäuser in Weimar, the first production outside Dresden, and had invited Tichatschek to the first two performances. Tichatschek returned saying it was a success, and Liszt sent me a gold snuffbox I would use for years. He invited me to come for a third performance in mid-May, and I took leave from the theatre to go.

I barely had time to make plans before the storm broke. On May 1 the reactionary Beust ministry dissolved the Saxon Chambers, and my friend Röckel, who had been a deputy, lost his immunity from arrest. I helped him flee across the Bohemian border, and promised to keep his radical newspaper Volksblatt running to support his family. I was still setting type for the paper’s next issue on May 3 when the uprising I’d half-expected finally ignited. Emergency deputations, nightly mob protests, union meetings: the signs were everywhere. That afternoon I attended a Vaterlands-Verein committee meeting as Röckel’s representative, and saw immediately that the moderate leaders were utterly out of their depth, panicking at the militant energy of the working class crowds. I left with a young painter named Kaufmann, and as we reached Postplatz, the bells of St. Ann’s Church began to clang the alarm of revolt. Kaufmann cried out “Good God, it has begun!” and vanished; I never saw him again. The bell’s clang, the strange yellow-brown light that washed over the square like the eclipse I’d seen in Magdeburg years prior, filled me with a giddy, almost playful excitement. I stopped at Tichatschek’s house first, laughing at his wife’s terror as I advised her to hand his hunting rifle over to the Vaterlands-Verein for safekeeping, then wandered to the Old Market, where I ran into the opera singer Schröder-Devrient, just back from Berlin, furious that troops had fired on crowds in “peaceful Dresden.” She begged me to help stop the bloodshed, and I would later learn she was charged with sedition for her protests.