My Life — Volume 1

Part 73 / Part 76

On his thirty-seventh birthday Wagner was in hiding at Magdala when Minna arrived to urge him, once more, to leave Germany for good. No appeal could lift her to his mood. The parting was arranged at Professor Wolff’s house in Jena, where Liszt and Professor Widmann sat in council. A writ was out for his part in the Dresden rising; Widmann warned him off the direct route through Baden and offered his own outdated Tübingen passport. Minna watched her husband walk out to begin the six-hour tramp to Jena. He arrived at sunset, embraced her for the last time, and stepped into the mail-coach that same evening. Through Rudolstadt, past the Bavarian frontier, to Lindau he travelled, and spent a feverish night rehearsing the Swabian dialect against imagined encounters with Bavarian police. In the morning the policeman handed him three passports at random; he seized his own and dismissed the man with exaggerated friendliness. On the Lake Constance steamer, watching the spring morning spread over the Swiss water, he felt himself delivered. At Rorschach he set foot on Republican soil, and by evening was descending into Zürich as the Glarner Alps flared in the sunset.

Through his old friend Alexander Müller he met the cantonal secretaries Jacob Sulzer and Franz Hagenbuch, who received him with respectful curiosity. To win them he read his poem on the Death of Siegfried; he swore he had never had more attentive listeners. Within days they had drawn up a federal passport, and Wagner set off gaily for Paris, entranced at Strasbourg by the cathedral and on the malle-poste by what seemed the bass-register melody of Beethoven’s “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” humming in the wheels.

In Paris in the first week of June 1850 the cholera-stricken capital oppressed him. He lodged near Belloni, Liszt’s former secretary; funeral processions passed nearly every hour. At Schlesinger’s music shop he caught Meyerbeer hiding behind a desk for ten minutes. Meyerbeer pressed him to exploit Liszt’s brilliant article; Wagner replied with violence that he wanted nothing to do with artistic production in this hour of reaction. From these encounters he turned to the other Dresden fugitives: Semper, the architect of the Dresden Museum, and young Heine, the painter of his Lohengrin scenes. With Semper he spent the only bright hours of that stay.

Belloni offered escape to a country place near La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where Wagner occupied a single room in the house of Monsieur Raphael, the wine merchant, and waited. He read Proudhon’s De la propriété and lingered over Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins. News came of the failed Republican rising of 13 June and the Prussian suppression in Baden. From Weimar his friends wrote curtly: nothing for him in Dresden, one could not knock at battered doors. Then Minna’s letter arrived: she could not dream of living with him again after he had so unscrupulously thrown away the position she prized. He begged Liszt to look after her and advised her to sell the Dresden furniture.

Zürich became his refuge. He arrived at Müller’s house with twenty francs, gave up the grand piano room for a modest bedroom, and let himself be carried along by the unaccustomed luxury of being received simply for himself. Sulzer, the young cantonal secretary, a Hegelian of austere integrity, became his friend. One wild evening, after reading Siegfried’s Tod, Wagner and Hagenbuch bodily lifted every door from its hinges in Sulzer’s official residence; Sulzer smiled and spent the whole night replacing them. Wagner began to write. Art and Revolution went to Otto Wigand for five louis d’or; Die Nibelungen fetched another five. He planned public lectures, conducted Beethoven’s A major Symphony for the Zürich Musical Society for five napoleons, and composed Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft in a sunless ground-floor room.

Minna, meanwhile, had begun the long journey to rejoin him, bringing the dog Peps, the parrot Papo, her “sister” Nathalie, and three hundred marks from the sale of the Dresden furniture. Sulzer’s quiet help made their little place in the Zeltweg cosy. Yet the home front was never peaceful: Minna despised Zürich’s smallness, dismissed Sulzer as a town-clerk, and would hear only of Paris. Frau Julie Ritter of Dresden sent fifteen hundred marks; Mme. Laussot wrote from Bordeaux with sympathetic assurances. These were the first signs of a new phase.

Minna’s pressure drove him back to Paris in February 1850. The journey was postponed by a chest weakness that stole his voice. He settled in the Cité de Provence and at once called on Seghers about the Tannhäuser Overture, only to find the orchestral parts still unprocured. The police agent who visited him was mollified by Liszt’s article; Semper, Kietz and the ageing Anders, recovered from a decline by a broken leg, kept him company. The Tannhäuser Overture was quietly dropped for the season; Wigand’s edition of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft arrived full of misprints and half its promised fee; Meyerbeer’s The Prophet, newly produced, struck Wagner with such disgust at its trivial roulades that he rose from his stall and left the theatre, never to heed the work again.

Then came the invitation from Mme. Laussot in Bordeaux. The Ritters had long been in correspondence with her family; Jessie Laussot, a young woman of twenty-two who read German poetry fluently and played the Beethoven B-flat Sonata with astonishing facility, had been intimate with them in Dresden. Wagner travelled by coach via Orléans, Tours, and Angoulême down to the Gironde and was received at the wine-merchant’s house by Jessie, her absent husband Eugène, and the deaf Mrs. Taylor. The two families offered him three thousand francs a year. He read Jessie his poems; she preferred Wieland der Schmied to Siegfried’s Tod. As he came to know the household he saw the unhappily married couple and the gulf between Jessie and her mother. From Dresden came word that Röckel, Bakunin, and Heubner had been sentenced to death; he wrote them farewell letters through Frau von Lüttichau, who burned them unread. Pressed by Minna’s letters, he resolved to break with everyone: to divide the Laussot income with his wife and vanish with his half to Greece or Asia Minor. Jessie hinted at sharing his fate.

He left Bordeaux in late April, stunned, and after a week at the Hôtel Valois in Paris retreated to Montmorency, where he put up at the inn of a wine-merchant named Homo. In a tiny bedroom with two cane-bottomed chairs he set out his Lohengrin score and writing materials. He sent the Lohengrin score to Liszt, summoned Kietz, and felt for a moment free as a bird. But Minna herself now arrived in Paris to look for him. Wagner instructed Kietz to tell her nothing; that night he left for Clermont-Tonnerre and then Geneva, where Karl Ritter joined him at the empty Hôtel Byron in Villeneuve. There, with his young friend beside him, he prepared Siegfried’s Tod for publication and allowed himself, briefly, the hope of a new life.