My Life — Volume 1

Richard Wagner’s journey from Prussia to London in 1839 represents one of the most dramatic passages in his early autobiography, combining genuine hardship with the formative aesthetic experiences that would later inform his operatic works. Facing severe financial constraints—his entire resources amounted to less than one hundred ducats—and burdened with his dog Robber, Wagner and his wife Minna resolved to travel by sailing vessel rather than overland, as railways did not yet exist and coach travel with a dog was impractical.

Following their ocean voyage, Richard Wagner and his wife Minna arrived in London only to discover new hardships. The rocking motion of their English double bed made sleep impossible, and the poor quality of the ship’s cuisine had left them both ill. Despite these trials, they set aside concerns about their finances and plunged into exploring the great city, relying on cabs to navigate London’s wonders. Wagner’s primary purpose in London involved contacting musical figures and exploring opportunities for his compositions.

After abandoning hopes of reaching Scribe, Wagner found an alternative collaborator in M. Dumersan, a prolific vaudeville writer who eagerly undertook the translation of his opera Liebesverbot into French verse for performance at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. Encouraged by friends, Wagner also began composing French songs, setting texts provided by Lehrs and Anders—including “Dors, mon enfant,” his first composition to a French text, which proved so successful that his wife, hearing him play it softly, declared it heavenly for sending one to sleep.

The loss of their dog, a valuable animal that had become a familiar attraction along the Seine, struck the Wagners as providential even through their grief—the theft seemed to underscore the precariousness of their Parisian existence. This misfortune came at a time when their resources were already strained, and friends remarked that keeping such a large dog while the couple themselves barely had enough to eat seemed foolhardy. The incident foreshadowed a winter characterized by alternating moments of unexpected connection and profound disappointment.

This chapter chronicles Wagner’s deepening financial desperation and his ultimate triumph in completing Rienzi, set against a backdrop of failed schemes and degrading work for publishers. The episode begins with a bitterly symbolic incident: his overture “Rule Britannia” is returned from the London Philharmonic Society, but he lacks the seven francs needed to pay the carrier’s fee. Unable to afford the postage, he sends the only manuscript copy back to the publisher, an episode that epitomizes his reduced circumstances.

During the winter of 1840–41, Richard Wagner endured one of the most humiliating and grueling periods of his early career. After failing to secure meaningful employment through Heinrich Brockhaus and other avenues, he found himself at the mercy of publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who exploited his desperate circumstances to assign him an enormous amount of tedious work arranging Donizetti’s La Favorita for various instrumentations—a task worth 1,100 francs, for which Wagner received only a 500-franc advance.

Wagner’s early months in 1840 brought devastating consequences when, through ignorance of Parisian rental customs, he failed to give proper notice to his landlady in time. Despite earnest pleas to the agent—an elderly man incapacitated by painful illness—he remained bound to another year’s rent. This catastrophe extinguished his remaining hopes of escaping financial ruin. Seeking relief, Wagner found a family willing to take over the apartment temporarily, allowing the couple to relocate to Meudon, a cheap summer resort on Paris’s outskirts.

The sale of Le Vaisseau Fantôme in July brought temporary relief from extreme financial distress, though it marked Wagner’s final abandonment of Parisian success. With five hundred francs in hand, he rented a piano—a instrument he had been denied for months—to restore his faith as a composer rather than the journalist and adapter he had become. The libretto for Der Fliegende Holländer had already generated enthusiasm with publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who declared it would equal Mozart’s Don Juan in impact.

During his years in Paris, Richard Wagner engaged in considerable musical journalism, writing articles for various publications while nursing ambitions to return to Germany. His work on Halévy’s Reine de Chypre brought him into closer contact with the composer, whom Wagner found to be “peculiarly good-hearted and really unassuming,” though plagued by “incorrigible laziness.” Schlesinger, the publisher, desperately pushed Wagner to “give Halévy no peace” until proof corrections were completed, such was his impatience with the composer’s procrastination.

During his years of exile in Paris, Richard Wagner underwent a profound transformation in his artistic vision. The German cultural heritage that had always drawn him now crystallized into specific legendary material. The legend of Tannhäuser, familiar from Ludwig Tieck’s version in Phantasus, captivated him not merely as fantasy but as essential German story. What particularly struck Wagner was the connection between Tannhäuser and the Wartburg contest—two narratives he had previously encountered separately now merged into a single powerful whole that would become the foundation of his next opera.

This chapter captures a pivotal period in Wagner’s life as he shuttled between cities pursuing the production of his opera Rienzi while confronting financial hardship, professional indifference, and his deepening ambivalence toward German theatrical culture. Wagner arrived in Berlin during this period, seeking out Felix Mendelssohn, who had been a source of both inspiration and frustration in equal measure. The meeting would prove consequential for his understanding of his own artistic path.

The preparation and premiere of Rienzi in Dresden during 1842 marked a pivotal moment in Wagner’s early career, revealing both the extraordinary talents of the singers who championed his work and the profound anxieties that accompanied his first major operatic success. The narrative centers on Wagner’s complex relationships with the artists who would carry his creation to the stage, the elaborate stratagems he employed to secure adequate rehearsal time, and the surreal experience of witnessing his own music triumph before an audience for the first time.

The premiere of Rienzi had stretched from six o’clock until past midnight, and Wagner’s relatives from Leipzig—Friedrich Brockhaus and family—had arrived expecting to celebrate a triumph over supper. Instead they found kitchen and cellar closed, everyone exhausted, and only complaints about the opera’s unbearable length. They stole away feeling stupefied. By eight the next morning, Wagner appeared at the clerks’ office, consumed with a desperate need to cut his opera.

This chapter chronicles two pivotal events in Wagner’s artistic development: his transformative meeting with Franz Liszt and the disastrous premiere of Der Fliegende Holländer. During a December excursion to Berlin with the singer Schroder-Devrient, Wagner sought to discuss his opera with Director Küstner but instead encountered Liszt under circumstances of singular embarrassment engineered by Devrient’s “exasperating caprice.”

Richard Wagner’s acceptance of the royal conductorship at Dresden in 1843 marked a turning point in his career, one he approached with profound ambivalence. Having long despised theatrical life and the degrading conditions of court theatres, he initially refused the musical director’s post vacated by Rastrelli’s death, viewing it as beneath his dignity. Yet the convergence of practical necessity—securing stable income—and the prospect of a higher court conductorship following Morlacchi’s death gradually eroded his resistance.