My Life — Volume 1

The vacation turned violent when Degelow, whom Wagner was scheduled to duel, proposed a truce so they could talk before their fight. They wandered the streets arm in arm, Degelow telling Wagner he was honored to cross swords with him, and embraced warmly before parting—only for Wagner to hear a week later that Degelow had been mortally wounded in a duel in Jena. The shock was still fresh when Wagner learned his next opponent Tischer had been beaten so badly by brothel workers after a drunken night that he was hospitalized, canceling their duel. As the wildest students left Leipzig, Wagner got caught up in a days-long gambling binge during a freshman festival. What started as a bid to win two thalers to cover his tab turned into a months-long mania: he stopped attending fencing, beer halls, or duels entirely, spending every night at the gambling table, lying to his family about his whereabouts, climbing over the garden gate to his room before dawn. He hit rock bottom when he gambled away a large sum of his mother’s pension money he was supposed to be managing, losing everything but a single thaler. He staked that last coin on a hunch, won big, and paid off every debt he owed, feeling as though divine intervention was guiding his hand. The terror of that night broke his gambling addiction for good; he confessed everything to his mother the next morning, and she thanked God he was “saved,” believing he would never err again.

Freed from his vices, Wagner finally turned his full attention back to music. He’d still composed small works during his dissipation, including a wild B-flat overture inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth, which he’d tried to color-code for different instrument sections (black for brass, red for strings, green for winds, a plan scuttled when he couldn’t source green ink). He showed the score to Heinrich Dorn, the Leipzig theater’s musical director, who agreed to perform it at a Christmas 1830 charity concert. The performance was a disaster: Wagner had inserted a jarring, out-of-place kettle-drum beat every five bars, which threw the orchestra into chaos and made the audience laugh; the piece ended abruptly with no proper resolution, and Wagner fled the theater, avoiding the pit for months afterward, humiliated.

Desperate to build real skill, Wagner studied with Theodor Weinlich, the elderly St. Thomas’s choirmaster, a former student of Pater Martini in Bologna known for rigorous teaching. Weinlich made Wagner promise to stop composing entirely for six months and focus only on harmony and counterpoint exercises, a punishment Wagner hated at first, but after his gambling rock bottom, he begged Weinlich for a second chance when the old man tried to fire him for lack of dedication. Weinlich relented, spending hours each morning walking Wagner through fugue writing bar by bar, and within eight weeks Wagner had mastered counterpoint so thoroughly that Weinlich told him he had nothing left to teach him, that he now had the technical independence to compose whatever he wished. Weinlich helped get Wagner’s new F-sharp minor piano fantasia and three overtures published; the D minor overture was performed at a Gewandhaus concert. Now inspired by Mozart’s clear, flowing technical style, Wagner wrote a second C major overture ending with a polished fugue, then a full C major symphony influenced by both Beethoven’s Eroica and Mozart, which his sister Rosalie, the family’s breadwinning actress, criticized for lacking real passion, a comment that stung but pushed him to refine his craft.

Wagner’s political awakening deepened when the Polish War of Independence against Russian rule broke out in 1831. He thrilled to early Polish victories, was devastated by the crushing defeat at the Battle of Ostrolenka, and was disgusted to find his student friends mocked his enthusiasm, caring only for rowdy drinking and dueling. He cut ties with his old associates, spending his evenings at a confectioner’s shop reading newspapers with like-minded radicals, and falling in love with the Polish cause. Through his brother-in-law Brockhaus, who ran a committee to support Polish refugees, Wagner met Count Vincenz Tyszkiewitcz, a noble, dignified Polish exile whose calm, kingly bearing made the posturing of the student “heroes” Wagner had once admired look ridiculous. Wagner became devoted to the count, visiting him daily, and was present when he was reunited with his wife and young son, separated during the fighting. The Third of May, the anniversary of the Polish revolution, was celebrated with a raucous all-night party outside Leipzig, with a brass band playing Polish folk songs, the crowd singing and swearing eternal friendship to the Fatherland until dawn. The experience inspired Wagner to compose an overture he titled Polonia.

When Tyszkiewitcz received a passport to return to Galicia, Wagner’s mother agreed to let him travel to Vienna with the count. He brought his three performed overtures and his unpublished symphony, traveling in Tyszkiewitcz’s coach as far as Brunn, then continuing alone to Vienna, terrified of a cholera outbreak but arriving safely in midsummer 1832. He spent six weeks taking in the city’s vibrant musical life: unimpressed by a star-studded performance of Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris, his expectations set too high by Schroder-Devrient’s Fidelio and Hoffmann’s writings, he was far more enthralled by Johann Strauss’s ecstatic waltz performances and the wildly popular opera Zampa. He left Vienna, stopping at Count Pachta’s rural estate Pravonin near Prague.

Pravonin brought awkward romantic tension: the count’s two daughters, the slim, dark-haired Jenny and the plump, fair-haired Auguste, were kind and playful, and Wagner, then nineteen with a fast-growing beard, fumbled a half-hearted courtship of both, frustrated by their crude aristocratic suitors and their lack of interest in art. He lectured them harshly about the French Revolution, begged them to marry middle-class men instead of the boorish nobles, and left on a cold November day unresolved, half in love, half angry. In Prague, he connected with Dionys Weber, the tyrannical conservatoire director who hated Beethoven’s later work and only respected Mozart. Wagner flattered Weber’s tastes, pointed out the Mozart influence in his own C major overture and symphony, and convinced him to let the conservatoire orchestra perform his symphony, a debut that went off smoothly in front of a crowd including Count Pachta. While in Prague, Wagner also sketched his first opera libretto, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), a dark, mystic tale of two feuding families whose reconciliation at a wedding is shattered when the bride’s new ally falls in love with her, she pushes him off a balcony to his death, and then dies at his funeral, averting a clan war. He wrote it in secret, hiding the manuscript behind the sofa at his friend Moritz’s house whenever his host came near.