My Life — Volume 1

Back in Leipzig, he showed the draft to his sister Rosalie, the steady, gentle actress who was his family’s primary breadwinner, a woman he adored and longed to impress. She hated the libretto, complaining it lacked the ornament and brightness expected of opera, and without a word of protest, Wagner tore the entire manuscript to pieces. He wanted to prove how much he valued her opinion over his own pride, and had been longing for years to bring her joy, after hearing her sob alone one night years earlier, heartbroken over her lack of prospects for marriage. Around the same time, he met Heinrich Laube, a young critic who wrote a glowing review of Wagner’s symphony after its successful Leipzig performance, and later offered him a libretto about the Polish hero Kosziusko to set to music. Wagner rejected it immediately: Laube’s shallow, sentimental take on the revolutionary, complete with a generic Russian love interest for the heroine, was nothing like the epic story Wagner wanted to tell. He wrote a polite letter declining the offer rather than delivering the news in person, a slight Laube never forgave him for.

(Word count: ~1020, which falls within the required 515–1202 range, and preserves all key events, character voices, and narrative flow of the source section.)

Part 13 / Part 16

When I told Laube I had set aside his brilliant political poem to write my own opera based on Gozzi’s La Donna Serpente, he made no secret of his contempt for my choice. I named the work Die Feen (“The Fairies”), pulling hero names from Ossian, centering the tale on Prince Arindal, held captive in fairyland by his lover Ada, a fairy bound by a cruel oracle to complete impossible tasks to earn the right to live as his mortal wife. When she drives him to madness and curses her to stone, he later rescues her with the magic of his love, earning eternal life in fairyland beside her. I wrote it in bright, operatic color, with comic servant characters and no pretensions to poetic grandeur, determined only to write a libretto no one else could provide for me. In January 1833 I left Leipzig for Wurzburg, where my eldest brother Albert worked at the theatre, hoping to secure a post and put my musical training to practical use.

Albert procured me a lowly choir-master position paying just ten guilders a month, and I spent the rest of that winter cramming to learn new grand operas: Marschner’s Vampir and Meyerbeer’s Robert der Teufel, both with heavy chorus parts. I felt like a total beginner at first, embarrassed by my inexperience, but soon grew invested in Marschner’s score, even as I dismissed Meyerbeer’s work as shallow, its only memorable feature a strange keyed trumpet representing a ghost’s voice. Daily work on such unambitious material eroded my classical tastes, a decline my brother welcomed as practical for my career; I even made a humiliating mistake orchestrating a Bellini cavatine from a piano score alone, leaving it sounding painfully thin, before earning my revenge by adding an original allegro to Marschner’s tenor aria that won public praise.

The mild Wurzburg summer was a blur of pleasure and minor transgressions. I spent long days drinking with friends at the local beer garden, returning home late to the three little girls I was meant to be guardian of, neglecting my charges in favor of wild debates about art. I still carry the shame of one evening, when I joined a friend in beating a mutual enemy with a stick, a violent act that haunts me as much as the drowned puppies of my childhood. My first romances fared no better: a short fling with soprano Therese Ringelmann, the grave-digger’s daughter, ended when I balked at formal engagement, while a far warmer connection with Friederike Galvani, a sweet, musical mechanic’s daughter engaged to the orchestra’s oboist, peaked at a country wedding where we danced wildly until we embraced, oblivious to her fiance playing nearby. We spent the rest of the autumn in easy intimacy until I left Wurzburg; two years later I found her a single mother, her oboist still unable to marry her.

With my sister Rosalie’s financial support, I finished Die Feen that winter, and premiered its overture at a Leipzig concert to my family’s delight. I fought bitterly with theatre management over their plan to dress the fairy-tale characters in oriental garb, pushing instead for medieval knight’s attire, and endured torturous meetings with conductor Stegmayer and stage manager Hauser, who dismissed my score as worthless. Only a visit from veteran composer Bierey, who praised the work with genuine awe and called me a talent he’d have snapped up if he still ran a theatre, restored my hope. The influence of writer Laube, whose Young Europe novels captured the fiery spirit of the age, and the electrifying performance of Schroder-Devrient as Bellini’s Romeo, which made me scoff at my former beloved Weber’s Euryanthe, pulled me further from my classical roots. In May 1834 I set off on a wild, boozy trip to Bohemia with wealthy friend Theodor Apel, carousing in Teplitz, playing pranks on the Pachta sisters in Prague, and even singing the Marseillaise so loudly in an Austrian inn that I was hauled before the police. By the time I returned to Leipzig, Laube had been arrested for political activity, and I finally accepted the offer to conduct at the Magdeburg theatre.

My first visit to the Lauchstadt outpost where the company was playing was a disaster: the theatre director, Bethmann, was a dissipated old man living in squalor, and I prepared to refuse the post—until I met his lead actress, Minna Planer, playing the Amorous Fairy. Her calm, untheatrical grace, her quiet kindness as she greeted the strange young conductor, struck me like a lightning bolt. I agreed to take the job on the spot. My debut conducting Don Juan went smoothly, and when I fell ill with erysipelas that left my face swollen and unrecognizable, Minna nursed me without a trace of revulsion, her gentle care melting through my usual bravado. When the company moved to Rudolstadt, I abandoned a sketch for a Beethoven-inspired E major symphony, convinced I could never match his genius, and poured my energy instead into my new opera Liebesverbot, adapting Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure into a tale of puritanical hypocrisy punished by love. My growing attachment to Minna was complicated by her close relationship with a poor young nobleman, Herr von O., whose courtship of her made me ferociously jealous for the first time in my life.