My Life — Volume 1

By the time we transferred to Magdeburg for the winter season, I had won the orchestra’s full trust, my fiery tempos earning raucous public applause. After months of cool distance, Minna and I reconciled after a raucous New Year’s Eve party in my rooms, where I had gotten drunk insulting an older actress friend of hers, Mme. Haas, after deliberately prolonging a whist game to avoid her company. I woke the next dawn in Minna’s bed, her quiet care the night before having sheltered me from my own foolishness, and realized my life had changed forever. We were officially a couple from that day on. I composed an overture for my friend Apel’s play Columbus that brought the house down, and even got to conduct the legendary Schroder-Devrient in Desdemona and Romeo, reigniting my passion for opera. My self-funded benefit concert to pay off my growing debts, accrued from entertaining my circle of singer and player friends, was a catastrophic failure: the cavernous hotel hall turned my loud, six-trumpet orchestral pieces into an unbearable racket, and the audience fled mid-performance, leaving me with more bills than ever. I took Minna and her sister on an impulsive trip through the Saxon Alps, a few perfect, happy days I’d later look back on as the last uncomplicated joy of my youth, before returning to Leipzig to clear my debts and negotiate my return to Magdeburg, determined to build a life with Minna and make my name in the art I loved.

Part 19 / Part 22

The first leg of Richard Wagner’s turbulent twenties finds him journeying to Nuremberg, where his sister Clara and brother-in-law Wolfram are engaged with the local operatic company, in the hope of both replenishing his depleted travel funds and gathering intelligence for his next career move. He pins his financial hopes on pawning a platinum snuff box gifted by a friend, paired with a gold signet ring Apel awarded him for composing the Columbus overture; the snuff box proves entirely worthless, but the pawned jewels yield just enough to cover his fare to Frankfurt, where rumors of a dissolving Wiesbaden operatic company and potential subsidies from Magdeburg theatre directors have led him. His stay in Nuremberg is first extended by a reunion with the soprano Schroder-Devrient, then fulfilling a short local engagement: Wagner had long carried the cloud of their last meeting, and seeing her again feels like a break in the storm that had darkened his artistic horizon. He is initially wary of her casting in the old, sentimental role of Emmeline in Die Schweizerfamilie, fearing the overwrought part would diminish the sublime impression she had made on him, but is instead stunned into recognizing her transcendental genius even in the most unglamorous of roles, a revelation he would carry with him as a benchmark for dramatic art for the rest of his life.

The most vividly memorable episode of his Nuremberg stay, however, is a cruel tavern joke played at the expense of Lauermann, a thick-set, middle-aged master carpenter with a comical appearance, a thick local dialect, and a delusion of his own vocal talent that makes him a favorite target of the local theatrical wags. Having long stopped mocking him to his face out of fear of his violent temper, the regulars trick Wagner into playing along by introducing him as the great Italian bass Lablache; Lauermann is immediately suspicious, noting Wagner’s youthful face and clear tenor voice, but his vanity is roused by the constant flattery of the crowd, who argue that even Lablache would have something to learn from him. After hours of back-and-forth, Lauermann finally gives in, singing a trivial street ballad with bizarre, jerky tics, his face bright red, his thumbs twitching behind his ears, as the entire crowd erupts in laughter. Furious, he storms out of the inn, and Wagner, wracked with guilt, follows to apologize, eventually convincing the drunken carpenter to return and sing again for the crowd’s amusement. The night ends with Lauermann being carried home in a wheelbarrow, his wife yelling curses at the crowd for enabling his delusions, before the group returns to the inn, gets into a fight with workmen enforcing closing hours, and only disperses after one of the regulars knocks a troublemaker senseless. Wagner and Wolfram walk home laughing, Wolfram admitting this chaotic routine was a standard evening at the local inn.

With his funds nearly gone, Wagner stops only briefly in Wurzburg, then travels to Frankfurt to wait for the Magdeburg directors’ promised travel subsidies, which never arrive. He makes a day trip to Wiesbaden to scout talent from the dissolving operatic company, hears the tenor Freimuller shine in a rehearsal of Robert le Diable, and hires him on the spot. Back in Frankfurt, he attends a production of The Magic Flute conducted by the celebrated Guhr, and is so impressed with the company that he hires the young soprano Fraulein Limbach, who sang the first boy role, on the spot; when the hotel owner refuses to advance him the funds to help her escape her existing Frankfurt contract, however, he is forced to abandon her, a humiliation that still stings as he travels through rain and storm via Leipzig (to pick up his beloved brown poodle) before returning to Magdeburg to resume his post as musical director on September 1, 1836.

The Magdeburg years that follow are a rollercoaster of artistic triumph and ruin. Wagner builds a world-class operatic company from scratch, hiring the bass Graf, the talented prima donna Mme Pollert, and the baritone Krug, and earning plaudits for innovative productions that incorporate Prussian military bands and singers to realize grand choral effects even in the small provincial house. He composes his first opera, Liebesverbot, a adaptation of Measure for Measure set in Sicily, where a puritanical regent’s crackdown on immorality backfires when a novice nun tricks him into exposing his own hypocrisy at a masked carnival. The opera is initially blocked by censors who object to its title, and only clears production when Wagner renames it Die Novize von Palermo; its Magdeburg premiere is a catastrophic mess, with the lead tenor forgetting his lines and wearing a gaudy giant feather to cover up his mistakes, the audience unable to follow the plot for lack of a printed libretto, and the performance canceled entirely after the lead tenor Schreiber is brutally beaten by Mme Pollert’s jealous husband backstage, leaving the singer covered in blood and Mme Pollert in convulsions. The theater collapses days later, its company scattered, and Wagner is left with nothing but creditors hounding him, summons nailed to his door, and his poodle having run away, a bad omen he interprets as a sign of his total downfall.