Mein Leben — Band 1

Part 25 (Chapter 25) / Chapter 28: Betrayal in Riga and the Flight to Paris

The Königsberg theatre crisis of May 1837 left director Hubsch facing inevitable closure after a disastrous season. Wagner spent hours convincing him to persevere, but the only path forward was demanding salary sacrifices from every company member, a move that sparked widespread staff bitterness even as Wagner’s marriage to Minna collapsed under years of accumulated pressure. Their quarrels, already inflamed by Minna’s choice to take extra stage work to support them (work Wagner dismissed as compromising “condescensions” to her profession) grew more violent and frequent: fights left Minna suffering terrifying convulsions, no mutual understanding was possible, and Wagner, buried under the weight of saving the theatre, failed to notice Minna pulling away.

To stabilize the company, Wagner summoned his old Magdeburg friend Friedrich Schmitt, a devoted tenor, to Königsberg. The pair soon crossed paths with Herr Dietrich, a wealthy merchant who had made himself a patron of the theatre’s women, hosting English gentleman-style dinner parties for actresses that Wagner found repulsive. Minna insisted Wagner was being unfairly hostile to Dietrich, but Wagner banned all further contact with the man, sparking more bitter fights. Then Schmitt reported that Dietrich bragged at a public dinner about a suspicious intimacy with Minna; Wagner and Schmitt confronted Dietrich at his home, he denied the claim at first, then secretly wrote to Minna about the interview, giving her fresh cause to accuse Wagner of being unforgivably inconsiderate.

On the morning of May 31, 1837, Wagner left for rehearsals, and Minna and her daughter Nathalie (who passed as her youngest sister to outsiders) embraced him tearfully at the door, refusing to explain their distress. He came home late that evening, exhausted and hungry, to find the house empty: Minna had vanished without a trace, even their maid unaware of her plans. Old friend Abraham Möller tracked Dietrich to a special coach bound for Berlin that morning; Wagner gave chase, but ran out of money in Elbing, forced to pawn their silver wedding presents to continue, and learned at the next stop that Minna had carried on to Dresden to stay with her parents, Dietrich having only accompanied her partway.

Wagner traveled to Dresden via Berlin on June 3, found Minna at her parents’ cramped, humble home, and his initial fury melted into sympathy for her despair, until he could only express repentance and heartbroken understanding. Minna insisted she had been driven to flee by their impossible situation, which Wagner had been blind and deaf to. He told her he had secured the post of musical conductor at Riga, where a new theatre was opening under favorable terms with a salary high enough for her to retire from the stage entirely. After a painful week in Dresden, he traveled to Berlin to sign the Riga contract, then returned to convince Minna to set up in Blasewitz, a village near Dresden, while he wrapped up his affairs in Königsberg. For a time her mood improved, as Wagner spared her all pressure, but soon the situation worsened for no clear reason. When Minna announced she was taking a pleasure trip with a girlfriend’s family, Wagner agreed, but was alarmed when her sister requested a written passport permission: he traveled to Dresden to investigate, only to be treated with open hostility by Minna’s parents, who accused him of being unable to support her. A letter from Möller cleared up the mystery: Dietrich was staying at a Dresden hotel, and both he and Minna had vanished again.

Desolate, Wagner turned to his sister Ottilie and brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus, who lived in a beautiful villa in Dresden’s Grosser Garten. For the first time, he experienced the comfort of uncomplicated family support, and his dormant creative instincts were revived by Hermann, a brilliant oriental languages expert. He worked out the full scheme for a grand opera based on Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi, sent his Rule Britannia overture to London’s Philharmonic Society, and began corresponding with Parisian librettist Scribe about a setting for H. Konig’s Die Hohe Braut, sending him the translated French libretto and the score of his Liebesverbot to prove his skill.

By October 1837, Minna, having written Wagner a heartrending letter confessing her infidelity with Dietrich and begging his forgiveness, arrived in Riga with her sister Amalie, a singer. Wagner took the blame for her choices, and they rebuilt a quiet domestic life, with Minna’s domestic talents shining and Amalie’s beautiful voice earning her early success. But the sisters soon quarreled bitterly, and Amalie left to marry a Russian army officer, Carl von Meek, leaving Wagner and Minna alone again. Wagner thrived professionally at first at Riga’s new theatre, run by director Karl von Holtei, who favored him for his youth and his skill with popular Italian and French operas. But Wagner grew to despise the petty, undisciplined theatrical world around him, and worked in secret on his Rienzi score, determined to write a work too large for the tiny Riga stage, to force himself out of the small provincial circle.

Then came the betrayal that shattered his remaining faith in his friends. When Wagner was hospitalized with typhoid fever after Holtei forced him to conduct a performance in icy Mitau against his doctor’s orders, Holtei was overheard saying Wagner would never conduct again, “on his last legs.” Wagner recovered, but when Holtei abruptly left Riga, his successor Joseph Hoffmann informed Wagner that Holtei had made it a condition of taking over that Wagner was not rehired, the post going instead to Wagner’s old mentor and closest confidant Heinrich Dorn. Wagner confronted Dorn, and discovered his dearest friend had deliberately used Holtei’s hatred of Wagner to secure the post, knowing Wagner was in a precarious financial position with creditors from Königsberg and Magdeburg, and assuming Wagner would have to leave Riga anyway. Wagner was shattered to learn Dorn had exploited their private conversations to assess his weakness, and that Holtei’s hatred of him had been personal all along: Holtei had been making improper advances to Minna, and when she rejected him, he also tried to push her to take a wealthy young merchant as a lover, his fury at being rejected fueling his vendetta against Wagner.

Hoffmann offered Wagner a one-year contract extension, and the people of Riga offered him teaching positions and concert series to make up for lost salary, but Wagner was determined to cut all ties with the small theatrical world he had come to despise, and to pursue composition full-time in Paris. He played on Minna’s anger at Dorn’s betrayal to convince her to agree to the move. They had barely any money, their passports impounded by creditors, so old friend Abraham Möller offered to drive them in a special coach across the Russian frontier without papers, to a Prussian port where they could sail to London then Paris. They brought their huge Newfoundland dog Robber, fiercely devoted to Wagner, and set out secretly in summer 1839.