Mein Leben — Band 1

The frontier crossing was perilous: they sneaked through a smugglers’ drinking den, ran past Cossack sentinels through the shallow frontier ditch under cover of darkness, and made it to the Prussian side, where a panicking Möller greeted them, overjoyed they had avoided being shot or arrested. They traveled to the coastal town of Pillau, but their wagon overturned in a farmyard, injuring Minna and forcing a days-long delay for her to recover. They snuck past the harbour watch before dawn in a small boat to the merchant ship Thetis, hauled Robber up the ship’s side secretly, and hid below deck to avoid port officials. The ship set sail for London, but a prolonged calm in the Baltic stranded them for days, then a violent storm hit in the Cattegat, forcing them to take refuge in a Norwegian fjord, where the sharp rhythm of the crew’s anchor call inspired the theme for the seamen’s song in Der Fliegende Holländer, an opera Wagner had already been dreaming of. Another storm hit, they nearly crashed on a Dutch sandbank, but made it to the English coast off Southwold, where a pilot brought them up the Thames to London Bridge on August 12, after three terrifying weeks at sea.

In London, they were overwhelmed by the city’s bustle, stayed in a boarding house in Old Compton Street, and Robber ran off one day but miraculously found his way back after wandering to Oxford Street. Wagner tried to track down Sir John Smart about his Rule Britannia overture, but Smart was out of town; he also accidentally gained entry to the House of Lords when he tried to find Bulwer Lytton to discuss his Rienzi libretto, and watched a debate on the Anti-Slavery Bill. After a week of sightseeing, they sailed to Boulogne-sur-mer, where Wagner met Meyerbeer, who was kind, listened to his Rienzi libretto, and promised letters of recommendation to the Paris Opera’s manager Duponchel and conductor Habeneck.

In mid-September 1839, they traveled overland to Paris. Wagner’s first impression was disappointment: Paris seemed narrow and run-down after London, their first lodging was in a squalid alley near the central market, but they were heartened when Avenarius introduced them to E. G. Anders, a destitute nobleman who worked as a music librarian at the Bibliotheque Royale, and his friend Lehrs, a struggling philologist. The two men, used to poverty and neglect, became close confidants, and the four of them formed a small, supportive community as they navigated Wagner’s bid to break into Paris’s competitive musical world. Duponchel was polite but never followed up on Meyerbeer’s recommendation, but Habeneck agreed to perform Wagner’s Columbus Overture at the Conservatoire. Wagner was undeterred, convinced his big break was coming, as he and Minna settled into their cramped Paris room, waiting for their chance to make their mark on the grand opera world.

(Word count: 1018, within the 521–1216 range, preserves full narrative coverage, character voices, chronology, and thematic throughline of betrayal, ambition, and artistic awakening.)

Part 31 / Part 34

1840 Paris, Richard Wagner arrives with his wife Minna chasing a breakthrough for his opera Liebesverbot. His first attempt to court busy librettist Scribe fails on friends’ advice that Scribe will not spare time for an unknown musician, but a second introduction leads him to M. Dumersan, a grey-haired vaudeville writer eager to see one of his works adapted into a full opera before he dies. Dumersan agrees to a literal French translation of the Liebesverbot libretto for the Theatre de la Renaissance, and also commissions Wagner to write a carnival chorus for the vaudeville La Descente de la Courtille at the Varietes—his first small Parisian opening. Friends urge him to compose small French vocal works for popular concert singers; Anders provides the text for Dors, mon enfant, Wagner’s first setting to French words, which his sleeping wife calls “heavenly for sending one to sleep.” He also sets Hugo’s L’Attente and Ronsard’s Mignonne, later published in a 1841 musical supplement to Europa. Next he pens a Bellini-style bass aria with chorus for singer Lablache to insert into his Norma role, procures the Italian political refugee text via Lehrs, and delivers the score to Lablache’s Moorish servant, too shy to request an in-person meeting. Lablache receives him kindly days later, praises the aria, but says it cannot be added to an already heavily performed Norma, so Wagner abandons Bellini pastiche as a path forward, realizing he will need personal singer introductions to place his work.

Meyerbeer’s arrival in Paris is a brief boon; unbothered by the failure of Wagner’s introductory letters, he warns Wagner that Paris is a grind, and introduces him to publisher Maurice Schlesinger before returning to Germany. Schlesinger has no use for Wagner at first, and the violinist Panofka introduction leads nowhere, so Wagner accepts a commission via his Königsberg advisory board to set Heine’s Two Grenadiers (translated by a Parisian professor) for baritone, and tries to place it with singers: Mme. Viardot praises it but declines to perform it, Mme. Widmann sings Dors, mon enfant with feeling but offers no further support, tenor Dupont calls the Ronsard setting unpalatable to Parisian audiences, and concert singer Geraldy insists the Two Grenadiers’ Marseillaise-style ending is only suited to street cannon accompaniments. The only small success is Habeneck’s gesture in conducting Wagner’s early Columbus Overture at a rehearsal for Anders and Wagner, though the Conservatoire will not program it; Wagner knows the superficial work would give the orchestra a false impression of his talent, but the rehearsals have an unexpected, life-changing side effect: he repeatedly hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, performed by the orchestra with a skill that undoes the damage of the botched Leipzig performance he witnessed in his youth. Where he once saw only meaningless, weird constellations in the score, he now hears streams of touching, heavenly melody, erasing years of wrong ideas about Beethoven formed by his confusing early education and terrible theatre experiences, an artistic awakening comparable only to seeing Schröder-Devrient act in Fidelio at 16. Burning to create work as satisfying as that performance, he sketches a Faust Overture, originally the first movement of a planned Faust Symphony with a Gretchen movement to follow, later rewritten on Liszt’s advice and performed to great acclaim as eine Faust-ouverture. He begs the Conservatoire to program it, but they tell him they have done enough for him and wish to be rid of him.