Ma Vie — Volume 1

In time, my uncle’s life changed too. He had lived with his sister Friederike and his old friend Jeannette Thome, but his literary work assured him a modest income, and he deemed it more in accordance with his dignity to make a home of his own. He chose for his housekeeper a friend of his own age, the sister of the aesthete Wendt of Leipzig. Without a word to Jeannette, he went one afternoon not for his usual walk but to the church with his chosen bride, and was married in haste; only on his return did he announce that he was leaving, and would have his things removed that very day. He met the old maid’s consternation with quiet composure, and to the end of his life continued his daily visits to “Mam’selle Thome,” who would at times coyly pretend to sulk.

I was meanwhile secretly labouring at the great tragedy I had conceived in Dresden—Leubald und Adelaïde, a sprawling work in the manner of Shakespeare and Goethe. My only confidante was my sister Ottilie, who listened with touching devotion as I recited to her, even during a thunderstorm, the most gruesome scenes. At length, in order to meet the coming rupture with the school “with dignity,” I sent the voluminous manuscript to my uncle, with a long letter in which I communicated, first, my ideas regarding St. Nicholas’s School, and second, my firm determination to let no school pedantry check my free development.

I expected him to recognise, with the deepest sympathy, my vocation as a poet. I expected—how foolishly!—his hearty approval. But the response I received was a different thing altogether. The family received the news as a catastrophe, and my uncle, quite conscious that he had been indiscreet, hurried to my mother and brother-in-law to report the misfortune. To me he wrote a serious letter of discouragement, reproaching himself for having corrupted me by conversations unsuited to my years. He made no attempt to explain to me, good-naturedly, the error of my ways. To this day I cannot understand why he showed so small a sense of humour in understanding my bad behaviour. The crime this boy of fifteen had committed was, as I said before, to have written a great tragedy: Leubald und Adelaïde.

Part 7 / Part 10

In 1830, seventeen-year-old Richard Wagner’s artistic life was upended by a performance of Fidelio starring Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient, the peak of whose beauty and talent made her, in Wagner’s words, an artist he would never see equaled. The “Satanic ardour” of her performance seared into his bones; he scrawled her a note declaring she had given his life its true purpose, dropped it at her hotel, and ran into the night as if mad. Twelve years later, when he debuted Rienzi in Dresden, she would greet him by reciting the letter, having kept it all along.

That experience left him unable to engage with any pursuit that failed to match its standard, so he abandoned his studies and flung himself into Leipzig’s rowdy student scene, surrounding himself with random acquaintances he felt no real affection for, only to find most connections fizzled the moment he tried to draw out their inner lives. He was expelled from St. Nicholas’s School at Easter 1830 for misconduct, and his family sent him to study privately before transferring to St. Thomas’s School to earn his university qualification. His uncle Adolph hired a Greek tutor for him, but the tutor’s room overlooked a tanyard, and the stench turned Wagner off Sophocles entirely. His brother-in-law, publisher Friedrich Brockhaus, gave him proofreading work for a new edition of Becker’s Universal History, which forced him to engage deeply with the Middle Ages and the French Revolution for the first time; he initially hated the Revolution for its cruelty, until the July Revolution in Paris upended his view. News of the French king’s overthrow, Lafayette’s triumphant return, and the new king’s claim to embody the Republic electrified the seventeen-year-old, who saw the uprising as a pure, heroic popular victory. As rebellions spread across Europe, Wagner lived in a fever of suspense, seeing the uprisings as the young, hopeful world rising against the old, decaying order. When unrest in Dresden forced the future King Frederick to grant a constitution, Wagner composed a political overture with a theme he labeled “Friedrich und Freiheit,” hoping to perform it at the Leipzig Garden Concerts.

Unrest soon hit Leipzig itself, when students clashed with police and a group were arrested in a street brawl. Wagner joined a mass student march to the University’s Paulinum building to demand their release; Rector Krug met them bareheaded to announce the prisoners had already been freed, but the crowd’s revolutionary energy did not dissipate. Rumors spread that a corrupt magistrate was protecting a local brothel, and the crowd turned to exact “popular justice.” Wagner got caught up in the frenzy, smashing furniture alongside his fellow students, driven not by moral outrage but by the intoxicating pull of the mob’s rage. The next night, lower-class residents copied the students’ example and began attacking employers and wealthy townsfolk. With no soldiers in the city and the police disorganized, the authorities deputized the students to guard property, and Wagner found himself living out his schoolboy fantasies as part of Leipzig’s unofficial student militia, stationed at town gates and patrolling merchant grounds, feted by the town council. He ingratiated himself with leading students, especially after his brother-in-law’s printing press was targeted in the unrest, and celebrated weeks of raucous hospitality with the university’s most notorious rowdies.

When the Easter vacation arrived and most regular club members left town, Wagner was left among “wandering students”: expelled rowdies from other German universities who had taken refuge in Leipzig during the unrest. He formed close bonds with Gebhardt, a supernaturally strong man, and Degelow, a fiery, sharp-tongued seasoned duelist whose dry wit made him a legend. Through them he met Schroter, an older, witty Hanoverian who introduced him to Heinrich Heine’s poetry, the first real friend Wagner felt he had ever had. Wagner joined a sham “Freshman’s Club” at St. Thomas’s to fast-track his student status, but the masters refused to recognize his credentials, so he dropped out and matriculated at the university as a Studiosus Musicae, then raced to earn his place in the popular Saxonia club before the regular members returned.