『我が生涯 第1巻』

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.