『我が生涯 第1巻』

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.