『我が生涯 第1巻』

The final blow comes as Donizetti’s La Favorita becomes a Parisian sensation, and Schlesinger, who lost heavily on Halevy’s recent operas, sees a chance to profit. He bursts into the Wagners’ flat beaming, and offers Wagner 500 francs upfront, 1100 total, to arrange the full La Favorita score for piano, piano without words, duet, quartet, two violins, and cornet à piston. Wagner takes the work, treats the humiliating hack job as a penance for his past artistic sins, and he and Minna move all their possessions into their bedroom to save fuel, using it as living, dining, and study space, stepping from bed to worktable in a single stride, only leaving the flat every four days for a short walk. The strain gives him gastric disorders that will plague him for the rest of his life. He corrects the La Favorita score, earning an extra 300 francs from Schlesinger when no one else will do the work, copies out the Faust Overture orchestra parts still hoping for a Conservatoire performance, and writes the short story Une Visite à Beethoven (A Pilgrimage to Beethoven) for the Gazette, which becomes a sensation reprinted in fireside journals. Schlesinger makes him write a sequel, Un Musicien étranger à Paris, where he avenges himself on his Parisian struggles; Heine says Hoffmann could not have written it, and Berlioz praises the story and later gives Wagner a sign of sympathy after he publishes an essay on overtures citing Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis as a model.

Wagner has long admired Berlioz’s orchestral mastery, having heard him conduct Romeo and Juliet three times the previous winter; the bold precision of Berlioz’s combinations overwhelms him, pushing his own musical ideas down, and while he finds Romeo and Juliet shallow in parts, its bewitching passages override his objections. He is equally impressed by the Sinfonie Fantastique and Harold en Italie, and Berlioz’s Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale, conducted under the Place de la Bastille column for the July Revolution heroes’ anniversary, thoroughly convinces him of Berlioz’s unique, enterprising genius. But Berlioz’s works leave him with a strange, unplaceable sensation: he is ravished by them, but also repelled and wearied, a puzzle he cannot solve for years, feeling like a schoolboy next to the master. When Schlesinger arranges a Gazette concert, Wagner has no suitable original works, and with only one rehearsal for the second-rate Valentino orchestra, he falls back on his early Columbus Overture, cutting the required six cornets to four, with only two reliable players. At the February 4, 1841 performance, the audience, largely made up of Gazette subscribers who know his writing, is well-disposed at first, but the failed cornet players ruin the work’s key passages, and the Parisian audience, which only cares about skilful difficult tone production, turns hostile. Wagner knows he has failed completely; Paris no longer exists for him, and he returns to his bedroom to resume arranging La Favorita, growing a long beard for the first time like a penitent. His neighbour, a piano teacher, practices Liszt’s Lucia fantasy all day, so Wagner moves his out-of-tune piano against the party wall and has Brix play his Favorita Overture arrangement on flute while he accompanies, driving the neighbour to move out soon after. The concierge’s wife used to do their housework, but they can no longer afford her, so Minna does all the housework herself, even cleaning Brix’s boots, and the concierge respects them more for their grit, reassuring Wagner when the Quadruple Alliance against France is formed that the four monarchs are all fools and war will not come.