『我が生涯 第1巻』

News at last came that Rienzi would be ready in Dresden by autumn 1842. The Fliegender Holländer had been accepted by Count Redern in Berlin, but a sour discovery awaited him: Redern was retiring, and the man succeeding him was none other than Küstner of Munich, who had previously refused the work. Family wealth, slow to awaken, began to flow toward him—his brother-in-law Avenarius surprised him with a five-hundred-franc note from a Leipzig merchant named Schletter, concealed in a Christmas goose. Friedrich Brockhaus, who had repulsed him a year before, now supplied travelling money, and the six-hundred-mark loan from Hermann Brockhaus and his wife gave him a true sense of relief.

On 7th April, 1842, the Wagners turned their backs on Paris. Farewells to the elderly Anders, to Lehrs, and to Kietz—who forced a final five-franc piece and a packet of French snuff upon them—left them blinded with tears. The journey through the German frontier was a torture of snow and storms, but the sight of the Wartburg, gilded by one hour of sunlight, transfigured the weary miles. He christened a neighbouring ridge the Hörselberg, and sketched the scenery for the third act of Tannhäuser in his mind. On 12th April he reached Dresden, found Minna’s parents in straitened lodgings, and installed his wife in cheap rooms in the Töpfergasse.

From Leipzig he visited his mother, now peacefully aged, and sought out Mendelssohn in Berlin, who received him with polite coldness; a glimpse of Meyerbeer, who was, as ever, “going away”; and Rellstab, who would not concern himself with his affairs. In Berlin he felt only desolation, and breathed a hope that his lot might be cast in Paris rather than in that “sordid” capital. Back in Leipzig, the home of his brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus moved him to a fit of weeping: here was unruffled content, illuminated by mental life, and a tender sister who understood his homeless soul at last. A loan of six hundred marks, tendered as a family duty, tided him over the anxious months.

In Dresden, the chorus-master Wilhelm Fischer greeted him with a shout and an embrace, having read the Rienzi score and fought for its acceptance. The actor Ferdinand Heine, a friend of his stepfather’s Geyer circle, became another anchor. Their evenings were spent at Heine’s over potatoes and herrings, in hopeful conversation. Tichatschek, briefly seen before his holiday, declared himself enchanted with the role of Rienzi, fired as much by the promise of new silver armour as by the music; the loss of his part in a subsequent production would drive a small Italian singer into denunciation at the time of the 1849 rising—a debt Wagner would long feel.