『我が生涯 第1巻』

When I got back from Hamburg, dispirited and worn out from constant colds, I finally got to conduct Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for the famous Palm Sunday concerts in the chapel, a dream I’d had for months. The orchestra seating was a disaster, leftover from the Italian conductor Morlacchi who’d favored it over Weber, but we got a performance beyond expectations, the first time I truly felt Beethoven’s prolific strength, my friend Kockel cheering me on from the wings. It was the only bright spot in a month of drudgery, forced to conduct inferior, unrehearsed performances of Mozart and other repertoire pieces that left audiences disappointed, Reissiger comfortingly telling me I’d soon get used to the “inevitable fate of a conductor” and have a belly as round as his. I’d also gotten a close look at Mendelssohn’s terrible interpretation of his own St. Paul earlier that year, and when he nodded at me during Reissiger’s butchered tempo of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony minuet, taken at a waltz pace instead of a proper minuet, I realized he had no real feeling for the music at all, an opinion later confirmed by Schumann.

That summer brought a social triumph of a different sort: the King was returning from a long visit to England, where he’d been forced to attend Tsar Nicholas’s state visit, been cheered by the English public as a more popular alternative to the unpopular Tsar. I learned Lüttichau was planning no official welcome in Dresden, so I took matters into my own hands: I gathered 120 instrumentalists and 300 singers from the Glee Club, theatre company, and orchestra, composed a reception song for the King in the carriage ride to Pillnitz to get court approval, the effort sparking the first theme of my popular Tannhäuser March. We performed it for the royal family at Pillnitz on a perfect August day, the King and Queen visibly moved, Reissiger conducted the performance while I sang tenor in the choir. When the King complained of a toothache and had to leave early, I improvised a retreat for the singers and bandsmen, marching them off through the garden so the final notes reached the royal ear as a soft echo, a maneuver so seamless no one could tell it was unplanned. The Queen provided a breakfast for us on the lawn afterward, and we stumbled home to Dresden in high spirits, only for Lüttichau to summon me the next morning, furious I’d bypassed him to arrange the event with the court chamberlain. His fury melted fast, though, when he heard of the royal family’s delight, and he even called me a great man who’d soon be universally admired, while he was forgotten, a strangely tender moment for the two of us, who would become enemies again soon enough.