『我が生涯 第1巻』

I expected him to recognise, with the deepest sympathy, my vocation as a poet. I expected—how foolishly!—his hearty approval. But the response I received was a different thing altogether. The family received the news as a catastrophe, and my uncle, quite conscious that he had been indiscreet, hurried to my mother and brother-in-law to report the misfortune. To me he wrote a serious letter of discouragement, reproaching himself for having corrupted me by conversations unsuited to my years. He made no attempt to explain to me, good-naturedly, the error of my ways. To this day I cannot understand why he showed so small a sense of humour in understanding my bad behaviour. The crime this boy of fifteen had committed was, as I said before, to have written a great tragedy: Leubald und Adelaïde.

Part 7 / Part 10

In 1830, seventeen-year-old Richard Wagner’s artistic life was upended by a performance of Fidelio starring Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient, the peak of whose beauty and talent made her, in Wagner’s words, an artist he would never see equaled. The “Satanic ardour” of her performance seared into his bones; he scrawled her a note declaring she had given his life its true purpose, dropped it at her hotel, and ran into the night as if mad. Twelve years later, when he debuted Rienzi in Dresden, she would greet him by reciting the letter, having kept it all along.

That experience left him unable to engage with any pursuit that failed to match its standard, so he abandoned his studies and flung himself into Leipzig’s rowdy student scene, surrounding himself with random acquaintances he felt no real affection for, only to find most connections fizzled the moment he tried to draw out their inner lives. He was expelled from St. Nicholas’s School at Easter 1830 for misconduct, and his family sent him to study privately before transferring to St. Thomas’s School to earn his university qualification. His uncle Adolph hired a Greek tutor for him, but the tutor’s room overlooked a tanyard, and the stench turned Wagner off Sophocles entirely. His brother-in-law, publisher Friedrich Brockhaus, gave him proofreading work for a new edition of Becker’s Universal History, which forced him to engage deeply with the Middle Ages and the French Revolution for the first time; he initially hated the Revolution for its cruelty, until the July Revolution in Paris upended his view. News of the French king’s overthrow, Lafayette’s triumphant return, and the new king’s claim to embody the Republic electrified the seventeen-year-old, who saw the uprising as a pure, heroic popular victory. As rebellions spread across Europe, Wagner lived in a fever of suspense, seeing the uprisings as the young, hopeful world rising against the old, decaying order. When unrest in Dresden forced the future King Frederick to grant a constitution, Wagner composed a political overture with a theme he labeled “Friedrich und Freiheit,” hoping to perform it at the Leipzig Garden Concerts.