『我が生涯 第1巻』

The rural retreat was a lifeline. Long walks across the hills cleared his head, and he sketched the full score of Lohengrin’s three acts, banishing intrusive Rossini William Tell motifs by singing the opening theme of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to himself. A small, thrilling sign of his work’s reach came one evening when he heard an unseen bather at Pirna whistling the Tannhäuser Pilgrim’s Chorus—the first proof his music was escaping the Dresden theatre’s walls. He returned to the city in August to resume his grueling conducting duties, and immediately threw himself into a meticulous revision of Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis. He rewrote the stilted German translation, cut the ill-advised invented romance between Achilles and Iphigenia added to appeal to French taste, reworked the orchestration to align with Euripides’ original tragedy, and added connective scenes between arias to tighten the dramatic flow. The production, with Ernst Mitterwurzer’s powerful turn as Agamemnon, was a runaway success. The theatre management, surprised by the enthusiastic reception, credited him as “Reviser” on the programme, a nod that irked critic Ferdinand Hiller, who complained specifically about Wagner’s unorthodox treatment of Gluck’s overture.

That winter, Hiller’s gatherings moved to his home, where he hosted subscription concerts featuring unknown musicians and modern works. Wagner attended occasionally, but was frustrated by Hiller’s careless conducting of Bach and Beethoven, including a broken promise to fix the tempo of the third movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. He spent most of his free time pursuing the self-education central to his artistic identity: he devoured Greek tragedy, from Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Aristophanes’ The Birds, and Plato’s Symposium, then turned back to Germanic antiquity, studying Jakob Grimm’s medieval records and Mone’s commentaries on the Heldensage, which shaped his emerging ideas for future operatic works based on Norse myth.