『我が生涯 第1巻』

He took his leave, traveling to Vienna via Breslau, where he visited old family friend and musical director Mosewius, admired his extensive collection of Bach cantatas, and later played him a piano reduction of Lohengrin to Mosewius’s astonishment. In Vienna, he met with Professor Fischhof to view rare Beethoven manuscripts, including the original of the C minor Sonata, Op. 111, and made the acquaintance of Vesque von Puttlingen, a former Metternich official now sporting black-red-gold revolutionary ribbons, and Russian attaché von Fonton, a staunch pessimist who believed only despotism could create stable social order, and who wished Wagner well with his artistic ideals even as he insisted they could never be realized under despotism.

Wagner had come to Vienna to push a radical theater reform plan: he wanted to merge the city’s five struggling, mismanaged theaters into a co-operative run by artists and literary figures connected to the stage, rather than private owners or bureaucrats. He gathered a small group including Friedrich Uhl, the passionate, cultivated Dr. Becher (later shot for his role in Vienna’s October Uprising) to hear his proposal, but everyone agreed the chaotic revolutionary moment was not the time for peaceful, institutional reform. Uhl took him to a radical political club, where Wagner was shocked by the crass, poorly thought-out speeches of the orators, but met the poet Grillparzer, who was friendly but visibly surprised by Wagner’s direct, personal appeal for his support for reform—the first playwright Wagner had ever encountered in official government uniform. After a useless meeting with Bauernfeld, Wagner concluded Vienna had nothing left to offer him, and was charmed by the city’s electric revolutionary energy: students in German colors marched the streets, ice servers at the Karl Theater wore black-red-gold Austrian ribbons, and a popular farce even featured Prince Metternich as a character forced to flee the stage after being accused of poisoning the Duke of Reichstadt.

On the journey home, he stopped in Prague, where he found his old friend Kittl utterly terrified the Czech nationalist revolt was personally targeting him, blaming Wagner’s opera Die Franzosen vor Nizza for inflaming revolutionary sentiment with its popular airs. On the steamer back to Dresden, he met sculptor Hänel, who was in high spirits after being paid in silver for a statue of Emperor Charles IV, thanks to the collapse of Austrian paper currency, and Hänel even accompanied Wagner all the way home in an open carriage, despite knowing Wagner had just caused a massive political stir in Dresden a few weeks prior.