『我が生涯 第1巻』

The vacation turned violent when Degelow, whom Wagner was scheduled to duel, proposed a truce so they could talk before their fight. They wandered the streets arm in arm, Degelow telling Wagner he was honored to cross swords with him, and embraced warmly before parting—only for Wagner to hear a week later that Degelow had been mortally wounded in a duel in Jena. The shock was still fresh when Wagner learned his next opponent Tischer had been beaten so badly by brothel workers after a drunken night that he was hospitalized, canceling their duel. As the wildest students left Leipzig, Wagner got caught up in a days-long gambling binge during a freshman festival. What started as a bid to win two thalers to cover his tab turned into a months-long mania: he stopped attending fencing, beer halls, or duels entirely, spending every night at the gambling table, lying to his family about his whereabouts, climbing over the garden gate to his room before dawn. He hit rock bottom when he gambled away a large sum of his mother’s pension money he was supposed to be managing, losing everything but a single thaler. He staked that last coin on a hunch, won big, and paid off every debt he owed, feeling as though divine intervention was guiding his hand. The terror of that night broke his gambling addiction for good; he confessed everything to his mother the next morning, and she thanked God he was “saved,” believing he would never err again.

Freed from his vices, Wagner finally turned his full attention back to music. He’d still composed small works during his dissipation, including a wild B-flat overture inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth, which he’d tried to color-code for different instrument sections (black for brass, red for strings, green for winds, a plan scuttled when he couldn’t source green ink). He showed the score to Heinrich Dorn, the Leipzig theater’s musical director, who agreed to perform it at a Christmas 1830 charity concert. The performance was a disaster: Wagner had inserted a jarring, out-of-place kettle-drum beat every five bars, which threw the orchestra into chaos and made the audience laugh; the piece ended abruptly with no proper resolution, and Wagner fled the theater, avoiding the pit for months afterward, humiliated.