『我が生涯 第1巻』

Belloni offered escape to a country place near La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where Wagner occupied a single room in the house of Monsieur Raphael, the wine merchant, and waited. He read Proudhon’s De la propriété and lingered over Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins. News came of the failed Republican rising of 13 June and the Prussian suppression in Baden. From Weimar his friends wrote curtly: nothing for him in Dresden, one could not knock at battered doors. Then Minna’s letter arrived: she could not dream of living with him again after he had so unscrupulously thrown away the position she prized. He begged Liszt to look after her and advised her to sell the Dresden furniture.

Zürich became his refuge. He arrived at Müller’s house with twenty francs, gave up the grand piano room for a modest bedroom, and let himself be carried along by the unaccustomed luxury of being received simply for himself. Sulzer, the young cantonal secretary, a Hegelian of austere integrity, became his friend. One wild evening, after reading Siegfried’s Tod, Wagner and Hagenbuch bodily lifted every door from its hinges in Sulzer’s official residence; Sulzer smiled and spent the whole night replacing them. Wagner began to write. Art and Revolution went to Otto Wigand for five louis d’or; Die Nibelungen fetched another five. He planned public lectures, conducted Beethoven’s A major Symphony for the Zürich Musical Society for five napoleons, and composed Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft in a sunless ground-floor room.

Minna, meanwhile, had begun the long journey to rejoin him, bringing the dog Peps, the parrot Papo, her “sister” Nathalie, and three hundred marks from the sale of the Dresden furniture. Sulzer’s quiet help made their little place in the Zeltweg cosy. Yet the home front was never peaceful: Minna despised Zürich’s smallness, dismissed Sulzer as a town-clerk, and would hear only of Paris. Frau Julie Ritter of Dresden sent fifteen hundred marks; Mme. Laussot wrote from Bordeaux with sympathetic assurances. These were the first signs of a new phase.

Minna’s pressure drove him back to Paris in February 1850. The journey was postponed by a chest weakness that stole his voice. He settled in the Cité de Provence and at once called on Seghers about the Tannhäuser Overture, only to find the orchestral parts still unprocured. The police agent who visited him was mollified by Liszt’s article; Semper, Kietz and the ageing Anders, recovered from a decline by a broken leg, kept him company. The Tannhäuser Overture was quietly dropped for the season; Wigand’s edition of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft arrived full of misprints and half its promised fee; Meyerbeer’s The Prophet, newly produced, struck Wagner with such disgust at its trivial roulades that he rose from his stall and left the theatre, never to heed the work again.