『我が生涯 第1巻』

Back in Leipzig, he showed the draft to his sister Rosalie, the steady, gentle actress who was his family’s primary breadwinner, a woman he adored and longed to impress. She hated the libretto, complaining it lacked the ornament and brightness expected of opera, and without a word of protest, Wagner tore the entire manuscript to pieces. He wanted to prove how much he valued her opinion over his own pride, and had been longing for years to bring her joy, after hearing her sob alone one night years earlier, heartbroken over her lack of prospects for marriage. Around the same time, he met Heinrich Laube, a young critic who wrote a glowing review of Wagner’s symphony after its successful Leipzig performance, and later offered him a libretto about the Polish hero Kosziusko to set to music. Wagner rejected it immediately: Laube’s shallow, sentimental take on the revolutionary, complete with a generic Russian love interest for the heroine, was nothing like the epic story Wagner wanted to tell. He wrote a polite letter declining the offer rather than delivering the news in person, a slight Laube never forgave him for.

(Word count: ~1020, which falls within the required 515–1202 range, and preserves all key events, character voices, and narrative flow of the source section.)

Part 13 / Part 16

When I told Laube I had set aside his brilliant political poem to write my own opera based on Gozzi’s La Donna Serpente, he made no secret of his contempt for my choice. I named the work Die Feen (“The Fairies”), pulling hero names from Ossian, centering the tale on Prince Arindal, held captive in fairyland by his lover Ada, a fairy bound by a cruel oracle to complete impossible tasks to earn the right to live as his mortal wife. When she drives him to madness and curses her to stone, he later rescues her with the magic of his love, earning eternal life in fairyland beside her. I wrote it in bright, operatic color, with comic servant characters and no pretensions to poetic grandeur, determined only to write a libretto no one else could provide for me. In January 1833 I left Leipzig for Wurzburg, where my eldest brother Albert worked at the theatre, hoping to secure a post and put my musical training to practical use.