《我的生平——第一卷》

With my sister Rosalie’s financial support, I finished Die Feen that winter, and premiered its overture at a Leipzig concert to my family’s delight. I fought bitterly with theatre management over their plan to dress the fairy-tale characters in oriental garb, pushing instead for medieval knight’s attire, and endured torturous meetings with conductor Stegmayer and stage manager Hauser, who dismissed my score as worthless. Only a visit from veteran composer Bierey, who praised the work with genuine awe and called me a talent he’d have snapped up if he still ran a theatre, restored my hope. The influence of writer Laube, whose Young Europe novels captured the fiery spirit of the age, and the electrifying performance of Schroder-Devrient as Bellini’s Romeo, which made me scoff at my former beloved Weber’s Euryanthe, pulled me further from my classical roots. In May 1834 I set off on a wild, boozy trip to Bohemia with wealthy friend Theodor Apel, carousing in Teplitz, playing pranks on the Pachta sisters in Prague, and even singing the Marseillaise so loudly in an Austrian inn that I was hauled before the police. By the time I returned to Leipzig, Laube had been arrested for political activity, and I finally accepted the offer to conduct at the Magdeburg theatre.

My first visit to the Lauchstadt outpost where the company was playing was a disaster: the theatre director, Bethmann, was a dissipated old man living in squalor, and I prepared to refuse the post—until I met his lead actress, Minna Planer, playing the Amorous Fairy. Her calm, untheatrical grace, her quiet kindness as she greeted the strange young conductor, struck me like a lightning bolt. I agreed to take the job on the spot. My debut conducting Don Juan went smoothly, and when I fell ill with erysipelas that left my face swollen and unrecognizable, Minna nursed me without a trace of revulsion, her gentle care melting through my usual bravado. When the company moved to Rudolstadt, I abandoned a sketch for a Beethoven-inspired E major symphony, convinced I could never match his genius, and poured my energy instead into my new opera Liebesverbot, adapting Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure into a tale of puritanical hypocrisy punished by love. My growing attachment to Minna was complicated by her close relationship with a poor young nobleman, Herr von O., whose courtship of her made me ferociously jealous for the first time in my life.