《我的生平——第一卷》

The Magdeburg years that follow are a rollercoaster of artistic triumph and ruin. Wagner builds a world-class operatic company from scratch, hiring the bass Graf, the talented prima donna Mme Pollert, and the baritone Krug, and earning plaudits for innovative productions that incorporate Prussian military bands and singers to realize grand choral effects even in the small provincial house. He composes his first opera, Liebesverbot, a adaptation of Measure for Measure set in Sicily, where a puritanical regent’s crackdown on immorality backfires when a novice nun tricks him into exposing his own hypocrisy at a masked carnival. The opera is initially blocked by censors who object to its title, and only clears production when Wagner renames it Die Novize von Palermo; its Magdeburg premiere is a catastrophic mess, with the lead tenor forgetting his lines and wearing a gaudy giant feather to cover up his mistakes, the audience unable to follow the plot for lack of a printed libretto, and the performance canceled entirely after the lead tenor Schreiber is brutally beaten by Mme Pollert’s jealous husband backstage, leaving the singer covered in blood and Mme Pollert in convulsions. The theater collapses days later, its company scattered, and Wagner is left with nothing but creditors hounding him, summons nailed to his door, and his poodle having run away, a bad omen he interprets as a sign of his total downfall.

Minna, his fiancée, has already secured an engagement in the distant Prussian city of Königsberg, and the theatre director there holds out the promise of a conductor vacancy if Wagner can join her. After a brief, humiliating stop in Berlin, where he reconnects with his friend Laube and meets the royal-favorite Konigstadt theatre director Cerf, who promises Wagner a conductor post and an immediate staging of Liebesverbot before betraying him by withdrawing all offers through his secretaries for his own amusement, Wagner has only one artistic bright spot: a performance of Spontini’s Ferdinand Cortez, conducted by the composer himself, whose grand, precise conducting opens Wagner’s eyes to the artistic potential of large-scale theatrical productions, an insight that will shape his later work on Rienzi. Minna writes from Königsberg with little news of a vacancy, and Wagner, wracked with jealousy after discovering old letters from the Magdeburg tradesman Schwabe, who had pursued Minna before she chose him, fights with her and proposes marriage in a desperate bid to secure their future. Laube, sympathetic to his friend’s plight, raises funds from his circle to cover Wagner’s fare to Königsberg, and warns him against getting caught up in the superficiality of stage life, urging him to read serious books in his free time to cultivate his greater gifts; Wagner, already planning to marry Minna to anchor himself against the chaos of theatrical life, keeps this intention to himself before leaving Berlin on July 7, 1836.