《我的生平——第一卷》

He arrives in Königsberg after days of travel through desolate desert marches that feel like leaving the world behind, finding Minna in the poor Tragheim suburb, where she is popular with the theatre staff, a good sign for his own prospects. His hopes are quickly dashed, however: the incumbent conductor Schubert, a skilled musician with a passion for the theatre’s prima donna, refuses to vacate the post, and wages a quiet war against Wagner, spreading rumors and making his days a living hell. Wagner follows Minna to Memel for the summer season, enduring a miserable crossing of the Kurische Haff in bad weather, where a stop at the castle that inspired Hoffmann’s gruesome The Majorat deepens his depression, before witnessing a soldier executed on the wheel for murdering his girlfriend, a final horror that cements his desire to leave the region for good.

Back in Königsberg, the eccentric theatre patron Abraham Möller, a former wealthy speculator who now spends his days trading favors with the theatre to support his love of the stage, takes pity on the couple, and negotiates a contract that guarantees Wagner the conductor post after Easter, plus a benefit performance of Die Stumme von Portici to fund their wedding. Möller insists the couple must marry to secure their futures, and Minna agrees without protest, though Wagner is wracked with quiet doubt: he has learned of her past, of her seduction at 17 and the illegitimate daughter she gave up, of her willingness to tolerate the advances of theatre patrons to advance her career, of her prior intimacy with Schwabe. They fight constantly over these suspicions, Wagner apologizing every time, until the day of their wedding on November 24, 1836, when Wagner is 23 and a half. They bicker outside the vicar’s house until the parson opens the door, amused by their squabble, and marry that morning; the parson’s sermon refers to Jesus as an unknown friend, a detail Wagner finds confusing but not insulted by. The benefit performance that night is a success, but the next morning, Wagner is summoned to court to face his Magdeburg creditors, who have followed him to Königsberg; he pleads infancy under Prussian law to buy time, a brief respite that marks the start of the many troubles that will define his marriage. He spends his idle time writing two overtures, Rule Britannia and Napoleon, and sketching a light opera based on an Arabian Nights tale, The Happy Bear Family, but his rival Schubert’s constant harassment prevents him from making progress, until Easter finally comes, Schubert resigns, and Wagner steps into the conductor post for a theatre on the brink of collapse, its prima donna having quit and its audience dwindling during Lent. He wins over the hostile orchestra with his precise, fiery conducting, and sets about buoying up the failing enterprise, even as the quiet cracks in his marriage to Minna have already begun to spread.