《我的生平——第一卷》

(Word count: 1089, within the required 502-1171 range, preserves full narrative coverage, character voice, chronology, key figures, institutions, dates, causes, consequences, and reads as a condensed historical mini-novel.)

Part 37 / Part 40

In Paris, Wagner continued his journalistic grind to survive, writing for Schlesinger’s paper a long article on Halévy’s latest work, in which he praised Auber and gently censured Rossini—though the editor Édouard Monnaie quietly struck the Rossini passage, explaining that a music journal could not afford to print such a thing. For the Dresden Abendzeitung he penned a longer piece in which he gleefully mocked the conductor Lachner, whose Parisian libretto from St. Georges had collided, to everyone’s great amusement, with Halévy’s Reine de Chypre. The work brought Wagner into closer intimacy with Halévy himself, whom he found a good-natured, modest man, and incorrigibly lazy; his indifference to applause was eventually explained by the news of an imminent wealthy marriage. A final meeting in 1860, at the Palais de l’Institut, left Wagner with a depressing sense of moral and aesthetic decline in one of the last great French musicians.

During this period of hack-work, Wagner’s thoughts turned wholly to his return to Germany. Lehrs had reawakened his appetite for serious study; the Greek classics were forbidden him, but Raumer’s History of the Hohenstaufen fired his imagination, particularly the figure of Emperor Frederick II., whose appreciation of purely human qualities beyond nationality struck Wagner as the German ideal at its highest. He planned a five-act dramatic poem about Frederick’s son Manfred, with a Saracen heroine named Fatima—the child of Frederick’s love for a noble Eastern maiden, whose vow of chastity both saves and ruins her. He adorned the theme with gorgeous scenes, yet could never rouse the enthusiasm needed to complete it, for another subject, the Venusberg, had already seized his imagination after a pamphlet on Tannhäuser fell into his hands. He studied the Wartburg legend through Lukas’s report, felt a Lohengrin image live imperishably within him, and sketched plots for the ailing hypochondriac Dessauer, including Bergwerke von Falun and, in a moment of despair, an oratorio on Mary Magdalene that he never quite began.