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To shorten the monstrous score, Wagner played and sang it through to the astonished Fischer with such frantic vigour that the older man grew concerned for his chest; as sops, Wagner flung him the second-act pantomime and most of the ballet. That summer he stayed at Toplitz with Minna and his mother, rambled through the Bohemian mountains, and on the romantic Schreckenstein, in a room strewn with straw, drew up in his pocket-book the detailed plan of a three-act opera on the Venusberg, and worked out its composition thereafter in strict accordance with that sketch. Climbing the Wostrai, he heard a goatherd whistle a merry dance tune he could never afterwards recall. The pilgrimage-greeting scene of Tannhäuser crystallised before him in that instant.
By July he was back in Dresden, lodging in a queer house facing the Maximilian Avenue, and moving in closer intercourse with his operatic stars. Hearing Schröder-Devrient in Grétry’s Blaubart revived his very first operatic memory, of a paper helmet and the song “Ha, die Falsche!” that he had sung at five years old. He found the Dresden orchestra thin in strings, the staging materially deficient, and the repertoire a mean affair; he felt degraded again, and wondered how he could hold his ground between disgust and desire.
It was the sympathy of those endowed with exceptional gifts that enabled him to triumph over these scruples, above all Schröder-Devrient, whose defects—the maternal stoutness ill-suited to male attire, the dragging time, the limited repertoire, the painful jealousy, the painful study of new parts—were eclipsed for him by an incomparable greatness he was uniquely fitted to appreciate. Tichatschek, by contrast, was an easy pleasure: he could sight-read the most difficult music, and poured himself into his role with childlike enthusiasm, picking up clerical errors with incorrigible pertinacity and dismissing all expostulation with “Ah! that will be all right soon.” To coax Reissiger into frequent piano rehearsals, Wagner offered him a versified libretto from his old romance Die Hohe Braut, only to discover that the suspicious conductor and his wife feared some trap; he regained the text and later helped Kittl with it in Prague as Die Franzosen vor Nizza.
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