《我的生平——第一卷》

My only real social circle was my old friends Heine and Gaffer Fischer, plus the tenor Tichatschek and his strange domestic set, and my work with the Dresden Glee Club, run by the ambitious Professor Lowe who wanted to use the club for his own ambitions: transferring Weber’s remains from London to Dresden, and hosting a huge Saxony choral festival. I wrote the Liebesmahl der Apostel (Lovefeast of the Apostles) for the festival, a 30-minute choral work for 1,200 unaccompanied male voices depicting the Pentecost outpouring of the Holy Ghost. When we performed it in the Frauenkirche, the sheer weight of 1,200 voices was a weak, muddy mess that disappointed me; I decided right then I’d never attempt a huge choral work again. I escaped the Glee Club by passing it off to the ambitious Ferdinand Hiller, and only looked back once for the 1843 transfer of Weber’s ashes to Dresden, a triumph I’d organize later that year. That summer, I was also commissioned to write a festal male chorus for the unveiling of King Frederick Augustus’s statue in the Zwinger, alongside Mendelssohn, who wove the national anthem “Heil Dir im Rautenkranz” into his counterpoint so skillfully no one in the audience could tell why the brass was playing a different tune than the singers. I got a gold snuffbox with a badly engraved hunting scene as a reward, the metal cut through in several places from the poor engraving.

Secure in my lifetime appointment, Minna and I set up a proper home in a spacious house on Ostra Allee, furnished with a concert grand piano, a stately writing desk, and the only possession that would stay with me my whole life: a Cornelius title page for the Nibelungen in a Gothic frame. I built a systematic library of German medieval literature, world history, poetry, hoping to finally do serious, productive study now that my official duties were light, Lüttichau gave me unusual consideration. I took a holiday in Toplitz that summer with Minna and my mother, who needed the baths for her gout, and read J. Grimm’s German Mythology, a scattershot collection of perished medieval legends that sparked my imagination for Tannhäuser. I sketched the Venusberg music in my head, had fits of excitability and brain rushes, took a trip to Prague to recover, came back and finished the first act of Tannhäuser in January 1844.