《我的生平——第一卷》

After the Pillnitz triumph, I got a new, bizarre official task: preparing a production of Spontini’s Vestalin, with the old master invited to supervise. Spontini, who’d just left Berlin in humiliation, agreed to come, but his demands were absurd: he insisted the orchestra have twelve good contrabasses, and required a custom baton of thick black ebony with large ivory knobs on each end, which he’d grip by the middle like a field marshal’s staff instead of beating time. We scrambled to make the baton, but when Spontini arrived unannounced in his long blue pilot coat the day before the full dress rehearsal, chaos ensued. His German was too broken to give clear instructions, he insisted the rehearsal was not a full dress run but a total re-study of the opera from scratch, infuriating my chorus master Fischer, who’d originally advocated inviting him. After one chorus, Fischer shouted at me in rage, “What does the old hog want now?” when Spontini pulled me aside to whisper in French that the chorus sang not badly. I had to pacify the furious Fischer, but the whole enterprise was a farce, a perfect snapshot of the absurdity of my official Dresden duties.

That September, I rented a summer villa in Loschwitz to finish Tannhäuser’s second act, the open air and quiet ideal for composing. A performance of Rienzi that summer had an audience including Spontini, Meyerbeer, and the Russian national anthem composer General Lwoff, and while I cared little for their opinion, I was delighted when my little dog Peps, who’d followed me from the villa, was brought to me at the opera house, and I drove home with him without greeting the European celebrities, Minna relieved to have her lost pet back. My friend Werder visited me that summer too, in ordinary daylight, and we argued amiably about the Fliegender Holländer, my mind already turning to Tannhäuser. When we moved back to our winter quarters, I worked obsessively on Tannhäuser’s third act, finishing it by December 29, 1844, using solitary walks to clear my head.