《我的生平——第一卷》

In Schroeder-Devrient’s dining room, where Heine and Ferdinand Hiller were also guests, Spontini revealed the full extent of his comic monstrosity. He listened deferentially until he spoke, and then only in categorical, sharply accentuated sentences that forbade contradiction. When Madame Devrient laughed during one of his harangues, he shot his wife an angry glance, and when the laughter was explained away, he declared coldly: “Pourtant je suis sûr que c’est ma femme qui a suscité ce rire; je ne veux pas que l’on rie devant moi, je ne rie jamais moi, j’aime le sérieux.” Over dessert he amused the company by crunching enormous lumps of sugar with his magnificent teeth. He confided to Wagner that he loved him and wished to preserve him from the misfortune of being a dramatic composer “after Spontini.” Quoting his own La Vestale, he declared that he had invented the suspension of the sixth, introduced the bass drum into the orchestra, and that no note written since had not been stolen from his scores. The Italians were cochons, the French mere imitators, the Germans eternally childish, and the Jews the ruiners of all German music. When taken to see Mendelssohn’s Antigone, he rose within minutes with the verdict: “C’est de la Berliner Sing-Academie, allons-nous-en.” Schroeder-Devrient, perceiving that no second performance could rescue the master from disappointment, took to her bed with a feigned illness, and Wagner and Röckel were dispatched to break the news. They found him radiant, for the Pope had summoned him to Rome to be made Count of San Andrea and the King of Denmark had raised him to knighthood. From Paris, Berlioz would later report his deathbed cry: “Je ne veux pas mourir, je ne veux pas mourir!” and Wagner, reading the news in Zürich, would extol in him that absolute belief in himself and his art which Meyerbeer and the aged Rossini had so lamentably lost.

Theodor Marschner, who had once hoped to inherit Weber’s place in Dresden, came to conduct his opera Adolph von Nassau under Wagner’s baton, and the score proved such a debacle that Tichatschek and Mitterwurzer burst into helpless laughter at rehearsal. A Viennese coloratura singer attempted to rescue the work with brilliant effects, and Marschner’s drinking quartet — in which the German Rhine and German wine played the usual stereotyped part — was roundly encored at the otherwise stillborn premiere. Ferdinand Hiller, charming and industrious, also besieged Dresden with his opera Der Traum in der Christnacht, having displaced the unfortunate Röckel’s Farinelli; the work survived two performances, and Hiller entreated Wagner to choose his next libretto for him. Wagner, exhausted by the parade of disappointed mediocrities, found his deepest consolation in a far more solemn enterprise.