《我的生平——第一卷》

Part 55 / Part 58

The winter of 1845-46 found Richard Wagner navigating Dresden’s tightly wound creative circles, a world that was at once intellectually stimulating and deeply dispiriting. His closest confidant that season was Dr. Hermann Franck, a comfortably well-off Breslau scholar and critic whose sharp, tactful judgment made him a rare counterpoint to the performative posturing that dominated most of Wagner’s artistic acquaintances. Franck’s scathing critiques of overhyped peers quickly became a balm for Wagner: the pair bonded first over exposing the myth of Felix Mendelssohn’s artistic self-sacrifice, which Franck had previously lauded as the composer’s noble renunciation of a 9,000-mark Berlin conducting post for a lower-paid Leipzig role. Wagner pulled back the curtain on the ruse: Leipzig district governor von Falkenstein had lobbied the king to grant Mendelssohn a secret 6,000-mark annual stipend on top of his public 3,000-mark salary, an arrangement kept hidden to avoid offending lower-paid conductors and framing Mendelssohn as a paragon of artistic altruism. Franck was left reeling, and the pair soon moved on to tearing down other empty figures: Ferdinand Hiller, the era’s chief exponent of musical “good-natured” platitudes, and the vaunted Düsseldorf School painters, including Eduard Bendemann, whose royal palace frescoes Franck dismissively deemed “bedaubed” by a hack.

Weekly gatherings organized by Hiller at Engel’s restaurant near Postplatz brought together Dresden’s artistic elite: painter-poet Reinecke, sculptors Ernst Hähnel and Ernst Rietschel, architect Gottfried Semper, and Munich museum director J. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, whose vivid German historical cartoons enchanted Wagner. The conversations were rarely productive, however: Semper’s default position of treating Wagner as a reactionary medieval Catholic sparked heated, fruitless arguments until the pair bonded over shared love of Germanic pagan myth, isolating them from the rest of the group. The appointment of writer Karl Gutzkow as the court theatre’s head dramatist, instead of Wagner’s old friend Heinrich Laube, proved a final straw for Wagner’s patience with the circle. Gutzkow’s insistence that the orchestra be deployed as a mere noise machine to cover actors’ unapplauded exits left Wagner writing him off entirely. The only bright spot was Berthold Auerbach, the Jewish Black Forest pastoralist writer, with whom Wagner could speak freely about Jewish identity and art; though he later grew frustrated by Auerbach’s obsessive focus on the “Jewish question” to the exclusion of all other cultural concerns.