《我的生平——第一卷》

Seeking cheap, quiet space to finish Lohengrin, he moved that Easter into a spacious, low-rent apartment above sculptor Hähnel’s studio in the old Marcolini palace, with access to a large, tree-filled garden. The seclusion was ideal: he finished the opera’s third act by year’s end, and spent his days walking the palace’s old Napoleonic-era pathways, jotting down ideas, and hosting small, cheerful gatherings of friends in the garden. His frustration with Dresden’s theatre administration, however, had reached a breaking point: his detailed plan to reorganize the royal orchestra into an independent concert society, build a dedicated concert hall on the site of a dilapidated theatre shed and wash-house, and eliminate wasteful spending had been dismissed out of hand by Lüttichau, who preferred the status quo of committee chaos. Wagner withdrew entirely from theatre management, limiting himself to conducting and composing, and turned his focus to getting his operas staged beyond Dresden. He settled on Berlin as his next target, leveraging a successful 1846 Rienzi gala performance in Dresden to win an audience with the Queen of Saxony, sister of the Prussian king, who agreed to intercede on his behalf for a Berlin Rienzi production. He set out for the capital in September 1847, hoping to use the production’s opening night to secure an audience with the king and pitch Lohengrin for a court theatre premiere.

His hopes were quickly dashed: rehearsals were delayed repeatedly by Jenny Lind’s exclusive booking of the Royal Opera, and his attempts to meet the king stalled at the level of low-level court officials. Poet Ludwig Tieck, whom he consulted for a recommendation, warned him the fickle king would never support his radical artistic ideals, comparing him to a man who loved Gluck one day and Donizetti the next. The Rienzi production itself was a disappointment: the lead tenor was utterly untalented, and the lukewarm public reception, paired with vicious reviews from Berlin critics, left Wagner demoralized. Even his old friend Hermann Franck, who had settled in Berlin, told him he’d made a mistake choosing Rienzi for his Berlin debut instead of Tannhäuser, which might have won over more culturally influential audiences. Meetings with other Berlin artistic figures only deepened his despair: composer Bernhard Marx told him his years-long pitch for a state music school had been killed by bureaucratic apathy, soprano Henriette Sontag returned his Lohengrin libretto with a fluffy comment that it was “very pretty” and made her think of fairies, and even his old ally Eduard Devrient warned him Berlin’s theatrical establishment was too corrupt and closed-minded to ever embrace his work. By the end of his two months in the capital, Wagner was convinced his only path forward lay far from the stifling conventionality of Germany’s major cultural institutions, his mind already turning to the grand, mythic works he would spend the rest of his career bringing to life.