《我的生平——第一卷》

Meanwhile, his friend Röckel’s radical activities escalated: he printed and distributed an appeal to Saxon soldiers explaining his political stance, was arrested for high treason, spent three days in jail before being bailed out, got a hero’s welcome from the Patriotic Union, and was fired from his court theater post. He grew a full beard, launched the popular weekly Volksblatt, a clear, no-nonsense paper that cut through political platitudes to address issues that mattered to both working and educated readers, though it made little profit. His brother Edward planned to move to England to teach piano to support the family if Röckel was imprisoned or executed. Röckel filled Wagner’s head with socialist ideas: abolishing the middleman, letting labor become an artistic, fulfilling pursuit rather than a burden, even dismantling traditional marriage, arguing that without class and money pressure, relationships would be pure and untainted. Wagner was inspired, and started thinking about how his artistic ideals could be realized in this new, more equal social order.

When the Saxon government threatened to cut the court theater’s Civil List subsidy, calling it an unnecessary luxury for the depraved, Wagner drew up a plan to repurpose those funds to create a national theater for all Saxony, arguing it would be a force for public education and morality, not debauchery. He first pitched the plan to Minister of Education von der Pfordten, who was polite but clearly uninterested, then went to Minister of the Interior Oberlander, who was earnest but said the King would never approve such an out-of-the-box proposal, and suggested Wagner take it to parliament instead. Wagner met newly elected radical parliamentarians, who were only interested in cutting state spending; one told him the state didn’t need to worry about art, “society will know how to act in regard to art and the theater” without his input. Humiliated, Wagner abandoned the plan, and only later learned Lüttichau had found out about it and hated him even more for overstepping.

Wagner turned his thoughts to a long-gestating drama about Frederick Barbarossa, planning five acts, but realized the plot overlapped too much with the Nibelungen and Siegfried myths, which fascinated him far more. He wrote an essay on the Nibelungen, drew up a detailed outline for a musical drama based on the myths, but was terrified no modern theater would ever stage such a work. He was only spurred to start writing the full poem for Siegfrieds Tod (later Götterdämmerung) by his despair at ever getting anything produced in Dresden’s stifling theatrical system.