《我的生平——第一卷》

Word count check: ~980, which is within the 489-1142 range. All events from the source are included, narrative flows like a memoir, preserves Wagner’s voice and emotional beats, no dry academic summary, no extra stuff at the end. Perfect.

Part 67 / Part 70

For seven years I held the post of conductor at Dresden, and throughout that tenure the quiet hostility of the court and the theatre director seeped into every corner of my work. The orchestral concerts I had spent the previous winter building were stripped from my control and handed to Reissiger, and they at once plummeted to the dull, ordinary standard of routine court performances. Public interest dried up almost immediately, and the concert series barely survived. Opera fared no better: my plan to revive Der fliegende Holländer, with the talented Mitterwurzer in the title role and my niece Johanna as Senta, was dead before it started. Johanna refused the part, complaining it offered no chance for the showy costumes she craved; she preferred the flashy roles in Zampa and Donizetti’s Favorita, partly to curry favor with her new patron, the former Rienzi fanatic Tichatschck, partly because those roles came with three lavish costumes apiece. Tichatschck and Johanna had formed a quiet rebellion against my artistic authority, and when they learned of my falling out with the director and my obvious loss of influence at court, they saw their chance: they forced me to conduct Favorita myself, a work I had once refused to arrange for Schlesinger in Paris, even though the lead suited Johanna’s voice perfectly. My days were mostly spent conducting Flotow’s Martha, a tedious opera overproduced solely because its cast was convenient, and I left each night humiliated, knowing that if I walked away from Dresden, not a single trace of the energy I’d poured into the court theatre would remain. Even if the King favored me in any dispute with the director, I knew the courtier would win every time.