《我的生平——第一卷》

When Tyszkiewitcz received a passport to return to Galicia, Wagner’s mother agreed to let him travel to Vienna with the count. He brought his three performed overtures and his unpublished symphony, traveling in Tyszkiewitcz’s coach as far as Brunn, then continuing alone to Vienna, terrified of a cholera outbreak but arriving safely in midsummer 1832. He spent six weeks taking in the city’s vibrant musical life: unimpressed by a star-studded performance of Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris, his expectations set too high by Schroder-Devrient’s Fidelio and Hoffmann’s writings, he was far more enthralled by Johann Strauss’s ecstatic waltz performances and the wildly popular opera Zampa. He left Vienna, stopping at Count Pachta’s rural estate Pravonin near Prague.

Pravonin brought awkward romantic tension: the count’s two daughters, the slim, dark-haired Jenny and the plump, fair-haired Auguste, were kind and playful, and Wagner, then nineteen with a fast-growing beard, fumbled a half-hearted courtship of both, frustrated by their crude aristocratic suitors and their lack of interest in art. He lectured them harshly about the French Revolution, begged them to marry middle-class men instead of the boorish nobles, and left on a cold November day unresolved, half in love, half angry. In Prague, he connected with Dionys Weber, the tyrannical conservatoire director who hated Beethoven’s later work and only respected Mozart. Wagner flattered Weber’s tastes, pointed out the Mozart influence in his own C major overture and symphony, and convinced him to let the conservatoire orchestra perform his symphony, a debut that went off smoothly in front of a crowd including Count Pachta. While in Prague, Wagner also sketched his first opera libretto, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), a dark, mystic tale of two feuding families whose reconciliation at a wedding is shattered when the bride’s new ally falls in love with her, she pushes him off a balcony to his death, and then dies at his funeral, averting a clan war. He wrote it in secret, hiding the manuscript behind the sofa at his friend Moritz’s house whenever his host came near.