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3 









i* Hubris* I 

TiRlCHARDi 

MLDRICH ^ 



HARVARD COLLEGE 
LIBRARY 




LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



RICHARD WAGNER'S PROSE WORKS. 

VoLUMB I. The Art- Work of thb Futurb. 

,» II. Opbra and Drama. 

», III. Thb Theatre. 

,f rv. Art and Politics. 

», V. Actors and Stngbrs. 

„ VI. Religion and Art. 

,, VII. In Paris and Dresden. 

„ VIII. Posthumous, Etc. 

/Viw I2s. 6(L net each vohtme. 



1849 • ^ Vindication, a short aoconnt of the Dresden insurrection 
and Wagner's attitude thereto. By Wm. Ashton Ellis. SUff pa^ 
covers^ 2s» 6a.; cloih, y. 6d, 



KEGAN PAX7L, TRENCH, TRDBNBR & CO., Ltd., LONDON. 



Letters of Richard Wagner to O. Wesendonck et al. 
„ „ „ Emil Hecrel. 

Translated by Wm. Ashton Ellis. Cloth, gilt tops, y. net each. 



GRANT RICHARDS, 9 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C. 



LIFE OF RICHARD 
WAGNER: 



BEING AN AUTHORISED 
ENGUSH VERSION BY 

WM. ASHTON ELLIS 
OF C. F. GLASENAPP'S 
«DAS LEBEN 
RICHARD WAGNER'S." 



VOL. L 



1 



LONDON: 

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Ltd, 
1900. 







TOUfSULL AMD tPBABSf 
MDlHBVmau 



PREFACE. * 



Prefaces seem to be falling into general dislike in 
England At times, however, they are necessary evils. 
I will endeavour to make the present ill as brief as 
possible. 

There is absolutely no need to dwell upon the lack of a 
full and authoritative English '' Life of Wagner/' for^pace 
Mr H. T. Finck's two entertaining volumes — ^the thing has 
never yet been seriously attempted. The same might be 
said with regard to every country, save for one exception : 
even in Germany, the Bayreuth master's native land, there 
exists but one bic^raphy of him that aspires to the com- 
pleteness of a standard work ; it naturally has both fed 
and swallowed up the rest That biography is the incom- 
parable work of Carl Fr. Glasenapp. Originally published 
in 1876, for the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, in 
1882 (the year of Parsifal) it was brought down to date 
by a second edition with a supplemental section ; then 
came a pause. Richard Wagner died in 1883, and it 
might have been thought advisable for Herr Glasenapp 
to hasten forward yet a third edition, with a second supple- 
ment ; but he felt, and rightly, that no further edition ought 
to be issued before time, research and meditation should 
have enriched his work with riper thought and a far larger 
body of material. Meanwhile appeared the shorter mono- 
graphs of Wilhelm Tappert and Richard Pohl ; supplying 
valuable information in many respects, however, they 
made no pretension to that monumental character Herr 
Glasenapp had prefigured as his own ideal. At last in 
1894 the first volume of his third edition saw the light ; 
containing in itself almost as much matter as both the 
volumes of its predecessor (1882), it was practically a new 



VI PREFACE. 

production. The German preface to that volume, ac- 
knowledging indebtedness to right and left (an indebted- 
ness really quite insignificant in comparison with the 
author's own rich stores and private sources of information), 
foreshadowed the work's completion in two additional 
instalments. Two further volumes have since, in fact, 
appeared, taking us to the Spring of 1864 (when Richard 
Wagner was summoned to Munich). A fourth, to conclude 
the Life, is not as yet to hand ; but by the time I have 
caught Herr Glasenapp up, I have every confidence that, 
despite the smallness of his leisure for literary pursuits, he 
will not have kept us waiting. 

Having managed to introduce myself into the question, 
I had better proceed at once to make a clean breast of it, 
and confess that this is not a literal translation of Herr 
Glasenapp's work. After commencing the task of trans- 
ference to our own vernacular, I felt that I should do the 
author far more justice by allowing myself a change of 
phrase or sequence here and there; that a paragraph 
might be sightly re-arranged upon occasion, a footnote 
lifted into the text, or even omitted, a comment varied for 
the English reader, and so on. Not that anything of a 
material nature would suffer change, but merely that the 
shade of difference in the spirit of two allied languages, 
and their literature, should be taken into consideration. 
Were I to call the plan which I deemed requisite — and 
have adopted — a " free translation," I should be conveying 
a false impression ; for page after page is in strict 
accordance with the German original. "An English 
revision" would be nearer the mark, and express the 
fact that in all essentials I have closely followed Herr 
Glasenapp's text, but from time to time I have made a 
little verbal or constructional alteration. To this, I may 
add, I have Herr Glasenapp's full and free consent 

As to the present volume : Objection may be taken, in 
some captious quarters, to the devotion of so much space 
to Richard Wagner's ancestors and other relations. It 
must be remembered, however, that in the case of any 



PREFACE. Vll 

notable phenomenon scientific inquiry positively demands 
some knowledge of the antecedent conditions ; individual 
biology is sterile unless it can trace, however imperfectly, 
the germs bequeathed to the scion by his stock. Then 
again, the life of boy and youth is far more largely repre- 
sented by impressions received, than by actions done ; the 
influence of the family surroundings forms an important 
factor in future evolution. And when we come to the 
doings of the hero's brothers and sisters (in all but one 
instance, his seniors), we have both lines of interest con- 
verging : on the one hand they distinctly shew what must 
necessarily have been reflected upon the juvenile mind, on 
the other they help to account through consanguinity for 
the bent of his own nature — in this case most strikingly, 
as almost every one of Richard's father's children except 
himself became an actor, or what is still more to the 
purpose, a singing actor. 

This volume brings our story down to 1843, an important 
era in Richard Wagner's life, with his entry, as composer 
of two successful operas, upon a so-called "practical" 
career at one of the principal German theatres. How 
he fared there, how he turned his back on Dresden and 
all office-bearing, and how he planned and actually 
commenced his great artistic reformation, will form the 
subject of Volume II. (to appear, as I hope, in 1901). 
Volume III. will follow his changing fortunes, through 
the last two-thirds of his exile, down to his rescue by 
King Ludwig. This, I trust, will be ready in 1902 ; 
whilst, subject to Herr Glasenapp's state of forwardness, 
I expect to complete the Life by a fourth volume in 

1903- 

As I fancy I heard the bell ring. Ladies and Gentlemen, 
I withdraw to let the curtain rise. 

Wm. Ashton Ellis. 
Horsted Keynes, 
August 1900. 



CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. 



PRi«NATALIA (1769-1813). 

PAGE 

Introductory . . .3 

I. Family History.— Excise-officer GotdobFriedrich Wagner 

and his forefathers — " Urahnherr war der Sch6nsten hold." 
— Leipzig after the Seven-years War. — Friends and de- 
scendants of G. F. Wagner ..... 7 

II. Adolf Wagner.— Years of study at Leipzig and Jena.— 

Friendship with Arnold Kanne and Joh. Falk. — '^Two 
Epochs of Modem Poetry.'' — Personal and literary con- 
nections: August Apel, Wendt and Brockhaus.— Apel's 
" Polyidos." — Translations and original poems . 17 

III. Friedrich Wagner.— Birth and childhood.— Impres- 
sions derived from Schiller's works. — Legal studies and 
general culture. — ''Gerichtsaktuarius" Wagner in Leipzig 
amateur theatricals. — Marriage with Johanna Bertz. — 
Friends of the house. — A quiverfial. — The "Maid of 
Orleans " and " Bride of Messina " . . •27 

IV. LUDWIG Geyer.- Friendship of F. Wagner and L. Geyer. 
— Geyer's youth: taste for painting. — ^Talent for play- 
acting. — Years of wandering, with military interludes: 
Magdeburg, Stettin, Breslaa — Return to Leipzig ; engage- 
ment in the Seconda company. — Relations with the 
Wagner family ...... 36 

FIRST BOOK: CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH (1813-1833). 

I. The Year 1813.— The King of Prussia's call to arms and 
Germany's uprising. — Birth of Richard Wagner. — E. T. A. 
Hofimann at Leipzig. — Geyer at Dresden and Teplitz. — The 
October-days: ** Napoleon without a hat." — Friedrich 
Wagner's death. — ^Jean Paul's prophecy * M 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB 



II. Removal to Dresden.— Fresh troubles.— Gcyer weds the 

widow. — Removal to Dresden. — Dresden's pigtailery. — 
Company at Geyer's house : puppet-plays and comedies. 
D^uts of Louise and Rosalie. — Richard's in&ncy . . 54 

III. Gever's Last Years.— Relations with K. M. v. Weber. 
—The "German Opera."— Starring at Prague and Leipzig. 
— Occupation as painter.— Comedy "The Slaughter of the 
Innocents."— Albert and Rosalie.— Failing health.— Repre- 
sentation of his comedy. — ^Journey to Breslau. — Illness and 
death ........ 63 

IV. Richard Wagner as Child.— First journey.- Impres- 
sions of Eisleben. — Return to Dresden. — ^Admission mto 
the Kreuzschule. — The new suit — Sister Cacilie as play- 
fellow. — Dread of ghosts. — Loschwitz : tale of a pumpkin. 
— Love of Nature and dumb animals. — "The history of my 
dogs." — ^Affection for his mother . . . -73 

V. The Kreuzschuler.— Enthusiasm for classical antiquity. 

— Adventure on the roof of the Kreuzschule. — Weber and 
" Der Freischiitz." — First music-lessons. — Hankering after 
theatricals. — Clara's d^ut as singer.— First attempts at 
poetry. — Weber's death. — Homer and Shakespeare.— Con- 
firmation.— The great Tragedy.— Changes in the household . 83 

VI. Leipzig.- Quarters in the " Pichhof"- Louise^s artistic 
successes.— She marries Friedrich Brockhaus. — Uncle 
Adolf and aunt Sophie— The S. Nicholas School.— Beet- 
hoven's Symphonies and "Egmont" music— Richard re- 
solves to become a musician. — Intercourse with uncle 
Adolf. — Reading Hoffmann.— First lessons in harmony . 97 

VII. Leipzig Court-theatre, and July-Revolution.— 
Court - theatre at Leipzig. — Goethe's Faust: Rosalie 
Wagner as Gretchen. — Auber's Muette: Rosalie as 
Fenella. — Rossini's 7>//.— The July Revolution makes 
Richard "a revolutionary." — Leipzig riots. — From the 
Nicholas to the Thomas School. — Overtures for grand 
orchestra. — Performance of the "big drum" overttu^ at 
the Court-theatre. — ^Transference to the University 107 



^ 



CONTENTS. XI 

PACE 

VIII. The Student of Music— The university.— A "smoUis" 
offered to the Senior of the Saxonia. — Student excesses. — 
Return to music. — Study with Weinlig: his method.— 
Immersed in Beethoven. — Personal relations. — Three over- 
tures. — Polish emigrants. — Overtures in D minor and C at 

the Gewandhaus ...... 120 

IX. The C Major Symphony.— Composition of the Sym- 
phony in C : its construction and themes. — ^Journey to 
Vienna: ^'Zampa^and Strauss's waltzes. — Prague: Dionys 
Weber has the Symphony played by his Conservatoire 
pupils. — Mozart traditions. — Tomatschek ; Friedrich Kittl. 
— " Die Hochzeit" — Return to Leipzig.— Heinrich Laube. 
— '^Kosziusko" text — Performance of the Symphony at the 
Gewandhaus. — Departure for Wiizzburg . . .134 



SECOND BOOK: STRAYINGS AND WANDERINGS 
(1833-1843). 

L WuRZBURG: "Die Feen."— Albert Wagner.— Richard as 
Chorus-master. — Birth of "Die Feen" ; text and music. — 
"You have only to dare 1»— The "Vampyr" aria.— Per- 
formances at the Wurzburg Musical Union. — Completion of 
"DieFeen." — Return to Leipzig . . . • I57 

II. "Das Liebesverbot." — Return to Leipzig. — " Feen *» 
negotiations. — Director Ringelhardt and Regisseur Hauser. 
— Representation postponed — Schrdder-Devrient as Romeo. 
— Article on "German Opera": against "leamedness in 
music." — Relations with Robert Schumann. — Poem of "Das 
Liebesverbot" written at Teplitz. — Off to Magdeburg . 170 

III. Magdeburg. — Lauchstadt and Rudolstadt.— Symphony in 
£. — Magdeburg. — Apathy of the Public — Last fortunes of 
"Die Feen." — New Year's music. — Columbus-overture. — 
Betrothal to Minna Planer. — The " Schweizerfamilie " at 
Nuremberg. — Death of uncle Adolf. — ^Auber's " Lestocq." 

— Performance of " Das Liebesverbot " . . . 1 86 



XU CONTENTS. 

rAos 

IV. ROSAUE Wagner. — External straits.~Leipzig : attempts 
to get ^Das Liebesverbot" accepted. — Solicitude of sister 
Rosalie. — Her temporary eclipse as actress. — Rosalie's 
marriage with Oswald Marbach : birth of a daughter, and 

the mother's death .205 

V. KdNlGSBERG. — Berlin disappointments. — K6nigsberg. — 

Letter to Dom.— Draft of <*Die hohe Braut" despatched 
to Scribe for Paris. — Marriage with Minna Planer. — *^ Rule 
Britannia" overture. — Concerts in the crush-room. — In- 
cidental music to a play. — Relations with A. Lewald. — 
Dresden: Bulwer's ''Rienzi". . . . .212 

VI. Riga. — First impressions. — Dom, Ldbmann, Karl von 
Holtei. — Wagner's endeavours to obtain good perfonnances. 
— ^Amalie Planer. — National hymn "Nikolai." — Bellini's 
'^Norma," and reflections thereon. — Removal to the suburbs. 
— Concert in the Schwartzhaupter Haus.—" Comedians' 
ways." — Longing to escape from narrow bounds 227 

VII. "RiENZi, DER Letztb der Tribxtnen."— -" Rienzi " as 
drama. — Impressions during the first spell of composition : 
MdhuPs "Joseph." — Dom on the inception of the Riexizi- 
music — Dom's "Schdffe von Paris." — Letter to August 
Lewald. — Loneliness at Riga ; compassion for a young 
delinquent ; the Newfoundland dog Robber. — Wagner 
replaced by Dom ...... 346 

VIII. From Riga to Paris.— Difficulties of leaving Russia. 
— Last performances at Mitau. — Crossing the Russian 
frontier. — Embarcation at Pillau. — Norway : the Sound and 
the " Champagne-mill." — London. — Arrival at Boulogne. — 
Meyerbeer. — Paris at the end of the thirties . 262 

IX. First Parisian Disappointments. — Introductions.— 
Meeting with Laube ; dinner at Brocci's ; Heinrich Heine. 
— Pecht, Kietz, Anders, Lehrs. — Grand Op^ra and Th^tre 
des Italiens. — Conservatoire de Musique : Ninth Symphony. 
— Scribe and Berlioz. — Composition of French romances. — 
Fortunes of the " Liebesverbot " at the Renaissance theatre. 
— A "Faust" overture. — Removal to Rue du Helder. — 
Bankruptcy of the Renaissance .271 



CONTENTS. 



Xlll 



X. COMPLBTION OF " RiENZi."— Retum to ** Rienzi.^^Musical 
hack-work. — ^ Der fliegende ' Hollander ** for the Grand 
Op^ra. — Friendship of the needy : evening reunions at 
Wagner's. — Contributions to the G€useiie MusicaU. — Meet- 
ing with Liszt — "Rienzi" finished.— More journeyman- 
work. — Napoleon's re-interment. — New Year's eve. 393 

XL "Der Fuegbnds Hollander."— "An End in Paris."— 
Failure of the Columbus-overture. — News-letters to the 
Abendzeitung. — Projected Life of Beethoven. — Henri 
Vieuxtemps, Schindler, Liszt. — In the country near Meudon. 
— The "Freischiitz" in Paris. — " Rienzi " accepted at 
Dresden. — Poem and music of the " Flying Dutchman." — 
Return to Paris : efforts to get the '' Dutchman " accepted 
at Leipzig, Munich, Berlin. — "Die Sarazenin." — "Tann- 
hSuser und der Sangerkrieg auf Wartburg." — Return to 
Germany ....... 308 

XI L Dresden.— Arrival in Dresden.— Summer at Tepliti.— 
Rehearsals and production of " Rienzi." — Excerpts at the 
Gewandhaus. — " The Flying Dutchman " produced at 
Dresden. — Offer of the Kapellmeistership : hesitation about 
accepting. — Trial-performance, Weber's "Euryanthe." — 
Trip to Beriin. — Wagner becomes Kapellmeister . 341 



APPENDICES. 
L Gbnbalogical Table • 363 

II. Family Chronicle, 1643-1813 -364 

III. Supplemental Notes .372 
Index ........ 386 



PRiENATALIA. 
(1769-1813.) 

However lofty a figure de, it never stands entirely 
detached from its surroundings; in some one thing 
each German is akin to his great Masters^ and this 
something — by the GermatCs very nature — is capable 
of greats and therefore needs a slow^ development, 

Richard Wagner. 




INTRODUCTORY. 

WUA Bach the German Spirit was horn anew, /ram out 
the inmost mysteries of Music. Whtn Goethe's « Gcetz " 
appeared^ the joyful cry went up^ ** That's German I** 

RiCHA&D Wagner. 

RITING from Berlin in 1750, Voltaire might well 
say: ^*I am living here in France; one knows 
no other tongae than ours. German is for none 
but the horses and soldiers." 
These insolent words of the emissary of French 
civilisation throw a lurid light on the state of German culture at 
the time. In the lethargy of profound exhaustion the nation had 
been aU but robbed of its last possession, its native tongue. 
Latin was the scholar's language, Italian the singer's and 
musician's, French the noble's and courtier's; the conversation 
•of the burgher world was tricked with French fal-dals; the 
mother-tongue fled scared away to nook and comer, field and 
hamlet, within the workshop and behind the plough. And just 
as this extirpation of the German name and nature seemed sealed 
for good, Sebastian Bach, the Leipzig Cantor, forgotten, lonely 
and weighed down by life's sore trials, forever closed his weary 
eyes against the poverty and want in which he left his loved ones. 
Of him says Wagner, that he represents '^the history of the 
-German Spirit's inmost life during the cruel century of the 
Crerman folk's complete extinction." 

To such a hidden refuge was consigned that remnant of the 
German Spirit which lingered on despite the bloody wars of 
creeds. In deep enfeeblement, both inner and outer, the 
<jerman had acquired the fatal virtue of endurance. He had 
learned to trim himself to the unworthy thing, to face oppression 
with the passiveness of dogged patience. Confronted with the 
braggart splendour of Ids Princes' courts, and their selfish policy 
diat spread such boundless misery throughout the land, he still 



4 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

preserved undying confidence in his ''beloved and honoured 
rulers," even when they sold their subjects to the foreign foe. 

But already on the Prussian throne there sat the man with 
great grey eyes of fire, whose cane was soon to teach all Europe 
to respect On the battlefield of Rossbach the friend and pupil 
of French culture, the patron of French taste in literature, first 
shewed the world again the German's strength. ''The first true 
gust of higher life was brought into German poetry through 
Frederick the Great and the deeds of the Seven-years War," says 
Goethe of him ; and just as in the " War-songs of a Prussian 
Grenadier" the German muse addressed herself once more 
directly to the Folk, however clumsily and scantly, so German 
sense and German speech began to reassert their sway in the 
reviving institutions of the Burgher class. "Whereas the folly 
of high quarters, disowning home for foreign dictates and French 
influences, fell victim to a ghastly impotence, the educated 
Burgher world took an active interest in the rewakening of 
German Literature, enabling it to follow the unmatched upsoar- 
ing of the German spirit, the feats of Winckelmann, Lessing, 
Goethe, and lastiy Schiller" (Richard Wagner^ s Prose Works, 

V. 331). 

Thus the reviving " German Spirit " obtained withal the fiiendly 
soil wherein to thrust and spread its roots. At the very time 
when the foreign spirit of Romanic Gaul was celebrating its 
triumphs over a trampled nationality, a Goethe was already 
bom, and with that birth the genius of the German Folk acquired 
a pledge of its renascence : the force deep-buried in the giant 
Bach was urging grandly outwards. A youthful stress beyond 
compare, a universal receptivity, were striving to present the 
whole phenomenal world within the beautifying form of ideal art 
On the opposite pole stood Beethoven, who sought indeed the 
form at bottom of Bach's wonder-mine, but solely to inspire it 
with an ardent soul, and thus dissolve it firom within. 

The genius of Schiller, keen to ennoble what it found at 
hand, bent from the open folk's-stage toward the listening 
comrades of his time, to draw them step by step through his 
creations from " Don Carlos " to the " Bride of Messina," into his 
realm of the Ideal And this was at the German Theatre, that 
same raw German Folk's-stage which, in the hands of a Gottsched 
and under the influence of misconstrued French exemplars, had 



INTRODUCTORY. 5 

just presented such a strange distortion. " We see the raw Folk- 
theatre, entirely neglected by the higher-cultured of the nation, 
&11 into the experimenting hands of beaux esprits in the first half 
of the eighteenth century; from these it escapes to the well- 
meaning care of an honest but narrow-minded Burgher world, 
whose fundamental note becomes its law of Naturalism " {Prose 
IVorks^ V. 185). From the simple naturalism of the Burgher-play 
to the lofty ideality of the Bayreuth Biihnenfestspiel, leads on the 
path pursued in the development of German Art. How many 
were the crossings of this path, how often has its settled trend 
been made untraceable ; how frequently in later days have sapient 
critics trumpeted its last surrender, at the very time the mightiest 
artistic genius ¥ras holding it with all the unmoved sureness of the 
magnet* 

Of all to whom was set the grand example of Schiller's efforts 
to uplift the German Theatre inch by inch, to form a truly German 
art at once ideal and popular, Karl Maria von Webbr was the only 
one to follow it with like devotion in the German SingspielA Nor 
was he spared from suffering the poet's outward lot; toward 
both these men the German courts and world of fashion stayed 
cold and distant, though in every stratum of the Folk itself both 
found unfailing tokens of a (merman instinct going out especially 
to these its masters. The heritage of both, the prosecution of 
their task, was to be taken up in time by Richard Wagner. 
From the Freischiitz to Euzyanthe, Weber had gone the same 
road as SchiUer from his Robbers to his Bride of Messina, the 
road of '' idealising the drama " : this ideal character was to be 
given it in the one case by choosing subjects from the realm of 
history and legend, instead of from domestic life, and finally by 
summoning the antique chorus to form a living breast-work 
against " naturalism " ; in the other, by invoking the magical aid 
of tnusic from the first. After Beethoven's world of Tone, well- 
nigh unknown to Schiller, had shewn the wondrous power of 
German Music, the road itself could no longer stay in doubt, 
though only for the tread of genius. Upon the Bayreuth hill 
now stands its goal and record. 

* Cf. Hans von Wolzogcn's "Z)iV IdtoHHrung des TJuaiers^'* Leipzig, 1885, 
C F. Leede. 

t A fonn of stage-play, with songs, &c., strewn among the dialogue.^ 
W. A. E. 



6 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

But the journey was long, and, properly to follow it, we 
must turn for awhile to the heart of that German burgher- 
life which in the second half of the eighteenth century begins to 
beat with freer pulse. Kindled by the pioneers of the awaking 
^ German Spirit," there pierces through the mists of apathy a 
light, a warmth, the like whereof had not been felt for five wan 
generations. " In some respect each German is akin to his great 
Masters " : in the attempt, however incomplete, to follow up our 
hero's ancestry, the profound truth of these words of Wagner's 
may be illustrated by the picture of a family in whose own 
evolution the national development is mirrored past mistake. 



I. 

FAMILY HISTORY. 

Exctse-cfficer Gottlob Friedrich Wagner and his forefathers — 
** Urahnherr war der Schbnsten hold.^^ — Leipzig after the Seven- 
Years War. — Friends and descendants of G. F, Wagner. 

Our newfewish fillcw-citiMem may tUc^raie tkermdves 
with Joreign names as startling as delicious; t9e poor old 
btargher and peasant famiUos have to rest content with 
" Smith,'' " Miller,*' «' Weavor,*' ** Waitmright,*' and so 
forth, for all time, 

RlCHA&D WAGNB&. 

On a September day of 1769 a simple wedding was celebrated in 
the little parish-church of Sch6nefeld, near Leipzig. The happy 
bridegroom bore the name of Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, and filled 
the post of Receiver of taxes for the Electoral Excise at Leipzig. 
The blushing bride was Johanna Sophia Eichel, only daughter of 
Gottlob Friedrich Eichel, the master of a charity-school A 
modest event enough, in no way attracting the notice of the 
contemporary world, or even of fellow-townsmen beyond the 
immediate circle of acquaintances. But the blessing of the 
renascent Genius of the German nation was on this union, and 
filled it with import to remotest times. 

The scene of this country wedding, a pleasant spot barely three 
miles distant from the city and a favourite summer resort for the 
inhabitants of Leipzig, was gay with all the bravery of autumn 
tints on field and hedge. Forty-four years later it became dis- 
tinguished in the War of Liberation, a scene of cruel havoc ; just 
about that time was bom our Richard Wagner, a grandson of 
this bridal pair. 

Not till quite recently has any light been thrown on the ancestors 
and previous history of Gottlob Friedrich Wagner. The family 
traditions did not go back beyond the grandfather; Richard 
Wagner's own knowledge here found its limit, and, ever striving 



8 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

toward the future, his genius had far more serious work to do 
than hunting up his personal pedigree. " Forget your ancestors," 
he cried in 1848 to a puffed-up aristocracy, ''and we promise to 
be generous and strike away sill memory of ours. Reflect that, 
else, we too must recollect our forefathers; whose deeds — and 
good deeds too — ^have not been treasured up in household 
archives^ but whose sufferings, thraldoms and oppressions of all 
kinds, are written on the great unerring records of the history 
of the last millennium." So speaks a sterling scion of the German 
Folk, who feels his blood and spirit one with the free Germanic 
hero-dom of old, and needs no other patent of nobility. Yet if 
sturdy manliness makes out the kernel of true heroism, we well 
may look to meet it in the forbears, sprung mostly from the 
peasant class, of these ''ancestorless" German heroes of the 
mind. A heroism made strong by toil and hardship, by work 
and strife; even though that strife at first be nothing beyond 
the struggle to bring the native soil to fruitful bearing, a rooting 
out, .a clearing, ploughing and sowing. When men b^n to 
group themselves into communities, and distinctive names of 
families arise, in the very name of "Wagner" we have a hint 
of the old Aryan, the ur-Germanic occupation of its earliest 
bearer.* And when the hero of the German Reformation, a 
son of miner and peasant folk, claims from the nobles of the 
German nation, the dignitaries of every German dty, the teaching 
of the poor neglected people, the founding of schools and churches 
in town and country, to German men there opens out a new wide 
field for struggle and endeavour. However insignificant its out- 

*See Hans von Wolzogen's Urgermaniscke Spuren : "As the old Aryan 
stock begins its wanderings, and history commences to evolve, men build and 
fit the wt^on^ to carry wife and children, goods and chattels, to a new home 
beyond the ancient confines. The ox-drawn wain is just as characteristic of 
the Aryan, as the tent-bearing camel of the Semite. Like our shepherd's 
cabin, the hut he next erects is but this wandering wagon brought to rest. 
Whithersoever his joumeyings took him firom the East, through Russia up to 
Norway, or downward to the Alps, to this day we find these wagon-huts — set 
high on stones, in lieu of wheels, to ward him from the torrent's rage. Thus 
with the first migration of our race appears the art of the * Wagiur ' (wain- 
wright), as the manly art, beside the womanly domestic art of the ' Weber ' 
(weaver) ; and it is truly touching to see the earliest handicrafts of our fore- 
fathers giving their names to those fomilies whence the Grermanest masters of 
the most German art were later to arise : families of calling, firom out the 
primal fiimily of blood " (Bayreuiher BlaUer^ 1887, pp. 267-68). 



FAMILY HISTORY. 9 

ward aspect, this struggle is a veritable fight with dragons, housed 
in^the caves of ignorance and superstition. The village School- 
master becomes the actual guide and Christian educator of the 
Folk : a notable and typic figure in seventeenth century Germany, 
down to its tiniest hamlet ; for the most part cantor, organist, nay, 
sacristan in one, and withal the friend and counsellor of the whole 
countryside, the link between the populace and culture of his 
times ; nay more, the only prop of " Deutschthum " against the 
overbearing Romanism of courts and high society. 

In this humble educational work the ancestors of Gottlob 
Friedrich Wagner had shared through many generations; from 
father to son and grandson we meet them as simple, pious 
folkschool-teachers in various nooks of Saxony, and mostly, too, 
as organists and cantors of the parish church. From the same 
rank sprang great Sebastian Bach, and never left it till his death. 
'' Behold this master dragging on his half-starved life as ill-paid 
organist and cantor now of this, and now of that Thuringian 
parish — ^puny places scarcely known to us by name," says Richard 
Wagner of him ; yet the influence of men like these upon the 
people's inner life, midst all the nation's outward powerlessness, 
be shews us in an earlier article : — " Go and listen one winter- 
night in that little cabin : there sit a father and his three sons, at 
a smaU round table ; two play the violin, a third the viola, the 
father the 'cello ; what you hear so lovingly played, is a quartet 
composed by that little man who is beating time. He is the 
schoolmaster from the neighbouring hamlet, but the quartet he 
has composed is a lovely work of art and feeling. Again I say, 
go to that spot, and hear that author'^ music played, and you 
will be dissolved to tears ; for it will search your heart, and you 
will know what German Music is, will feel what is the German 
spirit" {F. W. VIL 86-7).* 

Our hero's first discoverable progenitor is Samuel Wagner, 
appointed schoolmaster of Thammenhain near Wurzen in the 
Leipzig circuit, hard by the present Prussian boundary, but then 
in the very heart of Saxony. He was bom in 1643 i but where 
his cradle stood we cannot definitely say, as the whole preceding 
quarter of a century had been occupied by the unrest and havoc 

* For sake of brevity, quotations from Richard Wagnsr^s Prose Works will 
in fnture be indicated in the manner above. — ^W. A. £. 



lO LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

of the Thirty-Years War. Most probably his father, like himself 
was a simple folkschool-teacher; but neither register nor archive 
makes mention of his name or origin. The father's calling seems 
indicated by the scriptural fore-name of the son, which would 
hardly have been chosen by burgher or peasant. It remains a 
special favourite through several generations of the Wagner 
house ; repeatedly we find three Samuels at one time, a father, 
son, and grandson, or uncle and nephew; and if one dies, the 
next-bom is christened after him. 

It is in his twentieth year that we find our Samuel Wagner 
entering on his duties at Thammenhain,* and by his side his 
newly-wedded Barbara. His eldest son is Emanuel Wagner, 
bom in August 1664, sure of the stock whose destinies we are 
about to follow; but the very next son receives the father's 
Christian name, and succeeds to his post of organist and school- 
master when death takes the older Samuel, at sixty-three, after 
more than forty years of tenure. The first-bom, Emanuel, also 
remains faithful to his father's calling. Like him, he early enters 
office at the neighbouring Colmen (Kulm) near Thalwitz, and 
at Kiihren in 1688 he marries Anna Benewitz, aged eighteen 
years, daughter of schoolmaster and tax-gatherer Ernst Benewitz. 
What higher talents he may have possessed, his narrow round of 
life and duties prevents us from discovering. About 1702, 
already blest with a little daughter Anna Dorothea, he removes 
from Colmen to Kiihren, the birthplace of his wife, to fill a 
similarly modest station; at Kiihren a year later, the 14th of 
January 1703, his first male offspring, Samuel Wagner, comes 
into the world. It would-seem that Emanuel was not spared his 
share of trials ; several of his children must have died in infancy ; 
his faithful helpmeet goes before him to the other world in the 
prime of life, dying at the age of eight-and-forty. He lives to see 
his eldest daughter married at Kiihren to a master-tailor, Joh. 
Miiller of Altenbuig, and departs this life in his sixty-second 
year. 

Not long after his father's death we meet with the younger 

* The name *' Thammenhain " has been interpreted as " Damian's grove " ; 
but in the year 12S4 it appears in the form of <' Tannenhain," or •* Fir-grove," 
so that our hero's oldest ancestor presents himself as a genuine Tann-h&iser. 
The parish, still fairly flourishing, lies on the Thorgau road, in a hiUy and 
weU-wooded country-— of pines there is no lack ; to the north-east rises the 
Schildaer Berg, and to the east begins the Sitzeroder Heide. 



FAMILY HISTORY. II 

Sainiiel Wagner at Mi^lenz, two leagues north-east of Wurzen, 
as assistant to the schooknaster of the place, after having given 
proof of his powers by singing in church on St John's day, 1727, 
*' to the satisfaction of the Herr Pastor and assembled congrega- 
tion" — taking us quite into the first act of Die Meistersinger \ 
though the worthy Masters themselves are lacking, the minister 
and congregation play the role of "marker" and prize-adjudgers. 
His deed of appointment, executed by Administrator, Liege-lord 
and Justice, Rudolf von Biinau,* has come down to us in the 
original. In it he is solemnly pledged, as substitute during the 
life of the "emeritus," and principal after the tatter's death, 
"truly and with all diligence to dischai;ge God's service in the 
church with song, with lection, prayer and oi^an-playing ; to 
bring the school-children to a proper fear of God in the orthodox 
religion, and particularly in the Catechismo Lutheri and other 
Christian teachings and virtues; as also, assiduously to instruct 
them in singing, reading, writing and arithmetic; and, should 
plague arise, which God in His mercy forfend, to abide and not 
forsake his post," etc, etc The Emeritus having meanwhile 
been retired on account of age and illness, a second and still 
more elaborate decree, dated the 14th August of the same year, 
confirms Samuel Wagner's definite appointment to the rank of 
Miiglenz Schoolmaster with assurance of a full yearly wage "and 
an other benefits and customary accidencies enjoyed by his 
antecessors." 

Barely half a year later, on the loth of February 1728, he 
brings a wife to his Miiglenz schoolhouse, Anna Sophia the orphan 
daughter of Master Christoph R6ssig, late tenant of the flour-mill 
at Dahlen. His path in life seems to have been comparatively 
free of thorns ; nevertheless he lived to no old age, but died of 
some disorder on the 22nd November 1750, after two-and-twenty 
years of married happiness, leaving his widow with five surviving 
children, among them three daughters : Johanna Sophie, Christine 
£leon0re, and Susanna Caroline. Of these children the fourth 
in seniority is our Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, bom at Miiglenz on 
February 18, 1736. His younger brother, Samuel August, was 

* See/Vw« Works IV. 126 : << It was a Saxon Count Bttnau under whose 
protection our great Winckelmann enjoyed his earliest freedom from the 
commoD cares of life, and leisure to push his free researches in the region of 
artistic learning." 



12 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

hardly five years old at the time of their father's death ; two other 
children had died in earliest in£uicy. 

Gottlob Friedrich was now just fourteen years of age ; his child- 
hood had been passed in the open scenery round Miiglenz, with 
many a ramble along the banks of the Losse or among the foot- 
hills of the Hohberger Gebiige. A good share of his education 
he owed to his father himself, and then apparently — perhaps 
even in his father's lifetime — to some higher school in Leipzig. 
At sudi a school, at any rate, probably the Thomana, founded in 
1728, he must have ended his period of secondary education. 
Whether of his own inclination, or at his parents' wish, he was to 
proceed to holy orders, and on March 16, 1759 (the year of the 
battle of Kunersdorf, of Schiller's birth and the death of Ewald 
von Kleist) we find him inscribed on the books of the Leipzig 
University as " Student of Theology " ; but we meet him ten years 
later as excise-ofiicer, and our happy bridegroom of Sch6nefeld. 

What may have happened to the student of theology in the 
interval, to make him abandon a career to which he had devoted 
several years of study — ^whether some inner doubt or conscientious 
scruple^ such as frequently crops up at the last moment, a de- 
ficiency of worldly means, or what not — we have no reliable 
grounds for judging. The data about his life are scanty, present- 
ing us with merely a vista here and there, omitting whole stretches 
of his histoiy, and leaving gaps which it is no easy matter to fill 
with any certainty. In the year 1765, about the time when 
Goethe, just sixteen years of age, was removing from Frankfort to 
Leipzig, the ^'town of fashion" on the Pleisse, and taking up his 
abode in the '' Feuerkugel " on the Neumarkt, we find Gottlob 
Friedrich once more expressly mentioned as student of theology. 
Certainly the means with which he was furnished for the battle of 
life were none too ample, consisting rather in real estate of head 
and heart than in personal property. Perhaps, therefore, we may 
assume that, to find the wherewithal for the completion of his 
studies, he followed for awhile the traditional calling of hb 
ancestors, the example of so many an impecunious Theologian, 
and temporarily filled the post of teacher; helping, let us say, 
his future father-in-law, Schoolmaster Eichel, in his functions at 
one of the Leipzig schools ? We find him while still a student in 
close relation with Eichel, more especially with his fair daughter 
Sophie, and whereas we are vouchsafed no other clue to his 



FAMILY HISTORY. 1 5 

quitting Theology for a practical civic career, one notable and 
perhaps determinant fact is yet on record. In the grandsire of 
OUT master, for all the narrowness of burgher life, it betrays an 
ardent temperament — <^Urahnherr war der Schdnsten hold"' 
("Forefetther won the ladies' hearts"— Goethe). Alike the 
charms of the schoolmaster's nineteen-year-old daughter, and her 
inclination to the hot-blooded young student, must have been 
potent enough; for even before the £ichelin had become a 
Wagnerin in the eyes of the world, Johanna Sophia presented the 
elect of her heart with a love-pledge. On March 23, 1765, the 
child was baptised in the church of St Thomas with the names of 
its &ther and maternal grandfather ; * but, no further notice of it 
having come to us, we must assume that it was never granted to 
repay its mother's shame and suffering by the joy of seeing it 
grow up to strength and manhood. 

Whether it be that even in the sparldsh Leipzig of last century,. 
with its notoriously free manners and lenience toward the 
gallant vices of polite society, such an irregularity was rigorously 
visited on the head of a young plebeian aspiring to serve the 
Church or School ; or whether our Gottlob Friedrich had inner 
reasons for bidding farewell to Theology, — it is about this time 
that he must have taken the decisive step, and chosen a career 
that offered speedier prospects of the material independence 
needfiil for riveting in permanence the bond ah:eady knit by love* 

Such are the only antecedents, known as yet, of the wedding- 
feast at pleasant little Schdnefeld in 1769. 

Gottlob Friedrich Wagner had found the desired means of 
sustenance for himself and his in the administrative department 
of the Electoral Saxon General £xcise. As early as the 1 6th 
centuiy a system of territorial taxes had been adopted in Saxony 
and other German countries, together and almost simultaneously 
with imposts upon the consumer ; but at the beginning of the 
1 8th a total change was introduced by the establishment of a 
so-called ''General-Konsumtions-Accise." The incidence of taxes 
was more evenly distributed, and a far larger body of consumers 
laid under contribution. At the entrance to every town a duty 

* The godparents are recorded as: Maria Christina Lutz, daughter of 
jonmeyioan- mason Johann Georg Lutz; Johann Reisser, market-help ^. 
Johann Friedrich Tdcher, silk-worker ; all of this place. 



14 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

was levied on all raw materials, manufactured goods, and food- 
stuffs ; at Leipzig, where the matter was in the hands of the town 
authorities, there were at that time four such entrances, the 
Rannstadt, the Halle, the Grimma and the Peter Gates. Gottlob 
Friedrich Wagner was stationed at the first-named, the Rann- 
stadter Thor, leading to the Briihl with its eventual birthplace of 
Richard Wagner, the house of the *' white and red lion/' To 
every incomer on foot or wheels, along the paved Rannstadter 
highway from the old '' Water-gate " outside, he had to address 
the regulation "Quis? Quid? Unde? Cur?"; he inspected 
travellers' passports, and levied the gate-dues — ^not wholly 
abolished until 1824. That he had an '^ education far beyond 
the level of a civil-servant of those days," is attested by a note 
in the Litterarischer Zodiakus und Kanversatianslexikon der 
neuesten Zeit und Litteratur of September 1835, in course of an 
article on Adolf Wagner ; and so diligent and faithful was he in 
the discharge of his official duties, that we find the Assistant- 
exciseman of 1769 made five years later a Superintendent (Ober- 
Einnehmer), a position not merely lucrative, but also of some 
civic dignity, for in smaller Saxon towns we often meet it in 
combination with that of the presiding Bui^omaster.* 

The establishment of G. F. Wagner's household took place at 
a time when the blessings of peace were doubly welcome. Six 
years had passed since the signing of the Peace of Hubertsburg, 
and the town of Leipzig was just beginning to recover from the 
devastations of war, the forced contributions levied by Frederick 
the Great, the shameful coinage operations of Ephraim Itzig & 
Co. at Castle Pleissenburg.f "Von aussen gut, von innen 

* On Feb. 2, 1702, at Pirna there died the Electoral Excise-receiver and 
mling Burgomaster, Johann Gottlieb Wagner, bom in 1654, a son of the 
Pima Town-councillor and merchant, Johann Wagner. This flEiinily, how- 
ever, does not appear to have been connected with the line of Emanuel 
Wagner; its origin was in Bohemia, where Johann Gottlieb's grandparents 
on both sides *Meft their fair property of real estate and chattels, through the 
troubles of the anti-reformation, to turn their exiled steps toward Pima." 
Thus an old obituary notice of this Pima Excise-receiver and Burgomaster, 
which doses with an oration for the soul of " Wagner passing from us on the 
soft and blessed wain of death": "his death -wain," so rans the old printed 
document, '* was a veritable car of triumph ; but godless men and unbelievers 
shaH have (mj other wagons, to roll them into Hell." 

t Frederick the Great had farmed alike the Berlin mint and that of Saxony 
to Court-jeweller Ephraim Itdg, and grain by grain this man so lowered the 



FAMILY HISTORY. 15 

schlimm; von aussen Friedrich, von innen Ephraim," this folk- 
rhyme (quoted at WahnMed in the master's last years of life) 
long preserved the memory of those Prussian ducats, even after 
Friedrich August the Just had sought with some success to 
mitigate the effect of all these ills. Now a time of peaceful 
expansion and adornment was commencing for the Linden-city,* 
which impressed young Goethe — ^in comparison with his native 
town — by its lack of ancient monuments^ but wealth of tokens of 
material prosperity and social animation. The founding of many 
an art-institute^ the housing of rare collections, the installation 
of new buildings and gardens, contributed no little to confer on 
Leipzig its sobriquet of *' Paris minor." The Frankfort student 
was struck above all by 'Hhose gigantic buildings with facades 
on either side, enclosing in their heaven-scaling courts a world of 
citizens, more like huge castles, nay, in themselves half-cities." 
Thus on the Rathhaus Place stood the palatial Hohenthal and 
Apel houses, with the Auerbachischer Hof, celebrated not more 
for its "cellar" than for the abundance of all conceivable wares 
for dress and personal adornment in its countless stores and 
shopfronts, of which latter alone it contained six-and-forty down 
to the year 1799: a favourite rendezvous for the fashionable 
world, particularly at fair-time, and sung by many a poet 

Among the recent embellishments of the town not the least 
noteworthy was the new Playhouse, built close beside our Gottlob 
Friedrich's dwelling, on the site of the former bastion of the 
Elector Moritz, and founded by the liberality of a wealthy 
merchant The actor's art usurped the habitat of war, a pledge 
and token of reviving ease. The house had been open^ with 
Schl^el's patriotic "Hermann" and no small ceremony on the 
6th of October 1766, and within its roomy walls the skilful hand 
of Oeser had painted the new drop-curtain while the Frankfort 
student read aloud to him the proof-sheets of Wieland's 
" Musarion." 

In the absence of definite evidence, we may assume that the 
receiver-of-customs took pleasure in the art which won such lively 
interest from his fellow-townsmen ; we have no hint, however, of 

monetary standard that at last the "mark fine," worth 14 thalers, had come 
to be the equivalent of 45. Of these " Ephraim ites " seren-million thalers- 
worth were sent into the world. 
* The name of Leipzig is derived from the Slavonian ** /f>i^lime-tree." 



1 6 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

any personal leaning or relation toward the drama. In his house- 
hold intercourse, so far as ascertainable^ we are not taken beyond 
the strictly burgher circle of comrades of like standing with 
himself. We meet no Leipzig Garrick or Roscius there, but the 
worthy supervisors of the Land-Acdse^ Heinrich Baudius and 
Johann Georg Reinicke with wife ; the gate-clerk, Karl Gottfried 
Kdmer; shopkeepers Adam Horn and Joh. Gottfried Sintenis, 
with their ladies; Despatcher of the Electoral imposts, Kail 
Friedrich Ferber, et al. A well-to-do "burgher and vintner" 
Adolf V6lbling is found among them; he stood god&ther to the 
second son bom to G. F. Wagner in wedlock, Gottlob Heinrich 
Adolf, commonly known by Che last of these three names. Before 
Adolf, his elder brother Friedrich had been bom in 1770, the 
year of Beethoven's birth; after him, Frau Johanna Sophia 
presented her husband with yet a daughter, Johanna Christiana 
Friederike, bom 1778, whose memory Richard Wagner cherished 
to his dying day as his maiden " Aunt Friederike/' 

Beyond the testimony of that notice above-quoted, Gottlob 
Friedrich's bent toward higher culture is proved by the careful 
education he gave to his two sons, Friedrich and Adolf Wagner, 
in whom it is still more plainly manifested. That bursting away 
from the stifling materialism of our modem culture into the open air 
of art-creation, which we find so amazingly illustrated in the pre- 
eminently artistic mind of Richard Wagner — Nature seems to 
have already been trying for it in his uncle and his father ; together 
with the most untiring diligence, she planted in the one the 
passion to assimilate the intellectual gains of every age and 
people, in the other that predilection for theatric art which runs 
as a scarlet thread through all his life. We will first direct 
attention to the younger brother, and thereafter pass with the 
older to the earliest impressions brought to bear on Richard 
Wagner. 



II. 
ADOLF WAGNER. 

^ Years of study at Leipzig and Jena. — Friendship with Arnold 
I Kanne and Joh. Falk.—'' Two Epochs of Modem Poetry:' --Per- 
sonal and literary connections : August Apel^ Wendt and Broch- 
haus. — ApeTs *^ Polyidos" — Translations and original poems. 

His name is an hommred one in that group of men of 
mind and character who partly by creative force have 
founded a new epoch in any branch of mental culture^ in 
pari by teal and diligence haive helped to cherish and 
mature the intellectual gains of Germany; in union with 
the best of his age and nation he ever battled valiantly 
against the vulgar^ bad and superficial^ in Life and 
Literature, 

Necrologue on Adolf Wagner.* 

In all that faUs from mortal benches there needs must 
be much dross and shavings. Good, if a silver-gleam 
shews here and there, and the hing of metals has not 
vanished quite away I This, I may hope, I have 
preserved, 

Adolf Wagner. 

This chapter is devoted to the life and mental evolution of one 
who formed a prominent and familiar figure in our hero's earlier 
saironndings, who presents many a feature in common with his 
great nephew, and whose memory was honoured by Richard 
Wagner to his latest days. 

''A mind better adapted for assimilating the most diverse 
fbnns of human knowledge can scarcely ever have been bred, 
yet scarcely ever concentrated on so little use,'' says an old 
writer.! ''He eagerly stretched out his hand to every detail, 

•From an old coUection entitled ** Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen" 
(WeimaT, Voigt), xiii. 649-51. 

t The anonymous author of the Necrologue cited in our motto— perhaps the 
astbete Amadens Wendt himself. 

B '^ 



1 8 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

since all things interested him, and in his mobile brain he had an 
implement for each ; but never did he satisfy himself in his work, 
or do justice to his own original nature in what he wrote." 
Furnished with this many-sidedness, Adolf Wagner came into 
the world on November 15, 1774. From the age of nine he was 
educated at the Leipzig Thomana, where he soon evinced a bent 
toward philologic studies. At eighteen he was entered for the 
Theologic Faculty at the Leipzig University, though from the very 
beginning of his student-days he was more attracted by the lore of 
classical antiquity. In this he was encouraged by the example of 
the most eminent among his theologic teachers, Chr. Daniel Beck, 
one of those astoundingly learned Germans of days gone by, 
who, starting from old Roman Law, had urged through Exegesis 
and the Fathers to the field of Universal History, distinguished 
himself as an expert in historic regions partly opened for the first 
time by himself, and yet whose native soil remained old-classical 
philology. To train young philologians to be teachers in the 
higher schools, was one main object of his energy; thus he wished 
to attach young Adolf Wagner to the university for good. But 
the inner inclination of this gifted pupil met the wish with an 
insuperable obstacle ; his eager thirst for knowledge was coupled 
with a keen desire of independence, for whose sake he preferred 
all kinds of sacrifice to entering an academic life. 

Besides his theological and philologic studies, Adolf was 
powerfully attracted by the revival of German philosophy. In 
this respect, however, he had to depend much more on private 
reading, than on public lectures. He was also drawn toward 
modem languages, particularly the Italian and its literature — ^in 
the event a chief department of his scholarship. 

Having rejected many an inducement to assume a definite 
official standing, the death of his father soon made it a 
necessity for him to put alike his knowledge and his indepen- 
dence to the test It was Jena more than any other places 
that now attracted our young fiiend; Jena at that time the 
home of German letters, where Fichte, Schelling, Steffens, the 
two Schl^els, Gries and Brentano were revolving round *'the 
triad constellation" Goethe, Schiller and Wieland. With a 
friend, and not without adventures, he journeyed thither in 
1798, made the acquaintance of Schiller, and was welcomed 
almost daily to the poet's hospitable house until Schiller himself 



ADOLF WAGNER. 1 9 

removed to Weimar. He also attended the lectures of Fichte, 
who, called to Jena four years earlier, had begun to found 
fais own philosophic system while forming the amorphous minds 
of students. Everybody has heard of Fichte's troubles, due 
to misunderstandings of all kinds^ disunion with his colleagues, 
and lastly to his native headiness and obstinacy ; he was accused 
of atheism, and Adolf had to see his much-prized teacher in- 
dignantly hand in his resignation and find it promptly ratified. 
But here again A. Wagner gave more time to private studies 
and the vitai stimulus of personal intercourse, than to attendance 
at academic lectures. In company he was "an amiable and 
<:harming figure, and tasted the sweets of life in many an 
attractive relation." His modest wants he satisfied by literary 
work, translations firom all manner of languages, contributions 
to critical and other journals, etc., while he bore the pinch of 
outward straits with the calm indifference of a lofty mind. 

One boon-companion and life-long friend secured at Jena was 
Arnold Kanne, the scholarly and ill-starred explorer of Ety- 
mology and Myth. Neither difference of disposition, nor 
Kanne's restless love of roaming, could dissipate this friend- 
ship. In the summer of 1806, when war broke out with 
France, Kanne entered the Prussian service, and was taken 
prisoner by the French after the disaster at Jena. Through 
twenty raw November days he had to march in his light 
uniform, with insufficient food. One night-march through the 
forest near Vach he managed to escape, and found shelter in 
the nearest village upon producing from his breeches-pocket 
two letters that proclaimed him not a soldier, but a literary 
man and author: the one was from Jean Paul, the other, but 
a few months old, from Adolf Wagner. Thus he arrived at 
last at Meiningen, a beggar where a few years previously he 
had been driving with its Duke; but since he was barred by 
French and German troops firom access to the town, he entered 
military service again, and this time with the Austrians. How 
he quitted it, he tells us in his autobiography. He was down 
with fever in the lazaretto at Linz, despairing of life and fate : 
"Suddenly," so he relates, ''there came an unawaited aid. I 
had written to my friend Adolf Wagner in Leipzig, the only 
one with whom I kept up correspondence^ whatever my lot, 
and who loved me as faithfully as I loved him. Scarcely four- 



20 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

teen days had I left the hospital, when — as if dropped from the 
skies — a man arrived as envoy from bookseller Hasdinger of 
Linz, and bade me to the latter's house. It was a matter of 
buying me out, and in effect I became a free man for z6o 
guldens. For long I believed that Hasslinger himself had 
done it, upon hearing that I was author of the just-published 
Erste Urkunde der Geschichie. It seemed all the more probable* 
as Hasslinger had neither wife nor child, and said nothing to 
undeceive me. But from recent information I now am certain 
that President Jakobi of Munich was my liberator, and Jean 
Paul, to whom Adolf Wagner had written, must have supplied 
the first incentive. My friend had moved every stone, and 
even petitioned the Austrian Minister of War, von Dohm, to 
save me from my awkward plight" In other pages of his 
memoirs, too, Kanne speaks with the deepest gratitude of his 
''dear firiend Adolf Wagner, who was much too good for me, 
and took no stock of my great Mings." The appendix to a 
Mythological Survey in Kanne's "Chronos" describes their 
mutual relations and development in common. A "Pangloss'' 
shewing the unity of Religion and Speech was to have been 
published, Kanne collecting the material to be worked up by 
Wagner, who had already begun a philosophic introduction in 
Latin for sake of wider circulation ; but the work was abandoned, 
as ELanne took a turn toward mysticism at Erlangen, and fanati- 
cally committed the manuscript to the flames. Notwithstanding 
Wagner's difference of opinion on this point, and the many 
arguments to which it led, the good-feeling of the two friends 
remained the same ; merely their epistolary correspondence 
grew scantier as the years rolled on. 

Adolf Wagner experienced a similar inner change on the part 
of another Jena friend, Johannes Falk, whose first satiric poems, 
published in the Deutscher Mercur under the auspices of Wieland, 
had enjoyed the wdlnigh enthusiastic praise of the aged poet : 
"the spirit of Juvenal seems to have been so abundantly poured 
into him, that not even the fate of the Roman poet could avail to 
scare him from his course." * This young satirist's revolt against 



* Falk had given proof of his fearlessness at Halle, in a satirical puppet-play 
whose dramatis personse took the form of horn-owls, screech-owls, night-owls 
and ravens ; the performance was witnessed by a crowd of professors and 
representatives of every class, and set the whole city by the ears owing to its 



ADOLF WAGNER. 21 

the spirit of his times is expressed in his poems " Die Helden " 
and "IMe Graber zu Kon," but in later life his mind was tuned 
to kindlier feelings toward mankind at large; having lost his own 
children, he founded an institute at Weimar for technical civil 
education of orphans of the slain in war — the horrors whereof he 
himself had often witnessed in the years 1806 and 1813. It was 
for the benefit of this institute that Adolf Wagner edited m 18 19 
a three-volume selection from the best works of one whose temper, 
honesty and sacrifice, had won his high esteem. 

Schiller having left for Weimar, Fichte having resigned his post, 
and Adolf's room-chum having gone to Vienna in pursuit of other 
studies, after a year of residence in Jena young Wagner returned 
to his native city, which he now made his permanent abode, though 
the neirt few years were marked by trips to various other cities, 
in particular to Dresden, Berlin and Breslau. Of the splendid 
buildings of the place last-named, its ancient churches, beautiful 
gardens such as the Ziegelbastei, and surrounding scenery, the 
Moigenau and blue chain of the Riesengebirge, he speaks with 
affection in later years. In Dresden, to which his visits were 
more frequent, he became a close friend of Ludwig Tieck, whose 
acquaintance he had already made towards the end of his Jena 
period, and for whom he cherished a vast respect throughout his 
life. 

Among the philologic works that arose under the influence of 
Beck belongs his earliest essay, De Akestide Euripidea (Leipzig 
1797), which he followed up with a complete edition of the 
Alcestis after his return from Jena. Twenty years later he 
returned to this subject, with his revision of Seybold's translation. 
A translation of '' Caesar's Annals " may be mentioned on account 
of its having appeared at Bayreuth in 1808 ; more important is 
his German version of Sophocles' CEdipus Tyrannus, with a 
lengthy introduction of his own. In the first years of his return 
to Leipzig we also have a German rendering of the " Discourses 
of Ulrich von Hutten," followed by a whole series of popular 
histories of the Reformers (Zwingli, Leipzig, 1800; Wydiffe, 



open allanons to personages of the day, prot%^ of the all-powerful WoUner. 
An anonymoas letter from Berlin advised immediate flight, as it needed but an 
order of the Cabinet to clap him into prison. Falk remained, and — the 
Cabinet-order stayed away. 



22 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

i8oi ; Erasmus, 1802 ; Hutten, 1803 ; Jerome of Prague, 1803 f 
CEcolampadius, 1804). At like time he busied himself continually 
with Italian literature, and became such a master of the language 
that he was equally expert in translating into, as from it.* Thus 
it was a special joy to him, to have been the first to render the 
euphony of Fouqui's charming "Undine" into the melting 
accents of the South. When Weigl's opera Die Schwdzeffamxlie 
was to be made presentable at the Dresden Court by turning it 
into Italian, there was nothing for it but to apply to Adolf 
Wagner, who thus became entrusted with the task of Italianising 
a German work for a German Residenz-theater, — "da rappre- 
sentarsi nel teatro reale di Sassonia,'' as it runs on the tide-page- 
The first performance of this harmless sentimental work in die 
German language did not take place at Dresden until long there- 
after, under K. M. von Weber and on Richard Wagner's fifdi 
birthday. May 22, 1818. Just as gradual was the passage of 
Mozart's works into the domain of German Opera (founded by 
Weber), after having been confined for long to Italian singers 
and the Italian tongue, t 

One fruit of Adolf Wagner's saturation with the spirit of Italian 
poetry was his larger treatise styled "Zw« Epochen der mademen 
Poesie^ dargestellt in Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Goethe, Schiller 
und Wieland " (Leipzig, Breitkopf und Hartel, 1806). The avowed 
object of this work was " to select two principal groups from the 

* His admirable translation of Gozzi's dramatic fairy-tale " The Rayen " 
(Leipzig 1804) was the first to aim at an exact reproduction, and not a free 
adaptation, giving iambics where the original has iambics, prose where it has 
prose ; previously there had been none but Werthes' rendering of Gozzi's pieces 
— a rendering employed as basis of Schiller's *' Princess Turandot." Mention 
may also be made of his collection of tales called " Scherz und Liede, in 
italienischen Novellen." 

tin her Souvenirs ''Daniel Stem" (the Comtesse d'Agoult, mother of 
Frau Cosima Wagner) recalls the time of Charles X. , when the families of the 
Faubourg St Germain would not allow their daughters to go to the Play, but took 
them to the Italian Opera, for two sufficient reasons : " les chanteurs italiens 
n'^taient point excommuni^s, et Ton ne comprenait pas les paroles." The 
case was still worse in the capital on the Elbe, for not only the " daughters/^ 
but the whole population until the time of Weber were restricted to Italian 
Opera, and took the unintelligibleness of the words as a main essentiaL 
Three quarters of a century later Richard Wagner declares that, apart from 
the very nature of the current German translations of Mozart's operas, other 
means had been adopted to make the text quite unintelligible, and consequently 
harmless to ** unccrrupted youthful hearers of the fenude sex " {P* W. VI. 151). 



ADOLF WAGNER, 23 

picture of the modem world, and see if they would not shew the 
inner harmony of the whole great canvas." What strikes one 
most in this "Two Epochs" is the penetration with which its 
author contravenes the insane attempt to stamp the work of 
Goethe and Schiller as an epoch rounded in itself, a kind of 
"golden age" like the stkle ePar of the French, instead of seeing 
therein " the nucleus of a new world of concentration of forces 
hitherto dispersed." For we now know what that " new world " 
needed for its fuU development, the new inspiring might of 
Music — 

Let us turn for awhile to the surroundings that influenced the 
inner and outer life of the young scholar in his native city. As 
he himself has said, "our surroundings lend us colour, though 
their harmonising is a matter of our freedom," and certainly his 
L.eipzig milieu embraced the ablest talents of his day. In the 
£ront rank we have the noted Councillor August Apel, a man of 
many gifts, bom of a patrician family, living in affluence, staunch 
and tme in word and deed. Of him Adolf Wagner sa)rs : " He 
was a man of open mind. Delighting in nothing but what sprang 
from one's own efforts, he looked askance at the mere gifts of 
Fortime, and thus seemed cold and distant to the superficial 
observer. But see him on his own estate, where he passed the 
summer months in the society of his friends and the poets of past 
or present ages; then you find in him a noble, generous, high- 
minded man, nay, rather a playful child, who loves to hide his 
seriousness behind a sportive mask.'' In times of war he rendered 
many a service to his native city through his keen forethought, 
cool judgment and swiftness of resource; yet, just as in his 
poems (notably the "Freischiitz" and "Das stille Kind") there 
is evinced a trend towards the weird and spectral, so in his 
private life we find a certain tinge of superstition. The following 
story is told of him by Adolf Wagner : when standing godfather 
to the infant daughter of a friend, he made the child a present of 
a cask of wine, to be kept for her wedding-day, but with the 
stipulation that it must then be drained, or his ghost would 
appear as a guest at the wedding. 

Another friend was Amadeus Wendt, who had taken up his 
residence in Leipzig since 1808, thereafter to be summoned to 
Gdttingen; Adolf Wagner exerted a decisive influence on his 
career, for it was he who directed his thoughts to philosophy and 



24 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

aesthetics, and thus laid the foundation of his future fame. Yet 
another was the " Hofrathin " Minna Spazier, who had settled in 
Leipzig since the death of her husband (the founder of the much- 
read Zettung fur die elegante Welt) ; her beauty and amiability 
made her a great favourite in rather exclusive circles, where she 
often met both Apel and A. Wagner. She was on the best of 
terms with her two brothers-in-law, Jean Paul and Mahlmann, 
who assisted her from time to time in her editorial labours ; A. 
Wagner also contributed many an article to her Taschenbuch fur 
Liebe und Freundschaft^ and it was through Minna Spazier that he 
made the acquaintance of the rising young publisher Friedrich 
Brockhaus, who mentions both Wagner and Wendt in a letter as 
among his ''dearest acquaintances." Once, when offering a hand- 
some prize for a long epic poem for his journal the Urania^ he 
named Apel, Wendt and Adolf Wagner as the judges ; before its 
publication, however, they insisted on submitting their verdict to 
Goethe (the prize falling to Ernst Schulze's "Bezauberte Rose"). 
Brockhaus also secured A. Wagner as one of the first contributors 
to his Konversationslexikony commenced in 1812. 

His popularity, and the esteem in which he was held in so 
many circles, are sufficiently explained by the high qualities of 
his mind and character and his eminently social gifts. A con- 
temporary sets his personal and literary traits in somewhat crjring 
contrast, sa)dng that in all that he wrote he merely brought forth 
chips and splinters of the rich mine of thought within him ; that 
by wishing to give out too much he often gave too litde, and 
constructed for himself a German style whose curiously suggestive 
hieroglyphs too frequently involved one in a battle for life or 
death : " but when he spoke^ he altogether cast away this inter- 
woven stiffness, and never have I heard a German who expressed 
himself with a nobler flow of melody in thought and language ; 
added to which, though fond of leading the conversation, he 
always preserved the greatest unassumingness of manner." More- 
over he possessed a rich and sonorous voice, which made him 
rank beside his famous friend Tieck as a favourite reciter. 

One day at ApePs country-seat A. Wagner was reading to an 
intimate audience the former's just-completed iEschyleian poem, 
the " Polyidos." The poet was surprised to find his friend stop 
short from time to time without adducing any other reason than 
a certain idiosyncrasy of rhythm ; which gave the first impetus to 



ADOLF WAGNER. 25 

Apd's well-known theory of " Metrics." A private performance 
of this tragedy in the year 1806, conducted by Adolf Wagner 
after the manner of the ancients, confirmed his first impression : 
Apel found that the rhythm of the verses, constructed on the 
customary rules of metre, underwent all sorts of changes as it 
passed firom mouth to mouth ; the be(it was found to be the only 
possible, but indispensable bond of union. The poet's thorough 
knowledge of music had made him partly guess at this before ; 
so now, at Wagner's instigation, he devoted nearly ten years of 
unwearied research to perfecting a system of metrics that was 
already complete in all essentials when death removed its author. 
Prejudice, ignorance of music, and professional spite, made the 
new theory distasteful to the guild of philologians, at whose head 
stood Gottfried Hermann j but even during Apel's lifetime some 
of his discoveries were smuggled into the second edition of his 
chief opponent's " Doctrina Metrica." 

It was this private performance of Apel's ''Polyidos" that 
prompted Adolf Wagner's own German rendering of Sophocles' 
'*(£dipus Tyrannus." The translation cannot be said to rank 
very high among its author's many kindred works, and it has 
been severely dealt with by his adversaries. In its preface, 
however, while the author protests against the "Hellenising 
spirit" of his times, he gives us the guiding principle of his 
literary career: namely, that "Art is a world-growth whose 
component parts are formed of various peoples; beneath the 
influence of light it springs from earth, it blossoms, bears its 
firuit, and fades; and thus it has its history like every other 
mortal thing, or rather every fallen thing divine." Against the 
pseudo-Hellenism of Schlegel's " Ion," as compared with Goethe's 
** Iphigenia " and Schiller's " Bride of Messina," Adolf Wagner 
had ahready taken the field with a satirical burlesque "Der 
Biihnenschwarm, oder das Spiel der Schauspider" (1804), in 
which he contrasted the " new Italian Graecomania " with the older 
*' naturalism" of Iffland's moving pictures firom domestic life. 
But to that "world-tree" and the changeful story of its many 
branches he was never tired of returning fi'om his diligent 
researches in so many realms of knowledge. To this we owe his 
translation of Gozzi's "Raven" already-mentioned, as also the 
much later one of Byron's " Manfred." Thus, too, in an essay 
called " Theater und Publikum : eine Didaskalie von A Wagner" 



26 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

(Leipzig, Weygand, 1826) he gives us a review of the Drama's 
evolution among the various European peoples, with the expressed 
desire " to free the German Theatre from its present subservience 
to mere luxury and ennui, and point it to a mission worthy of 
the stage, the audience, and good taste." Here, with thorough 
German universalism, he recommends a systematic presentation 
of the dramatic works of every age and people, insisting for 
instance, quite in the manner of his friend Tieck, on a literally 
unaltered reproduction of Shakespeare. As might have been 
expected, this rather pedantic than practical conception of the 
Theatre was met by volleys of abuse. 

Finally we have to record a collection of dramatic efforts 
under the title " Theater," consisting of four original comedies : 
" Umwege " (in five acts), " Liebesnetze, " " Ein Augenblick " and 
" Hinterlist" (one act each). The well-known authority H. Kurz 
considers that in the " Umwege," a dramatisation of an Italian 
novel of Bandello's, A. Wagner was shipwrecked by the in- 
approfmateness of the subject-matter, whereas the " Augenblick " 
and '* Liebesnetze" are far more successfully handled, and written 
in a clearer, tenderer vein.* In spite of the tardy appearance of 
this collection (18 16), we believe that its constituents all date 
from A. Wagner's first period, perhaps a little later than his 
'' Biibnenschwarm." In this connection we may also note a 
novel entitled "Liebestand und Liebesemst" (Jena, 18 18); a 
book, however, which no efforts have enabled us to get sight of. 

The above review of Adolf Wagner's literary doings, in the way 
of both erudition and belles lettres, may serve as indication of 
his constant labour to assimilate the remotest products of the 
human world, alike in the domain of History as in that of 
Thought This strong-marked bent to universality gives us a 
lively foretaste of the spirit of his own great nephew ; yet the 
outward compass of his field of vision, and the mass of objects it 
embraced, had to be allied with an incomparably greater power 
of intentness, to lead that nephew to triumphant revelation of the 
German Spirit's universal scope. 

* H. Kurz, Geschichte der deutschen LUteratUTy voL iii., p. 395. 



III. 
FRIEDRICH WAGNER. 

Birth and childhood. — Impressions derived from Schiller^s works. 
— Legiil studies and general culture. — " Gerichtsaktuarius^* Wagner 
in Leipzig amateur theatricals. — Marriage with Johanna Bertz. — 
Friends of the house. — A quiverful. — The ^^Maid of Orleans^' and 
'' Bride of Messina:' 

It was a time of noble promise when the classic spirit of 
antiquity rewoke in the poetic warmth of our great masters^ 
and from the stage the ** Bride of Messina'^ re-aroused 
both young and old to study of the mighty Greeks. 

Richard Wagnbr. 

As we are unable to commence this chapter with a picture of 
domestic life in the Excise-officer's lodge by the Rannstadt Gate, 
we will rescue a couple of sober dates from the dust of parish- 
registers. Accordbg to these, our hero's father was bom on June 
the 1 8th, 1770, the year of Ludwig Beethoven; the first-fruit of 
the marriage of his parents, concluded in the previous year, he 
was baptised two days afterwards with the names Karl Friedrich 
Wilhelm. Besides his maternal grandfather, schoolmaster Eichel, 
the godparents were gate-clerk Karl Gottfried Kdmer and Christina 
Elisabeth Wahl, wife of Job. Friedrich Wahl, inspector of the 
Barenburg mill 

We know very little for certain about his youth« However, his 
first twenty years of life coincided with many an event in the 
Leipzig chronicles of art and culture that cannot have remained 
without influence upon the growing lad. A ^ privileged " theatre 
had recently been established, where D6bbelin's troupe gave per- 
formances of German plays and singspiels, to the public's great 
delight; as already stated, it stood quite close to his father's 
house, and needs must have entered largely into the impressions 
of his earliest childhood. Although the Court's original intention 

■7 



28 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

to found a German Theatre at Dresden and Leipzig had been 
abandoned owing to its contract with the Itdian Pasquale 
Bondini, who scarcely knew three words of German, yet under 
Bondini's own management the taste for German Burgher-drama 
began to make headway through the production of Lessing's 
pieces and the early works of Schiller \ * and it is significant that 
most of Schiller's works came to an earlier hearing at Leipzig 
than at Dresden, since one had to reckon with the wishes of the 
Public here, but there with those of the Court. Bondini was 
succeeded by his former secretary, Franz Seconda, whose brother 
Joseph was manager of the Italian Opera at Dresden ; and for 
some time the two Secondas took turn about with one another, 
the Opera coming to Leipzig, the Play going to Dresden, and 
vice versl At this epoch (1781) occurs the removal of the 
so-called "Grand Concerts," Leipzig's most important musical 
institution, from the quondam "ApePs house" to the old 
" Gewandhaus," whose large hall had been refitted for the purpose, 
and its ceiling embellished with allegoric paintings. Within 
these walls young Richard Wagner was one-day to drink his first 
draught of Beethoven's Symphonies (not a note of which had 
been written as yet) ; here too, soon after, he was to make his first 
bow to the public of his native town, and next — owing to a sudden 
turn in the tide of musical taste — to find those Concerts shut 
against him for the remainder of his life. 

In what degree the institution last-named may have affected 
Friedrich Wagner we have no direct evidence, though his younger 
brother Adolf displays a taste for music at every period. Certain 
it is, that dramatic art roused Friedrich's enthusiasm at an early 
age. Step by step was he a witness of the great advance of 
German poetry firom the "Messias" to "G6tz," from the 
" Robbers " to " Wallenstein." We may imagine the twelve-year- 
old Thomanian attending the first Leipzig performances of the 
" Robbers," and thence deriving the incentive to his later passion 
for the theatre and personal veneration of the poet Not long 

* It was the same in other places: for instance Prague, whose Gernuui 
theatre was first brought to a degree of brilliance by the Italian Domenioo 
Guardasoni through the engagement of firstrate talents such as EssUir. 
Nothing, in fact, could be done without Italians, particularly where German 
Courts were concerned. " At these Courts, whenever Art and Music formed 
the topic, the first thought flew to foreigners, black-bearded for choice'* 
(i'.^. VL8). 



FRIEDRICH WAGNER. 29 

thereafter followed " Kabale und Liebe," which Richard Wagner 
characterises as that work of Schiller's which supplies " perhaps 
the strongest proof, as yet, of what could be done in Germany by 
a full accord between Theatre and Poet" (P. IV. IV. 88). At 
Leipzig the piece had the same immense success as everjrwhere 
dse^ — Friedrich Wagner was just fifteen years of age. Then the 
young poet came himself, in answer to an invitation from 
Kdmer's enthusiastic band of friends, and stayed for some months 
in the town on the Pleisse. During his stay the *' Fiesco " attained 
its first Leipzig performance ; the effect was weaker than that of 
" Kabale und Liebe," and naturally, for Schiller tells us that seven 
of his scenes had been expunged, the denouement altered, and 
several of the actors utterly ruined their parts. Finally — " Don 
Carlos "; but again under great disadvantages, for, in addition to 
the impertinences already practised on " Fiesco," the actors posi- 
tively refused to declaim in verse : a curious result of that natu- 
ralistic tendence of the Burgher-drama from which so much good 
had sprung. Schiller himself had to consent to turn his work 
into prose for Leipzig, at the remuneration of sixty thalers ; had 
he declined, it would simply have been put in the hands of some 
literary had:. In effect, Goethe's " Mitschuldige " had fir^t been 
given in a prose rendering by Dr Albrecht; a fate which 
''Clavigo" and the *' Geschwister " fortunately escaped by 
anticipati<m.* 

In his twentieth year Friedrich Wagner appears to have attended 
the University of his birthplace as a student of Law, — brother 
Adolf had not yet left the Thomas-school. In the event he 
became a sound and practical official in power of his manly, 
energetic nature : how far he may have distinguished himself in 
his student years by a knowledge of legal theory, beyond the 
requirements of his future calling, we do not know ; but we can 
assume no particular liking for the dry bones of professional study 
in one so keenly alive to art and literature. As to his early^ 

* Rightly to judge of this, we must take into consideration the state of the 
Gennan theatre at that time. "Brought up in the school of so-caUed 
Naturalism, the actors believed it impossible to master these rhythmic verses 
save by reducing them to prose," says Richard Wagner (F, fV. IV. 203) ; and 
Genast, an ear- witness, tells us that in the opposite event the accented syllables 
were so intolerably drawled that you might fancy yourself listening to a saw- 
mill As a consequence, it was with ever greater reluctance that Schiller 
consented to make over his works to the theatre. 



30 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

devotion to general culture, on the other hand, we have among 
other things the evidence of a well-stocked library of classical and 
contemporaiy authors, collected in the course of many years ; a 
library which after his death becomes the object of epistolary 
negotiations between the eldest son Albert and his uncle Adolf. 
That the warm-hearted young man found many comrades among 
his fellow-students, will be easily understood, and we may probably 
date from this period several of those lasting friendships which 
we meet in later years, such as that with his official colleague 
Gottfried Karl BartheL 

In September 1794, father Gottlob Friedrich Wagner cele- 
brated his silver wedding in the bosom of his family ; six months 
later (March 21, 1795) he died in the prime of life. The bereave- 
ment fell too late to exercise any decisive influence on Friedrich's 
outward circumstances : whilst the grown-up sister remained with 
the mother, who survived her husband by fully nineteen years, 
and Adolf was still at his philologic studies under Beck in the 
Leipzig University, young Friedrich was ah-eady on his own feet, 
and able to assist in the support of his relatives. He had lately 
entered the service of the State, as deputy - registrar {Vice- 
Aktuarius) at the Leipzig Town-court, and his clear intelligence, 
unselfishness and candour soon won him the respect alike of his 
superiors and fellow-townsmen. Yet he still maintained a lively 
interest in the mental activity of his age and surroundings, and 
refused to let his official duties numb his taste for poetry and 
dramatic art Thus he took part in private theatricals on an 
amateur stage from time to time, playing, among others, in a 
performance of Goethe's " Mitschtddige." 

As there was no standing company at Leipzig then, but 
Seconda's people left for Dresden every winter, not to return 
before Easter, the theatre-lovers of the former city had frequent 
recourse to this form of entertainment Its chief locality was 
that mansion on the Rathhaus Place to which Goethe still refers 
in his Leipzig reminiscences as " Apel's Haus," but which had 
subsequently passed into the possession of Electoral Commissary- 
of-the-Exchequer Andreas Friedrich Thoma, and at this time was 
commonly known as the Thoma'sches Haus, the property of 
Jungfer Jeannette Thoma, unmarried daughter of that wealthy 
merchant, herself a great friend of both the brothers Wagner and 
their sister Friederike. Massively constructed, four storeys high, 



FRIEDRICH WAGNER. 3 1 

with a piazza above the highest, sixteen windows broad, and of 
considerable depth from front to back, it was no unfit palace for 
reception of the Electoral family, who made its state-apartments 
their regular abode whenever they stayed in Leipzig. Among its 
hinder buildings was a roomy hall, widi a ceiling painted by some 
unknown hand to represent Olympus. In earlier times the 
Leipzigers' especial pride, the aforesaid " Grand Concerts," had 
had their home here ; since their migration to the Gewandhaus, 
the hall had still more frequently been used for amateur 
theatricals. Friedrich August himself was partial to this form 
of diversion, as also were Princes Anton and Max, and whenever 
the Elector came to Leipzig there was sure to be an amateur 
performance. On such occasions men like Lembert and Gubitz 
repeatedly appeared as actors; young people who proposed to 
walk the stage, here made their bow ; and here police^actuary 
Wagner gave personal proofs of his ardour for the theatre. 

Three years after his father^s death Friedrich Wagner set up 
house for himself, bringing home from Weissenfels on the Saale 
his bride Johanna Rosina Bertz,* a charming girl of nineteen 
years (June 2, 1798). "From her pleasant birthplace, where the 
echoes of a former Court had long since died away,t she brought 
with her neither a profound nor a many-sided culture ; but she 
owned something better : a kindly gaiety, a swift instinctive grasp 
of the situation, and a practical talent for making the best of 
everything," — it is thus that she lived in her children's recollec- 
tion. Endowed with such gifts, she proved a faithful helpmeet 
to her husband, a loving mother to her numerous progeny. 

To take a glance at Friedrich Wagner's private life, we find 

* The name is also spelt ** Berthis," in which form it appears in the attesta- 
tion of CSdHe's christening. Pronounced "Perthes," in dialect, it is the 
patronymic genitive of the man's name Berth, Brecht, or Precht, which 
means "the shining." 

tThe many-windowed Schloss Neu-Augnstenbuig, standing high above 
Weissenfels, was the Residency of the Dukes of Sachsen- Weissenfels down to 
1746. — ^The characterisation of Johanna Wagner, printed above, is taken from 
the mtroduction to Prof. Gosche's work, Ruhard IVagn^s FratteHgestaUen. 
Her grandson F. Avenarius describes her as "A pretty little woman, with a 
practical eye and keen mother- wit, whose natural gifts made up for any lack 
of thorough culture. The spelling in her letters is often faulty ; not so their 
evidence of knowledge of the world. In everyone of those addressed to her 
we may trace the high respect in which she was held by aU, and not the least 
by her great son, to her dying day " (Augsb, Allg, ZeUung^ 1S83). 



32 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

him surrounded by a numerous circle of friends, for the most 
part from the legal and mercantile sections of Leipzig society, 
but also drawn from the theatre and allied regions. At christen- 
ings and other family-feasts the hospitable house on the Briihl * 
would entertain, besides the already-mentioned Town-clerk Barthel, 
Advocate and Excise-inspector Gottlieb Haase and wife, Con- 
sistorial-advocate Dr Karl Christoph Kind (son of the celebrated 
translator of Plutarch, and elder brother of the future librettist of 
I>er Freischutz\ Advocate Heinrich Karl Ehas Schulze, Soap- 
boiler Joseph Gottfried TQpfer with his wife Maria Regina, Dr 
Friedrich Ernst Gerlach, and many another. In later days they 
are joined by the art-loving tradesman Adolf Trager (an intimate 
of Adolph Wagner's too), Town-Registrar Paid David Pusch, 
and young Advocate Dr Wilhelm Wiesand; whilst a frequent 
« baptismal witness" (1803, 1807 and 1809) was the aforesaid 
Jeannette Thoma. Among the most prominent members of the 
Seconda troupe who were intimate friends of Friedrich's house- 
hold we have the talented Wilhelmine Hartwig, n^ Werthen, a 
native of Leipzig. In 1796, at the age of nineteen, she had 
entered the Seconda company in place of Schiller's friend Sophie 
Albrecht, and particularly charmed the Leipzig public by her 
truth and naturalness of expression and gesture as Louisa in 
" Kabale und Liebe." An enthusiastic eye-witness writes of her 
in 1799, " Her beautiful brown eyes have a magic all their own \ 
one must have no heart, not to feel moved to one's depths when 
those eyes are filled with tears of gende grief, or lifted heavenward 
in quiet resignation, or fixed in the wild glare of madness." 
Perhaps we may detect an echo of this " Louisa" in the fact of 

* It was called " The V^ite and Red Lion," two houses having been thrown 
into one in the year 1661. The *< Red Lion " is mentioned in documents of 
<535» "^^^^ Vincent Schopperitz took it over from the heirs of Matthes 
Cleemann ; the "White Lion " portion was so caUed untU 1590, when it was 
changed to the " Three Swans/' but seventy years thereafter it resumed its 
name in combination with the other " Lion." A huge lion over the entrance 
disdnguished this birthplace of Richard Wagner until 1885, when the building 
was condemned as unsafe and puUed down. The door leading from Friedridi 
Wagner's living-room into the bedroom where Richard was bom is now in 
London, having been presented by the Leipdg purchaser to the late JuUus 
Cyriax, the weU-beloved Secretary, and thereafter Treasurer, of the London 
Wagner Society ; this precious relic, through which the little Richard must so 
often have passed, Mr Cyriax had fitted to a cabinet for the preservation of his 
other Wagner treasures. 



FRIEDRICH WAGNER. 33 

Friedrich Wagner's having chosen the name for the baptism of 
his second daughter; as indeed, after her father's death, that 
daughter became the special prot^g^e and pupil of this excellent 
woman and artist 

The first issue of F. Wagner's marriage was a son, Karl Albert 
(bom March a, 1799), whose striking likeness to his famous 
youngest brother in voice, gesture and gait, has often been 
remarked on. It is to his tenacious memory that we owe so 
many a tradition of the family-history and our hero's earliest 
childhood As first-bom he proved himself a trae son of his 
fother by his later choice and successful exercise of histrionic 
art, though a preponderance of practical sobriety outweighed his 
artistic impulses. 

Karl Albert was followed by Karl Gustav, bom on the 21st 
July 1801 ; Johanna Rosalie, bom March 4, 1803^; Elarl Julius, 
August 7, 1804; Louise Constanze, December 14, 1805 ; Clara 
Wilhdmine, November 29^ 1807 ; Marie Theresia, April i, 1809 ; 
Wilhelmine Ottilie, March 14, 181 1. Such a rapid succession 
necessarily brought the parents cares as well as joy. Two of the 
eight children above-named, the boy Gustav and the girl Therese, 
were carried off by illness at a tender age, the latter ere com- 
pletion of her sixth year; the rest grew up in health and strength. 

If we examine the progeny of Friedrich and Johanna Wagner 
from the point of view of the conditions antecedent to the birth 
of genius, we are stmck by the fact that it was at the end of a 
long series, as it were of preliminary attempts on the part of 
Nature, that the subject of our biography was bom (1813); also 
that he was preceded since 1804 by none but sisters^ as if Nature 
had been husbanding her viriie force for one in whose tempera- 
ment it was to be so strongly manifested — just as in the case of 
Schiller, Mozart, Goethe, Schopenhauer and others, we find that 
they had sisters indeed, but either no brothers at all or merely 
weaklings whom death soon claimed. 

However, we must not forestall events, but return to the order 
of our chronicle. 

We have aheady alluded to the constant grotesqueries of 
rendering, on the part of German actors, which drove the two 
chief German poets into greater and greater estrangement from 
the actua] theatre. Since his experiences with Don Carlos and 
Wallenstein, Schiller grew less and less inclined to expose his 

C 



34 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

works to such distortion ; when putting his final touches to the 
''Maid of Orleans" — a thorough stage^piece, if ever there was 
one — he wrote with bitter resignation to friend Goethe, ''After 
long deliberation I have decided not to let the piece be acted" 
Nevertheless it was, and at Leipzig too. Here in September 
1801, on his way from a visit of several weeks to the K5mer 
family at Dresden, the poet attended the first performance of his 
latest work.* Kdmer came with him. Actuary Wagner (then 
thirty-one years old) and his young wife were among the spectators, 
who faced round at the end of the first act towards the box in 
which the poet and his fiiends were seated, and shouted an 
enthusiastic "Vivat Friedrich Schiller." Trumpets and drums 
joined forces with the cheers of hearty acclamation. At close 
of the performance everyone rushed to the doors to see the 
author come out; bare-headed and in reverent silence the crowd 
cleared a passage for him, while fathers and mothers held their 
children high above the heads of those in front According to 
Albert this first performance of the " Jungfrau " long ranked as an 
event in the Wagner household, and the i8th of September 1801 
as a red-letter date. Frau Hartwig had put forth all her resources 
in the r61e of Johanna, and won the author's full approval ; in 
£act the memory of her performance of that night still lingered in 
the mind of many an eye-witness even under the later impression 
made by the gifted Sophie Schroder. Yet the most afiiecting 
tokens of enthusiasm on the part of the audience could not blind 
the poet to the general fatdtiness of this representation of his 
work, and at a conference in the theatre a few days afterwards 
he complained of the "horrible maltreatment of his iambics," 
even the eminent Leipzig " Talbot," Ochsenheimer — of whom it 
was said that " without either hands or feet he would still have 
remained a great actor," so expressive was his play of features — 
not escaping the wholesale condemnation. What else was to be 
expected at a theatre where Ifiland and Kotzebue, as everywhere 
in Germany, were the life and soul of the repertory ? 

In June 1803 Friedrich Wagner and his wife went for a summer 
trip to Lauchstadt, at that time a favourite watering-place with 
the neighbouring nobility and the best families of Leipzig. 

* This was the very first performance of the Jfatgfrau mm Orleans on any 
German stage ; Berlin followed on the 23rd November, bat Weimar not tiU 
April 33, 1803 ! 



FRIEDRICH WAGNER. 35 

Schiller had arrived with the Weimar stagecompany. Though 
he carefully sought out the most secluded walks, he was mobbed 
wherever he went, and indescribable enthusiasm attended the 
Lauchstadt performance of the "Bride of Messina," notwithstand- 
ing that a thunderstorm rattled over the roof with such violence 
that for a quarter of an hour at a stretch it was impossible to hear 
a word the actors uttered. 

Meanwhile dark clouds were gathering above the German 
horizon. The Peace of Luneville had transferred Belgium and 
the whole left bank of the Rhine to France ; three years later, on 
May 20, 1804, Napoleon was proclaimed hereditary Emperor of 
the French ; at Cologne, on his triumphal progress through the 
Rhinelands, German citizens went so for as to take the horses 
from his carriage and drag him in it to the palace. If many a 
German Prince before had cast in his lot with France, to gain 
aggrandisement at the cost of his compeers, this happened now 
to a still more infamous extent: the ruin of all national in- 
dependence was threatening Saxony as well. 



IV. 

LUDWIG GEYER. 

Friendship of F, Werner and Z. G^er. — Giyef^s ytmih : taste 

for painting. — Talent for play-^icting. — Years of wanderings with 

military interludes: Magdeburg^ Stettin^ Breslau. — Return to 

Leipzig; engagement in the Seconda company, — Relations with the 

Wagner family. 

His taste for paisUing was the earlier^ and the more 
pronounced. Had he been permitted to devote his whole 
energies to portrait-patnting, gttite apart from their 
marketable value as good likenesses^ the works of his brush 
would have been treasured up in galleries as true art' 
products, 

K« A. BdTTiGRR on L. Gbybr. 

We have deferred all mention of a peculiarly important tie of 
friendship, uniting police-actuary Friedrich Wagner to the painter 
and comedian Ludwig Geyer, ten years his junior, that we might 
give the reader a more connected account of one whose destinies 
were so bound up with those of the Wagner £unily. 

Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, the eldest of three brothers, 
was bom on the 21st of January 1780 in the little Luther-town of 
£isleben, where his father acted as Actuary to the Overseer-in- 
chief. The father having been transferred to the Lower Court at 
Artem soon after Ludwig's birth, the family removed there, and 
young Geyer passed his first years of boyhood in that channing 
tract of green Thuringia, the basin of the "Goldene Aue," where 
the Unstrut flows clear between vineyards, fruit-laden orchards 
and grain-bowed cornfields, while the distance is encircled by a 
belt of amaranthine hills, their clasp the fabled Kyffhauser. 
Here the boy's love of Nature throve apace, and with it his power 
of observation and gift of reproduction. Swift was his eye to 
seize each likeness, and not a characteristic trait escaped him. A 
painter from Leipzig soon taught the eager pupil all he knew, and 
36 



LUDWIG GEYEIU 37 

day by day his passion for the brush developed. But the fiither, 
not approving of a breadless art, intended him for jurisprudence, 
and despatched him at the age of fourteen to the Gymnasium at 
Eisleben. Thus Geyer returned for awhile to his native town, and 
his favourite pastime had to jdeld to serious studies. He next 
removed to the University of Leipzig, to devote himself to Law 
in fulfilment of his father's wish« An unexpected blow cut short 
his course at its commencement. The father had been nominated 
to a more lucrative post at Dresden, and set off to complete the 
requisite arrangements on the spot: on the return-journey the 
overloaded coach in which he was travelling turned over on one 
of the proverbially villainous Saxon roads.* He arrived at 
Leipzig, only to succumb to the results of the accident in the 
loving arms of his sons. This* meant a time of great anxiety for 
Ludwig ; robbed of the means of pursuing his own studies, he 
found the burden of providing for his family at like time thrown 
upon his shoulders. It was well for him now, that he had never 
quite left off the cultivation of his early taste ; it became a means 
of livelihood, and while attending a course of finishing lessons at 
the Leipzig Academy of Drawing he was able to satisfy immediate 
needs by executing little portraits, in which his native gift of quick 
perception was his principal instructor. For the next two or three 
years he travelled f^om one small provincial town to another, and 
" painted young ladies and old gentlemen at the watering-places." 
About 1801 he returned to Leipzig, where he commenced his first 
acquaintanceship with Friedrich Wagner. 

From their earliest meeting F. Wagner became his friend and 
adviser. It was his encouragement that induced the young painter 
to cultivate another gift, previously confined to the amusement of 
his intimates, a talent for play-acting. The eye of his experienced 
friend, to whom the artist alwajrs attributed the most powerful 
influence on his theatrical career, had been the soonest to 
discover it 



* " By the violent jolting of my carriage I know that I am on Saxon soil. 
The vOoiess of these Saxon causewajrs is a standing theme for the Jeremiads 
of a thonaand timTeilers. The Elector has put aside 70,000 thalers for building 
new roads, and one is already commenced at Ziegelrode, in the vicinity of 
Artem. ' Things will mend in time ; — they always more slowly with us in 
Saxony,' as you may hear from the Saxon himself, whom one would scarcely 
bave credited with even that much power of reflection " (Letter from Saxony, 
m the Berlin Frnmiiihigt of 1805). 



38 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

At Wagner's instigation Geyer made his first attempt at the 
aforesaid private theatre in the Thoma house. His acting pleased, 
and he adopted the profession with a will, yet without bidding 
farewell to painting. His appearance was greatly in his favour : 
of faultless medium build of body, his features were eloquent and 
refined, as shewn us in a portrait painted by himself in riper years. 
Add to these an expressive and musical voice, not to be despised 
in lighter song, and a power of mimicry that enabled him to 
reproduce a characteristic as easily by facial play as on the canvas. 
Finally, a temperament of true artistic fibre, sensitive to the faintest 
change, and passing from the highest frolic to the deepest gloom. 
** He had no need to pinch himself, to find his humour," says a 
very good judge ; yet it is distinctive of his twofold nature that, 
besides the spirited creations of his comic muse, he was peculiarly 
at home in the embodiment of crafty "villains" such as lago, 
Franz Moor, Marinelli, the President in Kabale und Liebe, and 
the Duke of Alba in Egmont, — b. line which afterwards became 
his speciality. At the beginning he tried his hand on lovers and 
young cavaliers, his first part being Don Carlos ; only gradually 
did he find his province ; but in every role his eye for psycho- 
logical expression stood him in good stead, and as his portrait- 
painting gained him entrance to the most exclusive circles, where 
he learnt the manners of polite society, it was all the easier for 
him to reproduce them on the stage. Self-conceit was foreign to 
him throughout his life; he asked and heeded the advice of 
experts, and pleased himself the least of all. 

In the next few years we meet him on various minor stages. 
At the Magdeburg house, then beginning to rank high among the 
provincial theatres of Germany, with a good ensemble that even 
ventured tasks like "Tell," he was classed as one of the most 
valued accessions. It was here that he heard, to his deep sorrow, 
of Schiller's death. The first Magdeburg performance of the 
Bride of Messina was changed into a threnody. At 6 o'clock, 
the hour of the poet's death, it began with mourning music; the 
stage, all hung with black, displayed a lofty catafalque with a 
black sarcophagus, over which the Genius of Germany extin- 
guished a burning torch in an urn; the chorus of assembled 
actors intoned a dirge; all eyes were filled with tears. Then 
followed the representation of Schiller's work, in which the little 
Magdeburg stage eclipsed the fame of many a better-favoured 



LUDWIG GEYER. 39 

Daring the sammer closure, from Jaly to August, the Magdeburg 
company betook itself to Brunswidc, whose Ducal theatre was 
served at that time by a French troupe. Here, too, it won the 
praise of ^Mts object not being mere pectmiary gain, but some- 
thing higher," and Geyer's fancy and originality, especially in 
high comedy, were warmly recognised. 

The same autumn, 1805, Geyer went to the newly-founded 
Stettin dieatre. For years the citizens of Stettin had applied in 
vain for permission to have a standing theatre of their own, but a 
privil^e long since conferred on Ddbbelin's strolling company 
had stood in the way. The opening of this "standing" theatre 
was therefore a rather brilliant affair. However, the young 
artist's Stettin episode was of somewhat brief duration. The 
year of German/s profoundest shame had tolled with the forma- 
tion of the Rhine-League. In vain Prussia's ill-starred rising 
against a usurper to whom she had previously truckled; the 
spirit of great Frederick had flown from council-room and army ; 
all was lost with the defeat at Jena and the surrender of the 
Silesian forts. A few days after the fall of Erfurt and Spandau, 
waUed Stettin was given over (Oct 29, 1806) in coward fear, 
without a blow, at the first demand of a detachment of French 
light cavahy, though the commander had a garrison of sevenfold 
strei^th and a hundred and twenty cannon! The disgraceful 
example of Stettin was followed by well-nigh impregnable 
Kustrin, and with incredible swiftness by the remaining for- 
tresses. The King had to sign a peace whereby the victor gave 
him back his kingdom's half as act of grace. Prussia's disaster 
was the ruin of the scarcely inaugurated Stettin stage; Geyer 
again had to pick up his staff to woo fortune at Breslau. 

His heart full of longing for Saxony and his distant friends, he 
anived at the Silesian capital just after it had capitulated (Jan. 
5, 1807). During his two years there he formed a close friend- 
ship with the musical conductor Gottlob Benedikt Bierey, a 
fellow-countryman from Leipzig, who preserved a true affection 
for him long after they had parted* Besides his work as actor, 
Geyer still diligently plied his brush, as we may gather from a 



* Thus in later years, when Director of the Breslau theatre, he took ^roung 
Albert Wagner under his wing on his d^but there ; to which Adolf Wagner 
refers in a letter to his nephew (after Geyer's death) as " this resurrection of 
the father's love, its legacy." 



40 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Breslau letter printed in the Freitnuthige of August i, 1809: 
*' Herr Geyer, that excellent artist, whose acquisition would be a 
boon to any theatre, even the largest, has left us. He is also a 
talented portrait-painter, and Breslau's inhabitants are very loth 
to lose him." But this city, whose manners and customs were 
always somewhat strange to him, at whose weekly marts he saw 
Jewish and Sarmatian faces, and heard the Polish tongue, could 
not attract him long. The old home-sickness came back with 
added strength; he sought renewal of his Leipzig ties. Here 
the Weimar troupe had been engaged for awhile, in place of the 
Seconda ; but the latter had now returned again, while the enter- 
prising impresario had secured the title of " Royal Saxon Court- 
Players " for himself and company, despite its remaining a purely 
private undertaking. Through the influence of his Leipzig 
friends, and Franz Seconda's complaisance, Geyer obtained a 
temporary engagement for the coming Michaelmas. He left 
Breslau as early as July, for a personal interview with his new 
Leipzig patron, the "little doubled-up old man, of the terribly 
thick head and protuberant glassy eyes," as £. T. A. Hoffmann 
describes Seconda. Still with his buckle-shoes and knee-breeche8» 
his pigtail and powdered pemique, he struck Weber and Genast 
a few years later as the ghost of a long-buried past. " The in- 
timate of lackeys and ladies-in-waiting ; servile or rude, according 
to the favour in which you stood at court ; the type of a subal- 
tern office-bearer of those days, he passed for a man of some 
tolerable influence." 

After so long a parting, Geyer was rejoiced to meet his Saxon 
friends once more. Much had altered in his five years of absence, 
since the fatal peace concluded by Saxony with the insolent 
conqueror. Jurisdiction alike and administration had been 
transformed into a thorough despotism; the Code Napolkon 
had become the book of civil law. Actuaiy Wagner was among 
the few local officials who had sufficient mastery of the foreign 
tongue to act as intermediaries between the town-authorities 
and the French staff; he was therefore entrusted by Marshal 
Davoust, Commander of Leipzig, with the reorganisation of 
the legal S3rstem, and made provisional Chief of the "Police 
of Public Safety " : with the instinct of a Napoleonic general 
the dreaded Commander had recognised the advantages to be 
drawn from employing such a man. Years after, F. Wagner's 



LUDWIG GEYER. 4 1 

Tolnminous copy of the Code is mentioned — as no longer of 
use — ^in a letter of Adolf to Albert Wagner concerning an 
inTentoiy of the father's library. 

Many an extra load had thus been laid on Wagner's back, and 
not without visible effect ; but his welcome to the wanderer was 
none the less cordial. Geyer's first public appearance in Leipzig, 
as Philipp von Montenach in Kotzebue's '^ Johanna von Mont- 
£uicon,^ was attended by the desired success. In an account 
dated Oct 6, 1809, we read : '' He has greatly pleased, and will 
be an acquisition to any theatre, as he possesses distinguished 
talents suitable for a number of parts." The result of this 
good impression was his definite entrance into the Seconda 
company, and with it into the sphere of action to which he 
remained true to the end Then, as before, they played at 
Leipzig till the autumn, and spent the winter at Dresden; at 
the latter city in Feb. 1810 they lost a most eminent member, 
the talented Opitz, whose portrait was engraved on copper after 
a capital likeness by Geyer.* Geyer's manysidedness was now 
invoked to fill the place of the deceased, whose forte had been 
cavaliers and ardent lovers, such as Tellheim and Fiesco, and 
heroic parts like Wallenstein ; so that he was driven once more 
to a line not quite his own. He distinguished himself as Hamlet 
and Max Piccolomoni ; but his real ability not seldom came out 
in lesser rdles, where his knowledge of portrait-painting would 
help him to the ingenious devising of a ' masque.' Thus in a 
report on an altogether insignificant fiurce, "Der Schauspieler 
wider Willen," we find him praised for his " marvellous versatility in 
the various disguises which the part entails. He varied the differ- 
ent characters, alike in appearance and bearing, voice and delivery, 
to such a degree that the audience was left in serious doubt as 
to the actor's identity" {Ztgf. d. elegante Welt, March 9, 1810). 

Durii^ this winter at Dresden he had ample opportunity of 
observing the heartless parade of the titled world in that period 
of subjection to foreign rule. Immediately after the battle of 
Jena, Napoleon had declared that he had no quarrel with 

* In collections and catalogues of portraits, this engraving (by Amdt) is still 
to be met with. When E. T. A. Hofimann visited Seconda's office at Dresden 
in 181 3 be found Signor Franz's cabinet adorned with likenesses of Opitz, 
Odisenheimer, Thering, etc., "all very well painted in oils." Hoffmann, a 
talented draughtsman and painter himself, had the keen eye of a connoisseur, 
sad beyond doubt the portraits he approved were from Geyer's hand. 



42 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Saxony: the Elector Friedrich August had become Kif^^ 
joined the Rhine League, and been forced to share in the war 
against Prussia. At the time of Germany's deepest humbling, 
while Prussia lay crushed beneath the Peace of Tilsit, the 
festivities at the Saxon court formed an unbroken chain with 
those at the houses of ministers, ambassadors and peers, more 
especially of Cabinet-minister Senft of Pilsach and the Austrian 
envoy. Prince Esterhazy ; pomp and pleasure outvied each other 
in a riot of luxury and feasting. Particularly was this the case 
each time Napoleon stayed at Dresden. Shameless was the 
adulation of the foreign tyrant. At a pageant arranged in his 
honour, between the lofty columns of a temple stood altars 
with the names of Caesar, Alexander, Miltiades, Sdpio and 
Achilles; to strains of music an Italian singer, dressed as Fame, 
inscribed in flaming colours on an unnamed altar in their midst 
the name '^Napoleon"; a brilliant light was flashed upon the 
letters, and at the same moment the names of the ancient heroes 
vanished. " Of Dresden's wretchedness you have no conception," 
writes Geyer in a letter to his Leipzig friends; '^ people here 
have no heart left to live, yet go in daily dread of death, though 
they could really do noUiing more agreeable than to die. For 
myself, I should like to be a marmot, at least for this winter; 
but I have resolved to' fight with might and main against this 
world-irony whose fools we are, and if it is a proof of worldliness 
to grin and bear it, I shall make free to give my frice a pleasant 
smile, to boot, which ought to suit me admirably." 

There was more enjoyment in the shift to Leipzig from Easter 
to Michaelmas of every year. The old house on the Briihl 
received him as an almost daily guest. Two flights of dark and 
narrow stairs led up from the dim entrance-hall to the none too 
roomy, yet suflicient dwelling of the Leipzig Gerichtsaktuar and 
provisional Chief of Police. Without the means for ostentatious 
patronage, Wagner had something better to ofier the buffieted 
man : a house and home where he was always welcome, and 
many a valuable hint for his artistic development. Their evening 
chats, as Avenarius tells us, would last so long that it was quite 
late at night before the older friend could return to his official 
papers. For the first time, after all the chance and changes of 
his homeless life, the wanderer had found the comfort of a family 
circle. By side of the open-hearted, well-read husband stood his 



LUDWIG GEYER. 43 

cheery spouse, Johanna Wagner, just turned thirt}' ; a capital 
housewife, full of spirit and natuial feeling, untouched by any 
fiilse pretence to literary or aesthetic culture. An oil-portrait from 
Geyer's hand shews her in the full bloom of youth, with finely- 
moulded features, eyes ready at each instant for a friendly jest ; 
the jaunty cap with band beneath the chin, her favourite wear, so 
admirably setting off the perfect oval of her dace. Of the children, 
Albert was now at the Royal school at Meissen; the eldest 
daughter, Rosalie, not ten years old, was growing up to maiden 
charm ; below her ranged a sturdy troop of youngsters, Julius in 
his eighth year, the lively Louisa in her seventh, and so on. 
Here Geyer felt himself no interloper, but a friend and comrade 
prized and understood as rising artist. As he wrote after one of 
these Leipzig sojourns, ** The company of fiadthful friends, their 
hearty Sjonpathy in joy and sorrow, their fond endurance, con- 
stitute one of die highest blessings in life." Who could dream 
how near was the shipwreck of this household happiness itself, 
that the longed-for end of political thraldom would coincide with 
the impending collapse of this peaceful home ? 



FIRST BOOK. 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 
(1813-1833.) 

Ich liebie gluhend meine hohe Braut^ 
Seii ich turn Denken^ Fiihlen bin erwacht^ 
Seit mir^ was dnstens ihre Grosse war^ 
Ertdhlte der cUten Ruinen Frachi. 

Mdn Lehen weihte ich einztg nur ihr^ 
Ihr meine Jugend^ meine Manneskraft; 
Denn sehen woUf ich sie, die hohe Braut, 
Gehront als Konigin der Welt! 

(RiENZi, act v. sc. 2.) 



I. 
THE YEAR 1813. 

The King of PrusMs call to arms and Germany s uprising, — 
Birth of Richard Wagner.— E. T. A. Hoffmann at Leipzig,— 
C^er at Dresden and Teplitt. — The October-days: *^ Napoleon 
without a hat,^^ — Friedrich Wagnet^s death. — fean FauPs 
prophecy. 

When German princes were no longer merely servants 
to French culture, hti vassals to French despotism, then 
was the German Stripling^s aid invoked, to prove with 
weapons in his hand the mettle of the German Spirit 
reborn in him. To the sound of Lyre attd Sword he 
fought its battles. Amaud, the Gallic Casar asked why 
he no longer could beat the Cossacks and Croats, the 
Imperial and Royal Guards t 

Richard Wagnbr. 

Da or mich Mougf und starb 

(Tristan, act iii.) 

On the broad snowfields of Russia, in the ravenous flames of 
Moscow, the swing of a mighty pendulum was bringing round 
the Year of Liberation. The tidings of the rout of the Grand 
Army, of the ruinous retreat over the Berezina, the Emperor's 
sledge-flight flrom Warsaw vi& Dresden to Paris, — the news 
spread from mouth to mouth, from land to land; the down* 
trod everywhere took heart True, after a few more months 
the mighty man stood again at the head of a host of two hundred 
thousand ; but circumstances had entirely altered : the all-dreaded 
no longer could rank as invincible. The Prussian King's appeal 
«<To my Folk" filled every heart with inspiration; death-daring, 
the flower of German youth assembled beneath the flag of 
Liitzow's corps; even stay-at-home greybeards armed for the 
** Landsturm." 

In February, while Geyer was still with the Seconda troupe at 
Dresden, Friedrich August had to flee alike his palace and his 

47 



48 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

land; a Commission of Regency was appointed. Four weeks 
later the 'united forces of Prussia and Russia trooped into the 
city under Bliicher and Wittgenstein; trim Prussian volunteers 
and bearded Cossacks poured through the Old Market ; the in- 
habitants scarce knew if they were greeting friend or foe. Barely 
a week after the '' Baptism in blood " of the new-bom German 
army at Mockem, the fourteen-year-old Albert Wagner, then in 
the third class of the Meissen Royal-school, was confirmed at 
the chiuch in the Friedrichstadt (Dresden) on April 11 in the 
presence of Geyer, who meant to conduct him to his parents 
at Easter. But the incalculable tide of war changed everything : 
the company was forbidden to take its yearly trip to Leipzig, and 
Geyer not only had to forgo the prospect of seeing his friends 
once more, but also to go short of a third of his salary. On the 
26th of April the sovereign allies, King Friedrich Wilhelm and the 
Czar Alexander, made their entry into Dresden; that evening the 
Court-theatre gave ** Minna von Bamhelm, or the Soldier's For- 
tune," Geyer playing the part of the landlord " with every cunning 
artifice of mien and gesture." Meantime Napoleon had got 
his fresh army together, and while the Russian main body was 
advancing but slowly, and Prussia still busy equipping its '' Land- 
wehr," the battle of Liitzen made him master of Saxony once 
more. The "soldier's fortune" had not come true; yet the eyes 
of all Europe were centred on this Saxon land, for here the 
decisive struggle must soon come to grip. 

Thus stood affairs at simrise on the 22nd of May, when the 
youngest son of Polic&actuary Wagner greeted the light of this 
turbulent world with his earliest cry, in the house of the White and 
Red Lion on the Briihl at Leipzig. The cannon thunder of the 
two preceding days had scarcely rolled away from the field of 
Bautzen : Napoleon had been Idt with a barren victory, a loss of 
25,000 in killed and wounded, and neither prisoners nor field- 
guns taken. Just as little had he been able to prevent the Allies, 
whose loss was scarcely half so great, from withdrawing to Silesia 
in good order. He marched after them indeed, but his each 
attack miscarried, and again he suffered serious losses ; thus on 
the evening of May 22 he lost his faithful firiend. Grand Marshal 
Duroc, struck by a cannon-balL The following day was a Sunday; 
on this Sunday afternoon at 3 o'clock a remarkable man came 
from Dresden "on a comedian's adventure" right through the 



THE YEAR 1813. 49 

swirl of war, with a wife severely injured in a postchaise accident, 
— through the gates of what had become the town of Richard 
Wagner's birth, since the day before, came the "romanticist" 
£. T. A. Hoffmann. He had just been called to Dresden as 
musical conductor of Joseph Seconda's Italian operatic com- 
pany, but looked for it in vain there. The same dislocations, 
that had detained Franz Seconda and his acting troupe at 
Dresden, had interfered with the movements of his brother's 
alternant opera-company; it was stranded at Leipzig, and its 
new conductor must go there after it. On the morning of the 
24th, the day after his arrival, Hoffmann held his first pianoforte- 
rehearsal, the next day the first band-rehearsal of a new opera, 
and became installed as conductor of a theatre quite strange 
to him. To be sure, the Leipzig operatic enterprise could make 
but little headway in those days of storm ; the theatre was nearly 
empty, sometimes unusable at all, for Alarm would often be 
drummed just before opening time and the doors must be 
baired. So the manager saw himself compelled to beg leave to 
return to Dresden, and four weeks later Hoffmann was rumbling 
his way back to the capital * 

In the meantime, after concluding a truce of several weeks, 
Napoleon also had made his entry into the Saxon capital, and 
taken up his residence in the palace of Count Marcolini in 
the Friedrichstadt Once again Dresden became the scene of 
reckless gaiety. Besides Joseph Seconda's Italian Opera, the 
actors of the Th^tre Fran^ais had been summoned hither. 



* Hoffimann gives ns a most animated accoant of these Leipzig days, on one 
of which, " relying on his swiftness of foot," he had even witnessed a skirmish 
at close quarters : " It was the a&ir that took place on Jane the seventh at 
9 A.M. hard by the gates of Leipdg. The next day Herr Seconda coolly 
declared that he must dose the theatre, and we all might be off where we 
would. This came on us as a bolt from the blue ; every representation was in 
vain, even the offer of a loan of 1000 rdchsthalers by a tradesman friend of 
oar buffo Keller, a man much Hked at Ldpzig, — Seconda was inflexible. So 
the company put their heads together, and decided, after reducing the ex- 
penses as much as possible, to play for at least a fortnight on their own 
account, leaving Herr Seconda to keep the books. The Leipzig Tovm- 
coundl was so obliging as not only to raise no obstades, but considerably 
to reduce the rent of the house. Fortune favoured us; our two operas, 
Sargines and Figaro^ the very reverse of new, but excellently performed and 
vociferously applauded, we were able to give three times apiece to fiill houses. 
We were already preparing an extension of our programme, and boldly 

D 



so LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

among them Napoleon's special favourite, the far-famed Talma, 
and the much-prized Mme. Georges*; during the truce they 
divided their favours between the Court-theatre and a private 
stage improvised for the Court proper in the orangery of the 
Marcolini palace. As this meant a double provision for the 
theatric entertainment of the capital, Geyer's summer outlook 
was poor indeed. The wisdom of the Director, rejecting Leipzig, 
had decided that the company should go to Teplitz in Bohemia, 
still at peace. "The journey to Leipzig would have delighted 
me ; Teplitz is indifferent to me, I might almost say distasteful," 
writes Geyer to his friends on June the 6th, "but the hope 
of spending the last months of summer at Leipzig shall conquer 
my revolt In no summer have I so yearned for Leipzig as in 
this one, when it is only from a distance that I am permitted to 
take part in its summer diversions at pleasant St6tteritz, — think 
of me at times there, as I shall think of my beloved Leipzig 
when I climb the hills of Teplitz." He goes on to say that 
the truce just proclaimed gives hope of peace indeed, but, as 
usual, a peace of such a nature that another war lies hidden 
in its clauses. "Napoleon has promised to convert Saxony 
into a paradise; the prospect is truly excellent, for we are 
already reduced to our shirts, and its fulfilment will restore us 
altogether to a state of innocence." 

In the delightful highland nest of St6tteritz, not far from the 
Thonberg, and close to the base of operations of the approaching 
Leipzig battle, little Richard — still nameless, since still unnamed ! 



thinking of getting up the Vestalin^ when Herr Seconda's star most unex- 
pectedly began to rise. Through the intervention of his brother Franz he had 
received permission to play at the Court-theatre in Dresden ; so he naturally 
resumed the helm, and on June 24 we took our departure in nine vanloads, — 
an amusing journey that would afford me matter for the most comical tale. 
In particular a Hamburg charabanc, containing the lower staff, offered such a 
spectacle that I never failed to be present at its loading and unloading. On 
a careful computation it held the following : a stage-hairdresser, two scene- 
shifters, five maids ; nine children, of whom two newly bom and three still 
sucking ; a parrot that swore unceasingly and to the point ; five dogs, among 
them three decrepit pugs ; four guinea-pigS| and a squirrel." 

• See C. W. Bottiger's GeschUhU des Konigreuhs Sachsen, II. 252 : " Talma, 
Fleuiy, Mmes. Mars and Georges, had arrived for the French play in Dresden ; 
talents to which Friediich August had moreover to pay 1000 ducats travelliog- 
money." In 1841 we hear of Mme. Mars in R. Wagner's ''Correspondence 
from Paris" {P. fT. VIII. 119). 



THE YEAR 1813. 5I 

— passed a portion of his first month of life. Here Friedrich 
Wagner completed in mid-June his forty-third year, full of life 
and vigour, without one premonition that it was to be his last. 
Geyer had proposed a summer-trip to Teplitz, such as his friend 
would seem to have been fond of taking with his wife ; instead of 
that, Wagner soon had cause to hasten his own return to Leipzig. 
Napoleon was not the man for idle dalliance, and least of all at 
such a crisis ; in July he could no longer keep quiet at Dresden : 
to hold a grand review he came to Leipzig, where he quartered 
himself on the Thoma house in the Rathhaus Place, and Jungfer 
Jeannette again had to put up a royal guest in the state-apart- 
ments last tenanted (1809) by Ex-King Jerome of Westphalia. 

On August 15 the truce expired. For Geyer it had the dis- 
agreeable sequel, that next day all strangers in Teplitz received 
strict orders to cross the frontier within forty-eight hours. With 
the rest of the company he had to leave Bohemia, sent back 
once more to Dresden. 

The same day, Monday the i6th August, there was a christen- 
ing in St. Thomas's church at Leipzig, under Deacon Mag. 
Eulenstein i delayed by various causes in that year of war, at 
last the name of Wilhelm Richard Wagner was given to the 
delicate but well-proportioned child. The godparents, according 
to the parish archives (which also contain the "declaration of 
birth" in the father's handwriting), were Dr Wilhelm Wiesand, 
advocate of the Higher Court and Consistory ; tradesman Adolf 
Trager ; Jungfrau Juliane Henriette Schofifelin, orphan daughter 
of the late tradesman Heinrich Gottlob Schoffel (subsequently 
Frau Hofrathin B. of Stuttgart) — owing to illness, her place on 
this occasion was filled by Jgfr. Johanna Henriette Louise Mohl. 
Five years later Dr Wiesand was entrusted by Arthur Schopen- 
hauer, who had fallen out with his publisher Brockhaus on the 
eve of a journey to Italy, with the as yet unprinted final third of 
the manuscript of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung^ together 
with full authority to recover the stipulated fee. The Trager 
family is repeatedly mentioned in the letters of Geyer and Adolf 
Wagner ; for Trager himself Geyer had painted a portrait of the 
actor Christ during his stay at Leipzig. 

And so the rite through whose postponement Richard's Chris- 
tianity fell three months short of his Germanity came at the very 
beginning of the renewal of bloodshed. On August 22 the 



52 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

cannons on the walls proclaimed the victory just won by Bona- 
parte at Lowenberg in Silesia; a few days later he won his last, 
near Dresden. Prussians and Austrians retired with jeopardy to 
Teplitz, so lately left by Geyer and his colleagues. At the same 
time the army of Macdonald was beaten and dispersed by Bliicher 
at Elatzbach. On September 19 Richard's mother kept her five- 
and-thirtieth birthday : the decisive blow was near at hand. 

Every preparation for the final battle had been made, when the 
King of Saxony arrived at Leipzig on the 13th of October, and 
alighted at the Thoma house. The Allies invested the dty ; at 
eight in the morning of the i6th over a thousand cannons were 
belching thunder, shattering all the windows in the town. At 
three in the afternoon Napoleon's runners came in with news of 
victory ; the bells in every steeple were set ringing. The follow- 
ing day, a Sunday, was a day of rest; the victor's peace-proposals 
were not so much as honoured with an answer. Thus on Monday 
the 1 8th, again at 8 a.m., commenced the last murderous bout: 
half-way through the engagement the Saxons went over to the 
Allies; by evening the French had been driven back to close 
beneath the city's gates. On Tuesday the suburbs were bom- 
barded, alarms of fire set the Bhihl in commotion. About 10 
o'clock Napoleon left the city, after bidding farewell to Friedrich 
August. Richard's mother would often tell the growing boy how 
the emperor fled hat-less down the Briihl that day, under the very 
windows of the White and Red Lion where he was lying in his 
cradle. At midday — entry of the Allied Sovereigns ; horn every 
window white flags waving to them. The King, who had plunged 
his country into the deepest misery through his crass dependence 
on the foreign tyrant, was made a prisoner of state ; in the same 
apartments of the Thoma house, which had lately formed his royal 
lodging, the Russian Prince Repnin took his provisional seat as 
Governor General of Saxony until the occupation of Dresden. 

By Richard's cradle his mother had trembled for the fote of 
their fatherland, and now she cried for joy at its salvation. But 
Friedrich Wagner had sterner work before him. The aspect of 
the town was terrible : the avenues hewn down, the promenades 
laid waste, outlying houses demolished ; at every step in the outer 
city one trod on dead bodies of men or horses. The spectacle 
of devastation is preserved to us in a well-known woodcut of the 
view around the Rannstadt Gate in those eventful days of October. 



THE YEAR 1813. 53 

The &tal consequences of preceding panic and the accumulation 
of dead and wounded round the walls, nay, within the city's very 
streets and squares, were not slow to present themselves. An 
epidemic nervous fever (hospital-typhus) took toll of the inhabi- 
tants, among them Friedrich Wagner. Worn out by incessant 
exertions, he was snatched from the bosom of his family on the 
22nd of November, after a few days' illness, in the full vigour of life. 

Richard's half-year birthday was the death-day of his father. 

We need not dwell upon the mother's grief at this calamity. 
Acute was her anxiety about the maintenance of her young family, 
for Friedrich's sudden death had left his dear ones with no assured 
provision. However, there was no lack of sympathetic friends to 
smooth the earliest difficulties. It would appear that Geyer rushed 
over from Dresden, to help bury his friend and comfort the 
mourner. Arrangements were soon made for bringing up the 
children; Albert remained at his Meissen school, Rosalie was 
entrusted to a Dresden lady-friend of Geyer's, Louise was adopted 
by Frau Hartwig, under whose motherly care she completed her 
eighth' year of life on the 14th December at Dresden. In a letter 
of the 22nd, Geyer gives the mother an account of the presents 
and preparations for the two Dresden children's Christmas, and 
begs her to light a fine tree for the *' Cossack " (Richard), whom 
he ** so gladly would dandle awhile on the sofa." As for himself, 
he says he is living " buried like a badger, pacing his lonely room, 
and at the utmost slipping round to Frau Hartwig's to see how 
the foster-daughter is doing." 

In the same Leipzig in which Johanna Wagner was troubling 
for the weal of Richard and his brothers and sisters, at the Golden 
Heart in the Fleischerstrasse on New Year's £ve Hoffmann, but 
lately returned there, completed the manuscript of his fantastic 
masterpiece, the tale of the " Golden Pot" It was intended for 
printing with the " Phantasiestiicken in Callot's Manier," to which 
Jean Paul had written on November 24 (two days after Friedrich 
Wagner's death) a preface containing the prophecy — in reality 
aimed at Hoffmann : " Hitherto the Sun-god has cast the gift of 
poetry with his right hand, of music with his left, to two such 
widely-distant beings that we still are waiting for the man who 
shall both write and set the poem of a genuine opera." 

Strange that this presage should have come from Bayreuth 
in the natal year of the Bayreuth master ! 



II. 
REMOVAL TO DRESDEN. 

Fresh troubles, — Geyer weds the widow. — Removal to Dresden, 
— DresdetCs pigtaikry, — Company at Goer's house: puppet-plays 
and comedies. — Dkbuts of Louise and Rosalie. — Richard* s infancy. 

All paltry caUtthH^n was silenced by trust in God and 
his talent i when he game his hand to the wholly impe- 
cunious widow of a Jrietid proved true to deaths and thus 
became the father of seven orphans. 

K. A. BoTTiGER (Geyer's necrologue). 

With the bitter loss that year of great events had brought 
her, the time of trial for the sorrowing mother was not yet over* 
Towards its end, the oldest son fell likewise sick of nervous 
fever; and Richard's health was ominously feeble. She came 
near to sink beneath the load ; but Geyer's faithful voice revived 
her from afar: "Pluck up heart, and, however fiercely Fate 
assails you, don't dwell too much on trouble ; remember that you 
still have pressing duties in the world, that you are a mother and 
your children need you." His New Year's greeting announced 
that the Dresden children were well : " May Albert and Richard 
soon be also." Yet there was to be many a night of anxious 
vigQ, ere the state of the first-bom took a turn for the better. 
Then on the 26th of January 18 14 came the death of the grand- 
mother Johanna Sophia (n^e Eichel) at the age of all but 
seventy, — the last link, for the present, in a long chain of 
misfortunes. 

For the recuperation of the much-tried mother a brief trip to 
Dresden next was planned. The yellow Saxon coach that plied 
between Leipzig and the capital brought her safely to her des- 
tination ; again she saw her absent children, and found them 
thriving. But something else was settled between her and the 
trusty friend : in Geyer's honest heart a most worthy resolve had 
54 



REMOVAL TO DRESDEN. 55 

been forming in the months since the death of his lamented 
comrade; it ripened now to clearness, and the widow quietly 
became his wife. After a little while she returned to Leipzig, 
whither he followed her about Easter with good news of a 
change in his fortunes : the Seconda troupe was about to convert 
its precarious toleration bto a guaranteed engagement by the 
State, under favourable conditions.* With this encouraging 
assurance of his future livelihood was coupled the agreeable 
prospect of the company's nomadic roaming between Dresden 
and Leipzig soon drawing to an end. The latter, indeed, was 
not to be for a year or two yet ; only in the year 1816 did the 
Royal Court-playexs come to Leipzig for their last Easter term ; 
on the 2oth October of that year they said good-bye to it for ever 
with a performance of Lessing's " Emilia" in which Geyer played 
Marinelli and Frau Hartwig the Orsina; at its close this able 
actress spoke the farewell epilogue. 

Meanwhile the family's removal to Dresden had already taken 
place ; once more it was a settled home in which the little Richard 
struggled up. Brother Albert was just about to leave his Meissen 
school and attend the university for the study of medicine ; sister 
Louise still remained in the loving care of her foster-mother, who 
would not relinquish her charge so soon ; Rosalie, on the other 
hand, had returned to her parents inmiediately after they settled 
in Dresden ; of the others, Therese had succumbed to an illness 
at the age of five, but her place had been filled by a little dark- 
haired daughter, Augusta Cacilie (born Feb. 26, 18 15), the only 
fruit of Richard's mother's second marriage. 

Their dwelling lay in the Moritz-strasse, the comer-house next 
the passage through the Landhaus to the present Landhaus-strasse. 
Geyer was not overburdened with professional work now that his 



* It was a bad affiur, though, for poor Franz Seconda. In the first place 
he had the personal misfortune to be taken for a French spy on the very day 
of his company's arrival at Leipzig, and to be dragged before the Russian 
Governor Prince Repnin ; he had a narrow escape from death by shooting, 
and was sent to the Dresden police-court under military arrest. Not till five 
days later, and after his case had been twice heard, was he set at liberty. 
Then, through the incorporation of his acting-troupe with the Italian Opera 
as a state-establishment, he was completely dethroned and his contract an- 
nulled, though it stiU had several years to run. In the event, under Theodor 
HeU as temporary Intendant, he obtained a modest provision for his declining 
years as business-adviser of the full-fledged Court-theatre. 



56 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

engagement as actor had been restricted to Dresden ; with a salary 
of 1040 thalers (about ;;^*i56X he mostly had to appear but twice 
a week, and in frequently recurring rdles. Nevertheless it needed 
unflagging industry, to provide for the support and education of a 
growing hmily ; so he diligently devoted all his leisure to portrait- 
painting, and his studio was often quite full of would-be sitters. 
His energy was great, and bis health more promising than ever ; 
the happiness of domestic life had increased the natural cheerful- 
ness of his temper. 

For the rest, the state of the Saxon capital was little calculated 
to inspire so vivacious an artistic nature as Geyer's. After the 
return of its legitimate king (June 7, 1815) the Dresden of those 
days remained as if there had never been a War of Liberation ; a 
veritable colony of " Hofraths from first class to fourth," in the 
heyday of its pigtail^tge. Among Cadlie's godparents we find a 
" Counsellor " (Hofrath Theodor Hell, whom we shall meet again), 
a "Court-painter" (Georg Friedr. Winkler), and a "Court-player" 
(Friedrich Canow). Everything emanated from the " Court," and 
as of old its order of the day was suffocation of each breath of true 
Germanity in life and art. Even as regards the confession of faith, 
every person attached to the court or standing in the remotest 
relation to it, from the Hofmarschall and Master of the Cere- 
monies down to the Court turnspit and scullery-maid, was expected 
to share in the Royal family's adhesion to the Roman Church. A 
sickly note of sugar was the distinctive mark of Dresden's literary 
lions, at their head the polymorphic scribbler who went by the 
pen-name of "Theodor Hell," the noted Hofrath Winkler, so 
busy as adaptor and translator, critic, prefacer and editor, 
manager of the Italian Opera, Maecenas and adviser to a swarm 
of minor spirits, factotum of sundry clubs and unions, — surpassing 
all the beaux esprits of Dresden in virtue of an ugliness that had 
moved Tieck to depict him in his Puss-in-boots as a scare-crow of 
burnt leather. Around him the ever " unrecognised," but all the 
more self-conscious poet, Friedrich Kind, and a whole troop of 
sentimental novelists and saccharine lyrists who had made Hell's 
Abendzeitung their head-quarters. Richard Wagner's subsequent 
characterisation of this epoch as " quite openly avowing itself a 
paper one " is fully borne out by other accounts of the extraordinary 
bibliomania then raging in Dresden; the whole city ready and 
" even the red-coated Grenadiers, with their legs hanging out of 



REMOVAL TO DRESDEN, 57 

the palace windows, had a noyel on their lap as they knitted 
stockings."* 

The nimbus round the King and Court attached to their lowest 
depoident; thus it happened (according to M.M. v. Weber) that 
an excellent chamber-musician — subsequently Weber's valiant 
friend — ^was particularly prized because his brother was a Royal 
valet! Soft speech, respectful manners, distinguished the 
Dresdener j at the theatre itself one feared to shew approval by 
noisy demonstration. Concerning a performance of Geyer's as 
Jeflferies in Zeigler's " Parteienwuth," when he was loudly called 
before the curtain despite the public's naive detestation of the r61e 
of villain, we read in the Frdmuthige of Feb. 6, 1816 : "To have 
roused our public to stuk a pitch, is saying a good deal, and could 
have only occurred on a Sunday ; on weekdays, when the Court 
honours the house with its presence, it is not considered seemly 
to behave like that, as the King objects to demonstrations." 

With Geyer ''Art was earnest, life a sport, so long as life ran 
lusty in his veins," as Bdttiger puts it in his Necrologue (Dresden 
AbendteUung^ Nos. 359-60, 1821). His hospitable home in the 
Moritz-strasse was ever a favourite meeting-place for merry spirits, 
himself the life and soul of every party. To this sociable circle 
belonged, among others, the jovial War-counsellor Georgi, chief 
fiiend of the house, recollection of whom was preserved by 
Richard Wagner to the end \ the versatile Ferdinand Heine, at 
first a bandsman in the Dresden Hofkapelle, thereafter one of the 
Royal Players, devoted to the family from first to last, and 
especially to Richard from his childhood up ; Geyer's colleagues, 
Christ and Haffher, both veterans from the old Seconda days ; the 
hero-player Fr. Julius, Geyer's former comrade at Breslau, whose 
time-honoured Tellheim and Romeo eventually won the unstinted 
praise of Tieck himself. Then we have Frau Hartwig, with the 
elasticity of youth so well conserved that at the age of forty she 
was able to personate a girl of sixteen with all due freshness and 
vivacity. It certainly wa$ hard on her that short-sighted Herr 
Bottiger, Dresden's loquacious art-critic and archaeologic authority, 
should have presented her on her birthday, as symbol of her 
never-aging youth, with a rose whose petals he had stripped away 
in the fervour of oratory ; she was equal to the occasion, however, 
and replied that at last she realised how blind love makes. 
* F. Pecht, in his sketch of Gottfried Semper, 



58 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

In this lively circle the family-feasts at Geyer's house not 
seldom took the form of puppet-shows, or even full-fledged 
dramatic representations, in which he had arranged the whole 
himself, from verse to costumes. Thus arose full many a bright 
occasional product of his fancy, spiced with witty allusions to 
local topics and celebrities. Among these fugitive compositions, 
a number of which have been preserved to this day, belongs his 
satirical comedy — originally a puppet-play — " Die^^neue Delila," * 
in which Richard Wagner (speaking in 1878) remembered having 
seen the shepherds Damot and Philemon played by Geyer himself 
and Kri^srath GeorgL " His crams are worse than Bdsenberg's 
of Drasen," Geyer makes the shepherd Damot say of the Viking 
braggadocio Sigurd Rottenbrecher, alluding to his colleague the 
irrepressible low-comedian B5senberg, bom in 1750, who cele- 
brated his jubilee as actor soon after the commencement of the 
new Dresden era, and was noted for the Miinchausenesque 
reminiscences which he retailed for the benefit of the green-room. 
Ample matter for his fanciful skits was afforded by the Fate- 
Tragedy (" Kfinig Ygurd," " Die Ahnfrau," etc) then prevalent at 
the Play, and at the Opera the court's affection for Rossini's 
Gazza Ladra {Germanid "die diebische Elster'') and Tancredi^ 
in which last the celebrated male soprano Sassaroli sang the title- 
part and Signora Sandrini the part of Amenaide. The pushing 
maestro he treats as follows : 

Rossini ! raft die Welt — Rossini, nie, nie, nie 

Kommt wieder solch Genie : di tantipalpiti 

Hat ihn bertthmt gemacht, muss ihn unsterblich machen. 

Rossini ringt, anch wenn der Erde Pfosten kracheDi 

Die *' Elster " in der Hand, kUhn mit dem Weltenstun— 

Und was den Larm betrifft, da kommt er nicht zu knrz. 

Ere long the opportunity of turning his poetic gift to some 
practical use was furnished by the debuts of his step-daughters 
Louise and Rosalie. A friendly rivalry existed between Frau 
Hartwig as foster-mother of the first-named, and Geyer as foster- 
father of the second ; but the man was against their making too 

* It was printed twice, but not till after Geyer's death : first in 8vo, " The 
new Dalilah, a pastoral and heroic play, merry at the beginning, but most 
tragic toward the end," Leipzig 1823 ; and secondly in i6mo, in a continua- 
tion of the " Kotzebue-almanac of dramatic pieces for the entertainment of 
country-houses," 21st year of issue, Leipxig, P. G. Kummer. 



REMOVAL TO DRESDEN. 59 

early a public appearance. In the case of Rosalie, it had been 
the expressed wish of her father Friedrich Wagner that she should 
enter the career of a player, with the proviso that she was not to 
tread the boards before her fifteenth or sixteenth year ; it was for 
this reason that Geyer had declined to trust her education to his 
valued lady friend, as he feared a contravention of the limit In 
the case of Louise, he had been powerless to prevent her appear- 
ing in a tiny child-r61e in a one-act comedy even at the premature 
age of ten, but at least he claimed the privilege of writing a 
suitable piece for her next appearance in the following year: a 
comedy in rhymed alexandrines entitled " Das Madchen aus der 
Fremde," * given out under the assumed name of E. Willig. He 
himself played a part in it, with great success ; by his side Louise 
enacted the role of a girl of ten years old, to general satisfaction. 
For Rosalie's first appearance Geyer waited out the term appointed 
by her father. In the charming piece he wrote for her, " Das 
Emtefest," her r61e is named after herself, and Geyer's own 
fatherly love to the winsome fledgeling finds full expression, t 
This time his real name was announced on the programme, but 
he did not play a part ; the principal characters were sustained 
by his colleagues Julius, Burmeister, and Frau Hartwig. The 
reception by public and critics was most fiiendly and sympathetic ; 
due in part to the author's popularity, in part to the charm of the 
youthful debutante. 

Rosalie's d^but took place on the 2nd of May 1818 ; two days 
later she entered her sixteenth year. In her uncle Adolf s letter, 

* It was under this title that the piece was first performed at Dresden on 
May II, 1817, though it is also cited as "Braut aus der Fremde" in the 
Dresden Abendzeitung of Oct. 30, the samejyear. The plot of the innocent 
two-act play is briefly as follows : A young officer picks up a little girl of ten 
years old from the field of battle, and teases his betrothed by writing her, 
without further particulars, that he has a maiden always with him whom he 
lores and kisses etc. Thereupon the father of the bride-elect challenges 
the father of the officer to a due], but all ends happily after the necessary 
explanations. The subsidiary characters are also well drawn : a pretender 
to the fiancee's hand, whose name of Baron von Hopfensack denotes his 
rustic style and manners ; a spiteful stepmother, who rules the good-natured 
faither in his own house ; the officer's trooper servant, and so on. 

t This piece also is mentioned under a different title, "Der Emtekranz" ; 
but it was perfonned, and printed, (in the Kotzebue Almanac for 1822), under 
that quoted above. As the work is out of print, and rare, we give a summary 
of it as well. Count Werben had wedded Therese ; in his absence his proud 



6o LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

conveying his birthday wishes, we find them accompanied by the 
hope that *' the life of show and dissembling which she has chosen, 
or rather found, may not cheat her of her veritable treasure, a pure 
and humble heart, full of modesty, love and piety.'' To under- 
stand this solemn warning amidst all the preparations for Rosalie's 
future, we must recall Adolf s rooted dislike of the stage as a 
profession. Almost predestined for the theatre by Friedrich 
Wagner's predilection, the growing family had been brought into 
somewhat too close a contact with its perilous attractions through 
Geyer's direct connection. In this sense the unde brother-in-law 
had looked askance at the widow's second marriage; nay, his 
advice, if asked, would have been dead against it, however much 
he valued Geyer as man and artist Against the daughter^ train- 
ing for the stage he had openly protested from the first *' With 
any deeper glance into this calling," he was wont to say, *'I 
cannot but consider a life devoted to it as thrown away. Who- 
ever knows the actor's life at all, does not need much telling 
how it bums a man out, makes him shallow and empty; how 
it leads to so-called fortunes and adventures, too insignificant 
to mend the manners of a male, but serious enough in any case 
to mar the manners of a female. The whirl and scurry of the 
outer life, alike with the mendacious juggling of the inner, form 
too sharp a contrast, too severe a strain, not to derange at once 
and dislocate a woman's nature." Indeed Geyer's own opinion 
of his calling was not so very different, for he once described it 
as a career that " he would gladly abandon any day, as it robbed 

mother had got the marriage set aside, and Therese had departed with her 
hope and sorrow. Werben has been unable to trace her uitil, despatched 
as envoy to a foreign land, he believes he recognises the features of his long- 
lost wife in a girl of fourteen years — Rosalie — whom he meets there. His jo^ 
is crushed by information that the girl is daughter of an *' Oekonomierath " 
Ehrenberg, for he can but imagine that his wife must have contracted a 
second union. Yet he is conquered by the longing to see his beloved onoe 
again, and he decides to accompany the child to her parents, to disclose his 
story to the husband, and implore him to yield Therese to him. Rosalie 
is not the child of Ehrenberg; the Count's heart has not deceived him. 
Ehrenberg's wife had lost their own daughter in his absence, and, dreading 
to grieve him by the news on his return, had adopted Rosalie, the daughter 
of Therese, retaining the mother as companion. The knot is unravelled by 
the confession of Frau ESirenberg, and, the Count purchasing the adjoining 
property, both families resolve to live together. All this takes place on the 
day of Harvest-home, whose festival concludes the piece. 



REMOVAL TO DRESDEN. 6 1 

him of all quiet, joy and health"; and it was with no light 
heart that he let his foster-children brave its dangers. Thus it 
was not by his advice, that Albert also left his medical studies 
to become a singer; '* facility, forgive me for saying it, has 
prompted your choice of this calling," he writes, and warns him 
in no uncertain tones of the "torrent of comedianism." The 
younger brother Julius he apprenticed to his own unmarried 
younger brother, goldsmith Geyer at Eisleben; but he had 
eventually to see a third daughter, Clara Wagner (bom 1807), 
follow her natural inclination and the example of both her elder 
sisters. 

At least the youngest children, Otdlie, Richard and Cadlie, 
were to abide by their parents' wish, and keep off the boards. 
Little Richard was the special object of alike his mother's and 
his stepfather's affection. His delicate constitution required 
peculiar care, for he was already troubled with that irritating 
form of erysipelas (? erythema, or eczema) which recurred at 
frequent intervals throughout his life. However, it was not merely 
the child's weak health that drew especial interest to him, but also 
his surprising gift of observation, and comical comparisons, by 
far beyond the usual limits of his age. Down to his sixth year 
he had no regular lessons ; the mother wished to give him time 
to pick up strength, and would not have him plagued with school- 
work ; yet his sisters taught him this and that at home, besides 
what he learnt in the disguise of play from stepfather and watchful 
mother. Neither at this time, nor in the next few years, did he 
exhibit any symptoms of the "infant prodigy"; but his relatives 
have preserved so vivid a recollection of certain trifling escapades, 
that one can only conclude he must have had an individuality of 
^his own even in earliest childhood. 

A pale, slim little chap in short-armed frocks, but unruly 
enough already — ^thus these traditions shew the tiny Richard. 
On his errands to grocer Klepperbein he has a trick of forgetting 
his message in the delight of the largesse of raisins. He is fond 
of following his mother into the kitchen : just as the cutlets are 
frying most temptingly, she has to answer the door to a visitor ; 
on her return she finds an empty pan, and Richard scuttling off 
with queer contortions. Upon examination, the cause of distress 
turns out to be a steaming cutlet in his breeches-pocket, — what 
has become of the others? After a few maternal threats, con- 



62 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

fession is made that they smelt so good he took a bite at each 
of them, but they were so very hot he couldn't finish them, and 
one after the other went under the hearth. Another day, to 
make amends, he races through the streets after a dog who has 
stolen the joint, and is rewarded in the market-place by a kick in 
his chest from a horse, the consequences of which gave much 
anxiety. These fleeting reminiscences of Richard's fourth and 
fifth years we receive through his sister Cacilie; as she was 
nearly two years younger than himself, she must have had them 
from the older members of the family, in whose memory a 
thousand similar freaks of the young rascal would have lingered ; 
a few were afterwards perpetuated by the skilful pen of his friend 
the painter Ernst Kietz. 



III. 
GEYER'S LAST YEARS. 

Relations with K M. v. Weber,— The " German Opera:'— 
Starring at Prague and Leipzig, — Occupation as painter. — Comedy 
" The Slaughter of the Innocents?' — Albert and Rosalie. — Failing 
health. — Representation of his comedy. ^foumey to Breslau. — 
Illness and death- 

One knew not which to give the highest praise tOy his 
manifold artistic talent, his witty talk, or his deep feeling 
ofUme and duty. However conscious of his natural gifts 
and their assidnous cultivation, the ideal he strove for was 
so refined that he could never content himself with what 
he actually achieved. 

K. A. BoTTiGBR on L. Geyer. 

During Richard Wagner's earliest childhood a new and pregnant 
chapter in the history of art had been opened at Dresden. At 
the beginning of 1 817 Karl Maria von Weber arrived to found a 
German Opera in the midst of pigtailed and Italianised *' Elbe- 
Florence." Scarcely had he taken up his dwelling in a vine^lad 
cottage of the " Italian village,'* when he made his first experience 
of the hardships of his new position : summoned to Dresden as 
KapeUmeister, he was to be put off with the subordinate rank of 
Music-director. This so enraged him, that he threatened to leave 
at once if he were not placed on exactly the same footing as his 
colleague, Morlachi of the Italian Opera. Through his manly 
conduct he soon won the sympathy of his artistic comrades, but 
his first annoyances remained characteristic of his treatment by 
the Court throughout. 

Soon after commencing his preliminary rehearsals, he published 
a manifesto in the Abenduitung setting forth his aims and objects 
in starting this new enterprise, and appealing to the public to 
support him.* Support, however, was lastingly denied him in 

* '* The art^fonns of other nations," so it rans, ''have alwa3r8 been better 
defined than those of the Gennan. The Italian and Frenchman have made 

63 



64 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the region where it might have had the greatest influence, the 
Court itself : engagements made expressly for the " German 
Opera" were often vetoed or frowned at for the most singular 
reasons; a tenor, for instance, who had pleased both Weber 
and the public, was dismissed because his first appearance gave 
the King a painful impression of personal resemblance to that 
Privy-Councillor von Anstetten whose duty it had been to apprise 
him of his arrest by the Allies in fateful 1813. Barely able to 
extort the first necessaries for his undertaking, he saw himself 
compelled to fall back on the more vocal members of the Play. 
Thus Geyer, the lucky owner of a " by no means despicable " 
tenor voice, — Geyer who had begun as " hero " with Don Carlos, 
Piccolomini and Hamlet, and passed on to comic and character 
parts; Geyer, who, in addition to his painting and play-writing, 
was still busied with parts such as Alba in Egmont and lago in 
Othello^ had to become an "opera-singer" into the bargain. In 
recompense this brought him into much closer connection with 
Weber, for whom he entertained a high esteem from the first, 
than would otherwise have been the case. He undertook for him 
the parts of Lorenz in the singspiel " Das Hausgesinde," of the 
colour-grinder Paul in WeigPs " Adrian von Ostade," Thomas in 
Solid's comic opera " Das Geheimniss," and various other minor 
singing r61es ; reminding us of the reference in Richard Wagner's 
Actors and Singers to " that highly laudable class of performers " 
who in days gone by won recognition in Play alike and Opera. 

Fresh intrigues of Morlachi's commenced about the time of 
the summer representations in the little theatre at the Linke'sches 
Bad. The picturesque situation of this theatre, with its trifling 
distance from the city, made it a favourite resort for the middle 
classes : the Elbe flowing by, it was easy of approach, and every 
summer afternoon the pretty spectacle would be presented of a 
flotilla of pleasure-boats on their way there, while pedestrians 
streamed along the shady avenues by the river-side. Intent on 

themselves an operatic form in which they move with ease. Not so the 
German. It is his peculiarity to seize the excellence of all the rest with 
eager curiosity and desire for constant progress ; but he deepens everything. 
Whereas the others mostly make for the sensuous zest of isolated moments, 
he demands an artwork rounded in itself, where every part shall join to 
constitute a fine ensemble, a perfect whole." It is significant to find the 
aims of Richard Wagner foreshadowed in almost the selfsame words by his 
&vourite model 



geyer's last years. 65 

lowering Gennan Opera in the eyes of the public, Morlachi 
contrived to get the Italian singers dispensed from appearing on 
this suburban stage. Geyer had to suffer for it, and defer the 
cure he meant to undergo at Carlsbad ; before he could obtain 
leave to mend his broken health, he had to make repeated extra 
appearances in play and singspieL By the time he did get to 
Oirlsbad, he found it packed with royalty and fashion ; balls and 
assemblies were made occasion for the choicest toilets ; a rainy 
summer filled the theatre and concert-halL He himself could 
not escape the frequent call for evening entertainments, at one 
of which he recited Goethe's "Der Gott und die Bajadere**; 
but he kept as far as possible from the giddy throng, seeking 
recreation in walks and excursions into the beautiful surrounding 
country. 

The same autumn took him once again across the Bohemian 
frontier: bearing messages from Weber to his fiancee, Caroline 
Brandt, engaged there as a singer, and his valued patron Count 
Pachta, he went on a fortnight's starring trip to Prague ; whither 
Weber himself soon followed, on his wedding-journey, after Geyer's 
return. After a while he revisited Leipzig, for another star-engage- 
ment Though this dty had lost its main attraction for him, it 
yet remained a place of fond remembrances, and he met with 
many a sign of old attachment and respect Thus we are told 
that a volley of applause which greeted his first appearance, as 
King Philip in Don Carlos^ sent the actor's heart to his unguarded 
lips : for the nonce he quite forgot himself, or rather his rdle, and 
returned thanks to the audience in a few familiar words; after 
which he resumed his cue, "Thus alone, Madame?" The 
sarcastic stage-manager, Gottfried Wohlbriick, who never could 
repress a witticism, even though it stung his dearest friend, was 
standing as Domingo by side of the "Duke of Alba," and 
whispered to him, "Eh! for King Philip has just turned to 
Geyer." But no one could have felt the solecism more keenly 
tfaaji the good artist himself; the whole evening was spoilt for 
him, and with it his rdle.* He threw up his engagement at once. 



* This acoonnt, with all its details, is borrowed from Edouard Genast's most 
instnictive volume, Aus dem Tagebueh ei$us aUen SchauspUUrs ; contemporary 
reports, however, say nothing of either this impromptu speech of Geyer's or 
its eflfect on his impersonation, but simply tell us that " Herr Wolf os Marquis 
Posa, Dem. Bohler as Queen Elizabeth, Herr Geyer as King Philip, Herr Stein 

E 



66 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

not to come back till the following year, when he gave a series of 
most successful impersonations. 

We will now turn for a moment to that other aspect of Geyer's 
life, his career as painter^ of which we have as yet said so little, 
though many a report has come down to us, especially from the 
period of his permanent abode in Dresden. 

At the Dresden annual art-exhibition of 1816, beside the 
Sigurd-compositions of Julius Schnorr (after Fouqu^), Geyer's 
copy of an Assumption of the Virgin by Luca Giordano attracted 
universal notice. At a later exhibition one of the chief points of 
interest is said to have been his noble full-length portrait of the 
Queen of Saxony."* The Princess Augusta too (distinguished from 
the rest of the Court by her warm sympathy with Weber's efforts) 
sat to Geyer for a successful portrait. Commissioned by the 
Queen to paint her brother the King of Bavaria (Max Joseph), 
in the summer of 1819 he went on an eight-weeks leave to 
Munich, where he meant to combine a star-engagement with his 
studio-work. There he found ''all the magazines and sheds 
packed full with the antiques brought over from Greece and 
Italy," while the imposing fabric of the Glyptothek was making 
daily progress under the eaget eye of Crown-prince Ludwig. 
The King accorded him a sitting for the portrait, which proved 
such a speaking Ukeness as to cause "an indescribable sensa- 
tion." He also painted the Queen, whilst orders from court-circles 
soon rained so ^ck that he was obliged to break off the theatrical 
engagement which he had opened with Rudolf in Kdmer's 
" Banditenbraut," and moreover to decline quite a mass of com- 
missions owing to the expiry of his term.t 

as Don Carlos, and Mme. Wolff as Princess Eboli, received the most nnmis- 
takable proofs of general approbation ; whereas the Alba — Genast — ^was mncfa 
blamed in regard of both dress and conception/' 

* '* The whole large picture is finely and worthily conceived, and admirably 
held in balance/' says a report on this exhibition in the Wiener Zeitschrift Jur 
KuHst. "Our eyes also dwelt with pleasure on a charming portrait of the 
Princess Augusta." 

t A Munich letter of August 25, 1819, in the Dresd, Abendseitung (Nos. 
221-22) tells us that, " Commanded by her Majesty the Queen of Saxony to 
paint the portrait of her august brother, our King, Herr Geyer was shewn one 
from the hand of Stieler, and remarked that the resemblance was not such as 
he would undertake to dfect if he could but be allowed the honour of a single 
sitting of one hoar's duration. His wish was fulfilled, and the King's portrait 



geyer's last years. 67 

The unusually dose connection in Geyer's nature between the 
mimetic gift and that for painting, has often been remarked. Just 
as all reports on his histrionic performances make mention of his 
effective and appropriate make-up, so we read of his talent for 
reproducing features on the canvas that " the Muse <^ Stagecraft 
guided, unseen, the brush of her faithful disciple." Yet, for all 
his ample recognition by connoisseurs and experts, the modest 
artist ever failed to satisfy himself. Bitterly would he deplore the 
lack of thorough training in his earlier years, and ardently long 
for the higher incentive of Italy. This unfulfilled longing he puts 
into the mouth of Painter Klaus, the hero of his admirable comedy 
"The Slaughter of the Innocents," his ripest dramatic product.* 
Painter Klaus is a sterling artist, a delightful blend of enthusiasm, 
eccentricity, and lofty indifference to the straits of daily life. His 
wife has not attained this pitch of resignation to earthly dis- 
comfort: it drives her almost crazy to think that guests are 
arriving at midday and there isn't a sixpence in the house, though 
the painter recks but little of it Yet Klaus, too, can be torn 
from the clouds and plunged into the blackest despair, when it 
concerns the destruction of the sketch for a painting on whose 
completion he had built all his hopes of renown. Since Goethe's 

left his hands with a likeness than which nothing could be more complete. It 
is indescribable, the sensation this picture has made. Next he painted her 
Majesty the Queen, and again won the unanimous verdict of all unbiased 
connoisseurs. So Herr Geyer got overwhelmed with orders ; and it is scarcely 
credible, when one hears that within six weeks he was at work on 30 por- 
traits, among them those of the Duke Wilhelm, Field-Marshal Prince Wrede, 
the Minister of Foreign Affairs Count von Rechberg, with &mily, Chief Master 
of the Ceremonies Carl Count v. Rechberg, the Prussian and French am- 
bassadors, and so on. At last, his leave of absence running out, he had to 
decline to execute any more. It greatly redounds to the artist's honour, to 
have earned this distinction in a city where men like Hauber, Kellerhofen, 
Ettlinger, are so famous in this branch of painting ; but I am not saying too 
much when I assert that in point of likeness^ at the first glance, none equals 
Herr Geyer. Of this rapidity of vision, this correctness of apprehension, I 
should scarcely have deemed any artist capable." 

* The widest-known of Geyer*s comedies, Der betkUhemitische Kindermord 
(with sub-title, ** Dramatisch-comische Situationen aus dem KUnstlerleben ") 
did not appear in print until after his death, and then in the following 
editions: (i) as a separate publication, Weimar, 1823, Hoffmann ; (2) in the 
IVeimarisches DramoHselus Taschenbuch^ first year of issue, with a portrait of 
Durand as ^'Maler Klaus"; (3) in the Deutsche Sckauhuhne^ vol. xiv., 
Vienna 1825 ; (4) in Reclames Universalbibliothek^ No. 1979, edited by C. 
Fr. Wittmann, 1885. 



68 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

" Kiinstler's Erdenwallen ** the contrasts and collisions between the 
demands of everyday life, with household, wife and child, and the 
ideal aspirations of an artist's soul, have never been set forth with 
so much truth to nature and humorous invention. 

Geyer's diligence in every department of his varied activity had 
been rewarded by the removal from him and his of all material 
hardships, such as he had once known quite as acutely as his 
Maler Klaus. He had also reaped the satisfaction of having 
brought at least the two eldest children, Albert and Rosalie, to a 
state of independence. With Albert, who had abandoned his 
medical studies for a thorough course of singing-lessons imder 
Mieksch of Dresden, and was now to make his earliest venture 
on the boards, he once more went to Leipzig in the winter of 
1 819, where the young artist made his first appearance as 
Belmonte in Mozart's Entfuhrung. In the spring of 1820 the 
stepson made another trial as Belmonte and Tamino on the 
Dresden stage under Weber (who was just about completing 
his Freischutz\ and then bade farewell to home, to take up his 
first engagement at Breslau, where Geyer knew that he would be 
well looked after by his old friend Bierey (see p. 39). His 
departure left a sensible gap; "at table," we are naively told, 
"he was specially missed at the bread-slicing," an office which 
returned to the head of the family. Rosalie, too, had made such 
progress under her stepfather's tuition and by dint of her own 
industry, that she was engaged about the same time (May z, 
1820) for the Royal Court-players, with a salary of 824 thalers. 
On May 21, the eve of Richard's seventh anniversary, she 
made her first actual entry on this new dignity, in a comedy 
role. 

As to Richard's own progress, we have many a hint in Geyer's 
household reports to Albert : at one time we hear that " Richard 
leaves a trousers-seat per day on the hedge " ; at another, " Richard 
is growing big, and a good scholar." The boy has scarcely learnt 
a note of music yet, but in everything else shews such remarkable 
quickness of apprehension that Geyer finds the greatest pleasure 
in watching over his education ; he would have liked to make him 
a painter, " but I was never any good at drawing," as Wagner once 
told us himself. Geyer was also fond of taking him as companion 
on his daily walks, and not seldom would smuggle him into the 
theatre at rehearsal-time, thus laying the foundation of the stage's 



geyer's last years. 69 

magic power over Richard too, though it was against his father's 
wish for him to adopt that walk of life. For what concerns the 
boy's body, he had abready acquired great agility in climbing, as 
in all kinds of acrobatic feats : before he was seven years old, he 
terrified his mother by riding down the winding staircase-rail as 
quick as thought However, as he never made a slip, his people 
soon lost their alarm; in fact his brothers and sisters would 
frequently get him to shew visitors his skill in somersaults, stand- 
ing on the head, and other small gymnastic tricks. 

About this time occur the first disquieting signs of Geyer's fail- 
ing health. In the winter of 1820 he had gone alone to Leipzig 
for awhile, more as painter than actor, stopping with his brother- 
in-law Adolf Wagner ; who, since the death of his mother, had 
given up his bachelor quarters to join forces with sister Friederike 
in the Thoma house, where they set up a three-cornered establish- 
ment with their old fiiend its owner, Jungfer Jeannette. Here 
Geyer painted a good deal, and felt very unwell; so much so, 
that he withdrew from all outside intercourse, and vexed Adolf 
by refusing to take any share in his pet dramatic readings at the 
Tragers and Lacarri^res. Alike "dwelling and inmates were 
dismal " to him ; he complained of the unhealthy feel about the 
house; "the black poodle and the smoky old figures," life-size 
portraits in the Electoral apartments assigned to him, "have 
something uncanny which gets on one's nerves." Alarmed by 
his accounts of himself, his wife arrived at Leipzig to attend to 
him. " He is working too hard, and taking too little exercise," 
said the brother-in-law ; " 'tis a bad attack of spleen." But it was 
more than that ; it was the beginning of a general decline, and 
Geyer never really recovered ground. 

True, a ' cure ' of several weeks' duration, with abstention fi'om 
every form of work, so far restored the invalid that he was able to 
reappear in a comedy-r61e by the middle of February, and "once 
more enliven a large audience by his truly humorous acting." 
Meanwhile the " Slaughter of the Innocents " had been accepted 
by Count K6nneritz for performance at the Dresden theatre; 
Tieck, as dramaturgic adviser to the Intendanz, having expressed 
a most favourable opinion of it. So Geyer took an active part in 
die inscenation of his piece, in which he himself played Painter 
Klaus, and thirteen-year-old Clara Wagner was given the role of 
one of the children. The performance took place on Feb. 20, 



70 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

1 82 1, winning a great success and many calls for the author.* 
But the exertion of figuring as playwright, manager and peiformer 
in one, must have proved a terrible strain on a man whose strength 
was hardly yet restored ; as perhaps may be gathered from B6tti- 
ger's remark (in course of a long critique on the work and its pro- 
duction) that he could have wished that Geyer's reading of his 
own creation had been "kept more tranquil," though we must 
allow for the ordinary reporter's love of putting in a word himself. 
The piece was not repeated until several weeks later, owing to 
Geyer's state of health. 

At Easter 182 1 the family removed to a more roomy dwelling 
in a lofty old house at the corner of the Jiidenhof and Frauen- 
gasse, opposite the old Picture-gallery. It belonged to sword- 
cutler Voigt, the same who once had flashed before Richard's 
eyes a toy-sword intended for his Christmas-box, and hidden it 
again as quickly, — ^an impression keen in Wagner's memory for 
over sixty years. In front lay the shop of confectioner Orlandi, 
where the boy once "exchanged Schiller's poems for puflFs." 
Geyer took great pains over a tasteful decoration of the new 
abode, and rejoiced in its larger and more commodious studio. 
As Spring advanced, he bestowed peculiar care on the culture of 
his garden, in which he hoped to gather his dear ones round him 
for many a year. " When Fve nothing to do, I don't go to the 
theatre, but poke about in my garden," he writes to Albert, who 
had asked him for an item of news. As his piece was coming on 



* Besides Geyer as Maler Klaus, the wife Sophie was played by Mme. Schirmer, 
the scene-shifter Texel by Panii, Master-of-arts Stockmann by Geiling. Of little 
Clara's performance we read, '* Again young Clara Wagner, whom we have 
already seen play more than one small part with true childlike innocence and 
liveliness, displayed a quite delightful talent. The stage may cherish pleasant 
hopes of this young bud." — ^We append a very incomplete list of first perform- 
ances at other theatres : Breslau, June 1821 — the only other one in Geyer's 
lifetime ; Hamburg, Oct. 182 1 ; Weimar, Spring 1822, with Durand as Maler 
Klaus ; Berlin, Jan. 14, 1823, where the humorous acting of the famous Pius 
Alexander Wolff and bis wife kept the play for long upon the lists ; Stuttgart, 
March 1823 ; Prague, Sept. 1823, with several revivals ; Leipzig, Nov. 1824 ; 
Kassel, 1828 (?) ; Aachen, July 1829, and so on ; finally Bayreuth, May 22, 
1873, ^^^ Richard Wagner's sixtieth birthday. The r61e of Texel seems to 
have everywhere offered occasion for the most curious gags : the Riga town- 
theatre's acting copy is full of enigmatic variants from the author's text ; for 
instance, " The Jews have never brought us luck " is turned into the absurdity, 
"A heathen image never brought us luck." 



geyer's last years. 71 

at Breslau, he sent minute directions as to scenic details, the 
length and breadth of the picture that has to be overturned, etc., 
etc At the same time he heard the good news of the brilliant 
reception of Der Fteischutz in Berlin (June i8), a work whose 
Dresden production he was not to live to see. Weber had set 
out on May the ist, to be on the spot in good time ; but, owing 
to the over-taxing of the company by Spontini for his Olympic^ the 
rehearsals could not begin until three weeks later. The decisive 
battle had now been won; at midnight stage-manager Hellwig 
left the banquet given in Weber's honour after the performance, 
to retom to his friends at Dresden with tidings of triumph. 

In the middle of suiomer Geyer went with Rosalie to Breslau» 
where his " Kindermord " so lately had come to successful pro- 
duction. For the first time in twelve years he saw the town 
again, and renewed pleasant memories with old friends and 
acquaintances such as Bierey and Mosevius ; but the stay there 
did him Uttle good. After an absence of four weeks he returned 
to Dresden, in a very low state ; at a representation on the 28th 
August he had to battle with serious indisposition, but he appeared 
yet another time, and moreover took part in the reading-rehearsal 
of a new piece, " The Burgomaster of Saardam." * Again accom- 
panied by Rosalie, he went next for a change of air to Pillnitz 
** by order, but not at expense, of the Queen " ; the continuously 
rough and wintry weather did nothing for his convalescence. On 
the 19th September fell the mother's forty-third birthday, a family- 
festival which had never gone by without some gay surprise 
invented and arranged by Geyer ; for the first time he was absent 
on that day. From Pillnitz he sends her his congratulations, 
bewailing his inability to prepare a treat for her, " but it is his 
whim to make it up right heartily on his retiun to the home 
'drcle." The bad weather compels him to cut his holiday short 
After a complete rest, he feels rather better in town ; but die next 
<iay his condition is exacerbated by a violent attack of asthma. 
Between the paroxysms he still is occupied with the concerns of 
life ; thus, prostrated as he is, he is full of the desire to get hb 
excellent portrait of the King of Saxony reduplicated by litho- 

* Since the year 1801 the minor theatres of Paris had produced over ten 
difierent pieces dealing with the supposed adventures of Peter the Great at 
Saardam ; Lortzing subsequently used a German version of one of these for 
the book of his well-known opera C%ar und Zimmermann, 



72 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

graphy. To divert him, Richard must shew what he had leamt 
on the pianoforte : he played " Ub' immer Treu' imd Redlichkeit '* 
and the latest novelty, the " Jmigfemkranz" from FreisckUtz; in 
the adjoining room he heard tibie sick man murmur to his mother, 
" Has he a possible talent for music f " 

At nine in the evening next day, the 30th of September, the 
valiant heart had ceased to beat A letter from Kriegsrath 
Georgi to the old Breslau comrade Bierey tells us of the inconsol- 
able grief and despair of those left behind, of whom Rosalie alone 
had been able at last to control herself; in the presence of 
Richard and his sisters she had sworn to their mother a solemn 
oath — most faithfuUy observed — ^that she would carry out her 
filial duty to the departed, and become a prop to all of them. 
Early in the morning the mother had gone into the nursery with 
a word for each of the children ; to Richard she said, " 0( thee 
he would fain have made [something." To the boy it was as if a 
l^acy from his dead guardian ; " for a long time," he says, " I 
fancied that something indeed might become of me." 

Geyer's earthly remains were laid at rest a few days later, at 
seven on a bleak autumnal morning ; pair after pair, followed his 
colleagues of the Dresden stage, with a few more intimate personal 
friends. Roimd the open grave stood a family bereaved for the 
second time of a loving father, whose care had ever striven nobly 
to replace the first one's loss. 



IV. 
RICHARD WAGNER AS CHILD. 

Mrsijoum^. — Impressions of Eisleben. — Return to Dresden, — 
Admission into the Kreuzschuie. — The new suit. — Sister Cdcilie as 
playfellow, — Dread of ghosts, — Losckwitz : tale of a pumpkin, — 
Love of Nature and dumb animals, — " The history of my dogs." 
— Affection for his mother. 

Secure against denial by a father who died when I was 
in my cradle^ perchance the Norn so often flouted stole 
gently to it, and there bestowed on me her gift, " the n^er^ 
contented mind intent forever on the new"; a gift which 
never left poor untrained me, but mctde life and art, and 
my own self, my only educators. 

Richard Wagnbr. 

Geyer had departed this life too early to guide the boy into any 
definite course, or even to discover what might be his natural 
inclination. No regular plans having as yet been formed for his 
future, he was sent for the time being to Eisleben, where his step- 
Hother's younger brother had volunteered to receive him. 

For the present chapter in his life we have authentic data 
recorded by Richard Wagner himself, and also by his nephew 
F. Avenarius (in a contribution to the Augs, Allg. Zeitung of 
1883 entitled " Richard Wagner as a child "). To these we shall 
add such details from F. Praeger's mostly untrustworthy " Wagner 
as I knew him" as to us appear to bear the stamp of probability. 
Composing the differences between Praeger's English and German 
versions, we will commence with a narration he puts into the 
mouth of Richard Wagner himself in later years : 

"My first journey was in October 182 1.* Can one ever forget 
a first impression ? And my first long journey was such an event ! 



• Prater says "the beginning of 1822," but Wagner was always quite 
poative about the date as given above. 

73 



74 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Why, I seem even to remember the physiognomy of the poor lean 
horses that drew the jolting coach ; — and mind you, a post-car of 
those days 1 The horses were being changed at some intermediate 
station, the name of which I have now forgotten, when all the 
passengers had to alight I stood outside the inn, eating the 
bread and butter which my dear little mother had provided me ; 
to the astonishment of the postilion, as the tired-out horses were 
about to be led away I kissed them and thanked them for having 
brought me so far. Everything seemed strange to me, every cloud 
seemed different from the clouds at Dresden. How I looked 
around, to meet some new feature in everything 1 How grand I 
felt when the heavy car rolled through the gate of Eisleben ! The 
town inspired me with particular interest; I knew it to be the 
birthplace of great Luther, one of the heroes of my childhood. 
Nor was it without a reason, that religion should occupy the 
attention of a boy of my age ; it was a question of consdenoe 
with my thoroughly Lutheran family. As soon as we came to 
Dresden, where the oourt was Roman Catholic, all manner of 
means, both direct and indirect, were tried to make us embrace 
the court-religion. In vain, for my family remained staunch to 
the faith of its forefathers. What attracted me most in the great 
Reformer's character, was his dauntless energy and fearlessness. 
Since then I have often thought of the true instinct of the child 
— had I not also, as man, to preach a new gospel of art? Have 
I not also had to bear every insult in its defence? And have I 
not, too, had to say, ' Here I stand, God help me ; I cannot be 
otherwise!'?" 

The goldsmith uncle, to whom brother Julius had been ap- 
prenticed, dwelt at No. 55 on the Market of this Luther town, 
the house now belonging to a tradesman Eberhardt Richard 
seems to have been taught at first by his uncle himself; then, 
according to the latest inquiries, he went to a private school kept 
by Pastor Alt. As Fraeger makes him continue: "My good 
uncle tried his best to put me through some educational training 
and ever held the famous Dresden Kreuzschule before me as an 
incentive to my zeal. That I did not profit much by his instruc- 
tion, was, I fear, my own fault. I preferred rambling about the 
little country town and its environs, to learning the rules of 
grammar. Legends and fables of all kinds then had an immense 
fascination over me, and I often beguiled my uncle into reading 



RICHARD WAGNER AS CHILD. 75 

me a story that I might avoid working. But what always drew 
me towards him, was his boundless veneration for the memory of 
my own loved stepfather. Whenever he spoke of him, and he did 
so very often, he always referred to his loving good-nature, his 
amiability, and his gifts as an artist, and ever would end with a 
tearful sigh 'that he had to die so young."* — 

Among other news that came from Dresden in those days, 
were the tidings of the first performance of Der FreischuH there 
on January 26, 1822, amid boundless enthusiasm ; a laurel-wreath 
tied up with verses had been passed up from the parterre to Weber's 
desk. Visitors from the surrounding country streamed-in in shoals 
whenever the piece was announced ; and the house was packed at 
every repetition.* So the child's ninth birthday passed among the 
echoes of a work that was presently to take such hold of his 
imagination; while Weber himself had already begun the com- 
position of his Euryanthe, 

But the Eisleben stay was not to be of long duration, owing 
to a change in uncle Geyer's circumstances. " Rosalie complains 
of the Eisleben uncle," writes uncle Adolf to Albert at Breslau ; 
" surely one might excuse him with his altered situation, but still 
more in view of the wild suggestions of the mother, which are 
none the more laudable for their being well meant" This harsh 
remark of Adolf Wagner's seems founded less on reason, than on 
the old dispute between himself and what had now become the 
Geyer family; had he not lately been crossed again, when his 
brother's second daughter, Louise, adopted the theatrical profes- 
sion for good by accepting an engagement at Breslau? ''You 
would like Richard to come to us," he continues, "and were 
things as you think, it would be desirable. Only, they are not. 
Within the last few years I have been so taken to task by life, 
that I feel myself in the state of falling bodies, which become 
heavier (in whatever sense you choose to take it) the lower they 
falL Now this demands too strenuous a saving of myself and my 
time, for me to be able to bestow the requisite attention upon 
Richard. For these reasons I asked my friend Prof. Lindner to 
negotiate some means for furthering Richard's education, and 
delayed my answer to you in the hope of sending definite news ; 
but the only answer I have received to all my questions to L., 

* For the first twenty-five performances from 12 to 14,000 persons came 
Into town, many of them from distances of fifty to sixty miles. 



76 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

has been that he himself had received none as yet to the inquiries 
which he had made." The letter goes on to relate an accident that 
had happened to poor Jeannette Thoma; on Christmas-eve she 
had slipped on the pavement, broken her left leg, and been 
brought home on a litter " in a pitiful plight" Adolf winds up 
the description of his household troubles with the words : " So 
you may judge for yourself if we could take in Richard here."* 

While Albert, apparently on his own initiative, was making 
these inquiries of his uncle Adolf, young Richard's immediate 
destiny had been decided otherwise. At the time that Adolf s 
letter was written, the boy had already returned to the bosom of 
his family. There could be no real doubt in the mind of his 
relatives as to what his stepfather would have advised; it was 
always his wish that Richard should become a student, and there 
could be no more fitting preparation than that to be obtained at 
the Dresden Kreuzschule. On the 2nd of December 1822, in 
the middle of the winter^term, he was therefore received into the 
second division of the fifth class of that school, under the name 
of "Richard Geyer," which he seems to have home since his 
mother's second marriage, t This had been preceded by a pre- 
liminary examination, the prospect of which had filled the boy 
with dread, for all his pride at the idea of entering a Gymnasium. 
The venerable appearance of the building, the echo of his own 
footfall on the stone steps of the hall, made the little heart beat 
fast in timid expectation of what was yet to come. However, his 
examination went off better than he had anticipated, probably 
more in virtue of his ready and intelligent answers, than of his 
somewhat scrappy information ; at anyrate he always kept a fond 
remembrance of the teachers at this school, and their kindly 
treatment of the pupils. 

We reach the Christmastide of 1822. Imagine the new Cross- 
scholar's delight, when beside the cake and gingerbread — without 

* A longer extract from this letter is given in C. F. Glasenapp's article, 
« Adolf Wagner, ein Lebensbild," Bayreuiher BUUter, July-August 1885. 

t In bis mother's application to the Krenischule the stepfather had been 
explicitly given out as the father (a not infrequent occurrence in such 
formalities), and thus we find him inscribed by Rector Grobel under number 
588 of the current list of scholars in the Pandecta rerum Sckolam A Cruets 
cencementitun (commenced in 1688) as '* WiVulm Richard Geyer ^ son of the 
deceased Court-player Geyer, bom at Leipzig the 23nd May 1813, recip, the 
and December 1822, CI. v. Div. 2." 



RICHARD WAGNER AS CHILD. ^^ 

which no German Christmasing were thinkable — he found on the 
board a brand-new suit, " to cut a decent figure at school" This 
time be had been allowed to rise at daybreak, to help adorn the 
christmas-tree ; never could he see one afterwards without recalling 
his mother's tender love, and so late as 1857, after an interval 
of five^and-thirty years, we find him referring to this same 
" new suit" 

The widow still retained the comfortable set of rooms in Herr 
Voigt's house on the Jiidenhof. The elder children were earning 
good pay ; Geyer's stock of pictures had gone up in value ; a Royal 
pension appears to have helped : in brief, though Frau Geyer was 
not exactly left well off, yet she was not precisely poor. As 
Albert and Louise were engaged at the Breslau theatre, her 
household at present consisted of Rosalie, Clarchen, Ottilie, 
Richard and Cadlie. When the first period of mourning was 
over, the mother once more gathered in her rooms a goodly share 
of Dresden's best society ; and " all the children took after their 
parents too much, to forget that life's earnestness can bear a 
tidy pinch of humour in its daily flavouring. If quarrels arose 
among themselves, the spirit of Geyer's bringing-up soon restored 
the wonted harmony." * 

Richard's chief companion at this age of nine was his " pretty 
little dark-haired sister Cile," who worshipped him and treasured 
everything he said as gospel. He is always with her whenever 
he " has time," according to a boy's notion of it ; with her he 
hatches out his plans ; with her he scours the fields, though not 
without the male's strict sense of condescension; with her he 
shares his little cubicle at home. " By day, one of the children 
would be waiting at the window for the other to come back from 
school ; by night they had to suffer for each other, as both were 
most excitable and fitful sleepers. They had a holy dread of 
being left in the dark at any time \ Richard would see ghosts in 
every comer, while Cile gave them tongue. Of the steep dark 
stairs leading up to the suite the boy had an especial horror : if 
it was evening by the time he reached home, he would ring down 
a maid with a candle, despite all orders to the contrary. ' Bless 
me J ' he would say when reproved again, ' I was only playing with 
it, ever so lightly, and the silly thing began to ring' ; — at other 

* F. Avenarius, after the remimscences of his mother CScilie, from which 
the following anecdotes are also borrowed. 



78 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

times the ' silly thing ' refused to ring till one tugged at its rusty 
crank with all one's might Once the pair stayed out too late, 
and had to trudge back from Blasewitz in the dark : what a 
skeltering past the churchyards ! Luckily a cart came by ; they 
hailed it, explaining that they had no money, but really didn't 
weigh much ; the driver had some sense of humour, and Richard 
was soon proudly crying, * See now, Cile ! There's the old grave- 
yard with its ghosts ; but— clck ! — they can't catch us now,' " 

Cacilie had plenty to say of her brother's sudden shouts and 
talking in his sleep, his laughter and tears in the night ; but she 
herself was not much better. Once she ran breathless to her 
mother : " There's a great bogey in my bed." Richard was no 
little pleased ; thenceforth whenever he wanted to tease her, he 
had only to creep under the bed and cry in an unearthly voice : 
"Cilel Cile! there's a great big bogey hiding in your bed."* 
However, these little practical jokes caused no ill-feeling : when 
it once seemed threatening in fact, the boy surprised his sister 
with a cap which he had stitched for her doll himself, and all was 
smooth again. " I never could be angry with him," says Cacilie 
in remembrance of that happy time, "for he either had his mouth 
so full of childish jokes that I was forced to laugh against my 
will, or his eyes so full of tears that I myself must cry." Very 
often these tears were in bitter earnest — but not always: for 
instance when he wanted to run round to the theatre and look 
on from the wings, and his views as to its preferability to pre- 
paring his lessons did not coincide with his mother's, he would 
plant his elbows on the table and mark time : " Oh dear 1 Now 
they're doing that — now that — ^and that," and sob as if his heart 
would break, making grimaces at Cacilie all the while. As a rule 
the ruse succeeded : " Off you go ! " came the order, and he was 
off in a twinkling. 

But the children's brightest days werefthose when their mother 
took them to the country. An early stay at Loschwitz on the 
Elbe lingered in their recollection long after boy and girl had 
become man and woman (down to a few years ago, at least, the 
house where they lodged was still standing). Mother and elder 
sisters had much to do in town, and mostly left the children in 

* <* This ' big bogey ' became a catch-word in the fieunUy. I myself possess 
two letters in which die long since adult master threatens his sister with it in 
jest" (F. Avenarins). 



RICHARD WAGNER AS CHILD. 79 

charge of their rustic landlady, or of a Frau Doktorin Schneider 
at Blasewitz, where they had built themselves a hut of waste 
planks next the dog-kennel, in which to tell each other stories. 
The boats skimming by on the Elbe lent wings to their fiuicy ; 
inventive as Wieland of the saga, Richard set about building one 
himself, which the couple meant for no less an adventure than a 
sail on the Loschwitzer brook ! 

With the freedom of the open air an irresistible passion for 
going barefoot seizes them, the sister in particular. A drawing 
by Kietz, in the possession of the Avenarius family, shews us the 
boy in the frateiiial act of sharing his foot-gear with her. Im- 
patient to welcome back their mother, Cile and her brother have 
rushed off to the landing-stage one afternoon ; but it is raining, 
and has turned bitterly cold ; while the children are sitting lonely 
on a fallen tree-trunk, waiting for the boat that won't make haste 
to come from Dresden, Cile's naked feet begin to freeze. ''Stop 
a bit!" says Richard, "just you puU on this one of my boots, 
and well warm the other feet on one another." This is the 
moment chosen for the little sketch : a sjrmbol of Wagner's readi- 
ness throughout his life to share what he owned with the needy, 
as expressed in his praise of the old Aryan heroes (P.fV.Vl. 278). 

A more tragic incident, the tale of the big pumpkin, likewise 
has Loschwitz for its background. Mother and sisters were in 
town, whither Richard's tutor — ^who "explained Cornelius Nepos "' 
to him, and seems to have fruitlessly endeavoured to teach him 
to "draw eyes and a flat head" — had also gone. Now it so 
happened that Richard had discovered a mighty pumpkin, in 
which he carved not only "eyes," but a nose and a grinning 
mouth : a fearsome sight " Come, Cile, we'll have fine fun with 
this I" Cile was quite ready; only, she also had made a dis- 
covery, namely that their hostess had taken Frau Geyer's best 
porcelain tea-set from the cupboard in mamma's absence and 
without her permission, to use it for her private guests ; all the 
budding housewife's sense of propriety was outraged, and the 
young lady determined that, if they both went out and left the 
sitting-room unguarded, at least it should be left secure : " Well 
take away the latch and door key ! " So out they sallied : first 
into the village, to frighten people out of their wits; then, as 
somehow that wouldn't succeed, up aloft to the hills. Key and 
latch were deposited in the pumpkin — ^a fine clatter they made I 



8o LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

— ^and down it was rolled to the bottom. A glorious game they 
had, racing down after the pumpkin, scrambling up with it again* 
and so on ad infinitum. At last it turned dusk, and (they must 
be getting home. But the stupid pumpkin had lost both latch 
and key, through its mouth ! How to get into the parlour, and 
their bedroom that lay behind ? A good job, mother can't come 
back to-night ; the house-folk daren't go beyond scolding. " You'll 
just have to sleep on the stove-bench out here," they acquainted 
the culprits when through with their lecture. After shedding 
tears enough, Richard and Cile puUed off their clothes, sobbed 
a little more, shivered, froze, and fell asleep. It was night by 
the time Dominie Humann arrived, the mother having sent him 
from town to see after the children. In judicial calm he stood 
to hear the charges and defence of those aroused from slumber. 
But it gradually dawned upon his brain that he must pass the 
night too on the stove-bench: then his wrath boiled up, and 
scathingly he trounced the "little wretches." He had the worst 
of it, however; proud as Minerva, with "Sir! — what are you 
thinking of? — It has nothing at all to do with you — ^it was / 
who did it— and besides — " etc., Cile placed herself with arms 
a-kimbo between her brother and the tutor, as Rietz has drawn 
this scene as well. The denouement was suggested by the 
remark of a disinterested party that, after all, one might get in 
quite well through the window, with help of a ladder. So Richard 
and Cile hung their clothes on their arms, and were up in a trice; 
with proper dignity the tutor slowly followed after. — " If we only 
hadn't put the key in the pumpkin," writes Wagner sadly to his 
sister some thirty years later, when in exile, " everything would 
have gone much better. Don't you agree with me ? " * 

One principal trait of Richard Wagner's character was already 
shewing in the boy: his pronounced and passionate love of 
Nature. Singing and romping by his sister's side, or pushing 
her along in the little hand-sledge in winter, to roam about the 
country was his chief delight At times they would go to the 
Linkesches Bad, on the right of the Elbe: in the meadow 
bounding its garden they had open air combined with music, 
as paling-guests of the concerts. Or mother would give each 
of tliem a sechser (value 6 pfennigs), — ^then they were " splendidly 
off," and could venture as far as the Plauenscher Gnmd, or even 
* See F. AveDarivs : Richara Wagner ais Kind. 



RICHARD WAGNER AS CHILD. 8 1 

to Loschwitz, and buy a glass of milk to wash down the rolls they 
bad brought with them. The strange thing was, that Richard, 
ever so glad to look at fruit and flowers, could never take them 
in bis hand. But his love of Nature came out strongest in his 
devotion to dumb animals. The boy who had thanked and kissed 
the weary horses on the way to Eisleben, would always be explor- 
ing for dogs with whom to strike up friendship. He knew every 
hound in the neighbourhood, and his sister and he had a regular 
system of espionage for litters of pups to be rescued from drown- 
ing. Once he heard something whining in a pond, and with the 
aid of his sister he fished out a newborn puppy : previous experi- 
ence told him that it was forbidden to bring it home ; but that 
couldn't be helped; he wasn't going to let the poor thing die. 
So Cile smuggled it into her bed. However, it betrayed a 
defective grasp of the situation : it whimpered, and stood revealed. 
Another time he improvised a rabbit-hutch in his lesson-desk, 
cutting a large air-hole in its back. — At last he obtained his 
mother's permission to keep a dog of his own; but when the 
children were out one day the poor beast fell out of the window, 
and broke its neck, — long, long was it mourned. This incident, 
which he is said to have described in a later period as the greatest 
sorrow of those years, would probably have formed the opening 
chapter of that " History of my Dogs " so long projected for his 
iamily's perusaL Throughout his life it was as good as impossible 
for him to be quite happy without " something to bark around 
him," and the History of my Dogs would have proved a very 
significant autobiography, revealing aspects of the artisf s mind 
which, as it is, we have to piece together for ourselves from 
fragmentary utterances. 

He never could bear to see an animal maltreated ; at such a 
sight his anger knew no bounds, and he would throw himself on 
the delinquent without regard to consequences. " One of his 
first impressions was a chance visit he paid with some of his 
school-fellows to a slaughter yard. An ox was about to be killed. 
The butcher stood with uplifted axe. The horrible implement 
descended on the head of the stately animal, who gave a low, 
deep moan. The boy turned deadly pale, and would have rushed 
at die butcher had not his companions forcibly held him back 
and taken him away from the scene. For some time after he 
could not touch meat . . • When a man, he could not refer to 

F 



84 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Wagner sums up this epoch of his youth as follows : '^ I do not 
believe there can have been a boy more devoted to classical 
antiquity, than myself at the time I attended the Dresden Kreuz- 
schule. Though Greek mythology and history formed my chief 
attractions, I also felt drawn to the Greek language itself with a 
power that made me almost ungovernable in my shirking of Latin. 
How far my case was normal in this regard, I cannot judge ; but 
I may add that my favourite master at the Klreuzschule, Dr Sillig, 
was so pleased with my enthusiasm that he strongly urged me to 
adopt philology as my profession " {P. W, V. 292). His imagina- 
tion was fired by the deeds of the champions of freedom in the 
Persian wars, his fancy by the tales of Greek mythology in K. 
Ph. Moritz' "Gotterlehre." The wrath of Achilles and Ulysses' 
wanderings, the heroic figures of Ajax and Hercules, the fate of 
Philoctetes and the gloom of the CEdipus legend, alike became 
realities to his plastic mind ; and it is quite in keeping with these 
boyish impressions that in the year 1850, when he had already 
passed completely to the sphere of northern saga, besides his 
Siegfried and his Wieland he was thinking out a tragic drama of 
Achilles, In his own words, " Again and again, amid the most 
absorbing labours of a life entirely distracted from such studies, 
have I won my only breath of freedom by a plunge into the 
ancient world " (-P. W, V. 293). 

To take Praeger's word for it, he was plagued with his cutaneous 
malady even in his schooldays. Repeated attacks of the kind 
may perhaps account for his slow promotion during his second 
school-year, as compared with the years immediately succeeding. 
"An attack would be preceded by depression of spirits and 
irritability of temper. Conscious of his growing peevishness, he 
sought refuge in solitude. As soon as the attack was subdued, 
his bright animal spirits returned, and none would recognise in 
the daring little fellow the previous taciturn misanthrope." The 
psychology is Praeger's, but, allowing for defects of focus, it 
probably is pretty near the mark. 

The same informant tells us that as soon as Richard had grown 
a little used to school his ready wit procured him a band of 
followers among his schoolmates, but ''the stupid hated him, as 
ever"; also that the headstrongness with which he pursued his 
will against all opposition was the cause of frequent quarrels, 
which would often have ended in blows, but for his winning talent 



THE KREUZSCHULER. 85 

of persuasion : '' Practical joking was a favourite sport with him, 
but only indulged in when harm could befall no one, and incident 
offered some comic situation. To hurt one willingly^ was im- 
possible in Wagner. He was ever kind, and would never have 
attempted anything that might result in real pain. His super- 
abundance of animal spirits, well-seconded by his active frame, 
led him often into harebrained escapades; but his fearless 
intrepidity was tempered and dominated by a strong self-reliance, 
which always came to the rescue at the critical moment" As an 
instance, we may give the same author's account of an adventure 
which Wagner's eldest brother is said to have related to him 
(Praeger) in illustration of Richard's foolhardiness. 

One day, so this story runs, a holiday was suddenly proclaimed 
to the boys at work in school Wild with excitement at the rare 
event, they rushed out into the street, shouting and throwing their 
caps in the air. On the impulse of the moment Ricbard caught 
one of these, and flung it right up to the roof of the schoolhouse. 
Among his admiring schoolfellows there was one who did not 
cheer, however — the one who had lost his cap. As he never 
could bear to see anybody in tears, with his usual swiftness of 
resolve young Wagner ran off to recover the missile. Back into 
the building, upstairs to the cock-loft, out through a ventilator, he 
emerged on the roof. The youngsters down below huzzaed, but 
held their breath when they saw the intrepid urchin scrambling 
down the steep incline on all fours. Some hurried off to fetch 
the porter. When the man arrived, they crowded after him as 
he edged his ladder up the narrow stairway. Meanwhile the 
climber had secured his prize, crawled back in safety, and 
managed to creep through the air-hole into the pitch-dark garret 
just in time to hear the buzz of voices on the stairs. Panting, he 
hid himself behind a partition, and waited for the dreaded " custos " 
to mount the ladder and peep out ; then, half scared, half joking, 
he left his retreat and asked quite coolly: "Whatever are you 
looking for? Is it a bird?" "Eh! a gallows-bird" was the 
scathing answer of the angry porter, heartily glad, however, to see 
the scapegrace safe and sound. — When this story was repeated to 
the master in after years he is said to have confirmed its details, 
adding a touch known only to himself: he remembered that he 
had been seized with giddiness upon the roof, and was about to 
give himself up for lost, when his peril extorted the cry, " Mein 



86 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

liebes Miitterchen !" — those words reacted on him like a charm, 
restored his courage, and enabled him to scale the roof and 
regain the opening. 

The escapade was not allowed to pass without a lecture from 
the headmaster, threatening more appreciable punishment should 
the culprit be caught in any such exploit again. Perhaps this may 
help us to date it Only once in all his Dresden school-time, 
namely at Michaelmas 1823, is Richard's '' conduct '' rated merely 
"tolerable" in the half-yearly report— otherwise it is always 
" good " or " very good " ; and Albert Wagner was actually on a 
visit to Dresden about this time, to accompany his sister Rosalie 
to Hamburg for a double star-engagement in which he was to 
figure as '' first tenor from Breslau." 

Besides his regular education, the boy had remained in un- 
broken connection with the theatre through his brother and 
sisters, as erewhile through his stepfather. We have already 
referred to Geyer's personal relations with the honoured master 
who had occupied the post of Royal Saxon Kapellmeister since 
181 7, also to Weber's difficulties with a "German Opera" de- 
manded by the larger public but looked at with indifference by 
the court. As " Schauspiel " and " Singspiel " were served by the 
same company, the dramaturg Tieck and the conductor Weber 
were all but hostile captains. Equally active was the Italian 
Opera's antagonism against the German musician : imder the all- 
powerful protection of Cabinet-minister von Einsiedel, Morlachi 
as Italian Kapellmeister with his subordinate the Concertmeister 
PoUedro waged incessant war against Weber ; and it is characteristic 
of his position at Dresden that Der Freischutz came to an earlier 
hearing in BerUn and Vienna than on the spot where its author 
himself was engaged.* When Richard played the "Jungfem- 
kranz" to his dying stepfather, the work itself had not been 
performed as yet in the Saxon capital ; his return from Eisleben 

* Here are a few prise specimens of his systematic snubbing at Dresden. 
To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Friedrich August's accession, Weber 
had composed a "Jubilee Cantata " ; it was struck off the programme. For 
the marriage of Prince Friedrich he was commanded to compose a festival 
opera ; the order was rescinded. The production of his Syhnma at Dresden 
was made impossible by intrigues against him ; and when he returned there 
in the full flush of his FMschiitz* Berlin triumph, he was greeted by his 
superfine Intendant with the incredulous question, " Why, Weber 1 are you 
really so big a man ?" 



THE KR£UZSCHtfLER« 87 

to Dresden coincided with the height of its popularity. Tieck's 
protest, that " the Freischtitz was the most unmusical din that ever 
had brawled across the boards," had been drowned in the general 
acclamation. Writing in 1841, Wagner himself describes the 
immense sensation raised throughout all Germany: ''Weber's 
coimtrymen from North and South united in their admiration of 
the accents of this pure and pregnant elegy, from the adherents 
of Kant's * Criticism of pure Reason ' to the readers of the Vienna 
* Mode-JoumaL' The Berlin philosopher hummed * The bridal 
wreath for thee we bind'; the police-director repeated with 
enthusiasm 'Through the woods and through the meadows'; 
whilst the court-lacquey hoarsely sang *The joy of the hunter' — 
and I myself remember having practised, as a child, a quite 
diabdlical turn of voice and gesture to give due grit to ' In this 
earthly vale of woe.' " 

From this last sentence we may judge the work's effect on 
the boy's receptive mind: nothing on earth came up to the 
Freischiitz; on it was centred all the fervour of his lively temper. 
Still without declared or conscious passion for music, the charm 
of this its manifestation usurped his youthful soul, and drew it 
quite within the magic circle. Der Freischutz was the clue that 
led him to its author's other works, and to his person: never 
could he forget the fascination when, hidden in a comer of the 
theatre, he heard the first weird shivering of the cymbals in the 
Preziosa overture ; and he would often recall the thrill wherewith 
he saw the spare and fragile figure of the master returning from 
rehearsal, passing the house in the Judenhof, or even entering 
it to exchange a few words with his mother. * He regarded him 
with a holy awe, and, beckoning sister Cile to his side, would 
whisper to her: "My! that's the greatest man alive! How 
great he is, you haven't the weeniest notion." The flood of tears 
which formed his last, and often but too natural device for 
escaping from his evening-tasks to the theatre, flowed chiefly on 
Der Freischutz nights. Then, when he saw his hero at head of 
the orchestra, his heart would cry aloud, "Not King nor Emperor, 
but to stand there like a General, and conduct ! " t Scarcely 

* Hans von Wolsogen, Erinmrwugsn an Richard Wagner^ 2nd ed. 
(Keclam) 1891, pp. 22-23. 

t Wcbcr had introduced this practice into Dresden as an innovation ; 
previously the band had been led in Italian fashion from the first violin-desk* 
whilst the conductor's duties were confined to directing the singers. 



88 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

past the earliest five-finger exercises on the piano, he taught 
himself by ear and stealth the Freisckutz overture, much to the 
disapproval of his music-master : it was the first outward sign of 
the musician, and called forth an instant rebuff. Intention and 
execution were scarcely on a par, but aheady the inner spirit of 
the tone-poem had passed so fully and distinctly into his mind, 
that twenty years later, — when he himself had to conduct it 
in Dresden for the first time, — he was able to restore the 
whole romantic flavour of this forest-fantaisie to the purity of 
a time before its tempo and expression had been falsified by 
Reissiger. 

Hans V. Wolzogen records the following, from a conversation 
with the master in later years : " I begged my mother for a couple 
of groschen to buy music-paper with, so that I might write out 
Weber's Lutzoufs wilde verwegene Jagd^ in order to possess it In 
its 'possession' of Weber's music lay Germany's fortime. Here 
the poor fatherlandless German found hb fatherland. When the 
whole misery of Saxon history was read out to us at school, and 
I had to tell myself 'That's what you belong to,' I sought in 
humiliation for something besides ; tlien I learnt of the existence 
of our Weber's music, and knew where lay my native land : I felt 
myself a German, That feeling never 1^ me." ♦ Twenty years 
afterwards it resounds from the sojourn in Paris : '' O my glorious 
German fatherland, how can I else than love thee, were it only 
that from out thy soil there sprang the ' Freischiitz ' ! Needs 
must I love the German Folk that loves the ' Freischiitz,' that 
e'en to-day, in full-grown manhood, still feels those sweet 
mysterious thrills which made its heart beat fast in youth. Ah ! 
thou adorable German reverie ; thou Schwdrmerei of woods and 
gloaming, of stars, of moon, of village-bells when chiming seven 
at eve 1 Happy he who understands you, can feel, believe, can 
dream and lose himself with you ! How dear it is to me that ly 
too, am a German !— " {F. W. VII. 183). 

"Music was not thought of " in his fiirst stage of education, as 
he tells us : " Two of my sisters learnt to play the pianoforte ; I 
listened to them, but had no lessons myself. Then a tutor, who 
explained Cornelius Nepos to me, at last had to teach me the 
piano as well " (/l W. I. 3-4). This ended in that episode with 
the FreisckuH overture, when his tutor declared that nothing 

* H. ▼. Wolzogen, Erinmrungen, p. 23. 



THE KREUZSCHOLER. 89 

would come of him. Sister Cacilie was present, and says that 
Richard boimded up at this pronouncement, and thundered out 
"You may go to Jericho with your piano-teaching! I shan't 
play any more." But " the man was right," continues Wagner, 
" in all my life I have never learned to play the piano properly. 
Thenceforth I played for my own amusement; nothing but 
overtures, with the most fearful fingering. It was impossible for 
me to play a passage clearly, and I conceived a just dread of all 
scales and runs. Of Mozart I only cared for the overture to the 
Magic Flute ; Don Giovanni went against my grain, because of 
the Italian text beneath : it seemed to me such rubbish." 

But matters did not stop there. His head was so full of Der 
IreiscMfz .thaX he longed to take an active part in it. He 
determined to get up a private performance of the scene in the 
Wolf s-gulch ; it was to take place at the abode of one of his 
friends, in what was formerly known as merchant Hofer's house» 
not far from the Kreuzschule; Richard was to play Kaspar, 
his friend to play Max. Funds in provision of die necessary 
pasteboard, paper and paint, he saved penny by penny from his 
breakfast-money ; his schoolmates had to share in the interminable 
work of cutting, trimming and devising. Scenery, wings, curtain, 
fireworks and all, were gradually laid in, and among other fear- 
some monsters there was a terrible boar, with great white tusks, 
to make a raid upon his stage. 

We find a hint of such diversions in the Communication to my 
Friends (1851), where he says, " I felt an inclination to play-acting, 
and indulged it in the quiet of my chamber ; in all probability 
this was aroused in me by the close connection of my family 
with the stage." By now another sister had adopted the pro- 
fession: on May z, T824, occurred the d^but of sister Clara, as 
" Signora Clara Wagner^^ temporarily engaged at the Court Italian 
Opera. Since her earliest attempts in fantastic child-roles such 
as Lili in the Donauweibchen^ the guardian spirit Jeriel in the 
Teufelsmuhle etc. (for the most part by the side of Frau Hartwig), 
she had profited by a long course of vocal study to become an 
expert singer. Her first vocal part was that of Angiolina in 
Rossini's Cenerentola^ with its thousand-times repeated crescendi 
and colorature ; and not only the young artist's charming presence, 
her youthful freshness and childlike naivety, but in particular a 
virtuosity far beyond her years, obtained the full approval of 



90 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Dresden connoisseurs and critics.* It was much to Richard's 
disappointment that this ddbut should have taken place at the 
hated Italian, and not the German Opera : shortly thereafter he 
must have been the more rejoiced at seeing Rosalie play 
"Preziosa" under Weber's own baton; a part in which she made 
her first excursion from Recited Play, and alike in song and 
dance, gesture, dress and bearing, presented a ''most charming 
picture," winning repeated nfaFoes of applause from an over- 
flowing hoaae. In bet, she made so great an impression upon 
her audience, that the memory of her poetic rendering was not 
effaced by Schrdder-Devrient herself, t A like success awaited 
her at Leipzig, where she played a number of "guest" roles the 
following winter ; among them Katchen von Heilbronn, Marianne 
in Goethe's Gtschwister^ and this same " Preziosa." 

At Easter 1825 Richard was moved up to the Fourth Class in 
the Kreuzschule. His promotion from this time onward is regular 
in succession, and evidence of his unceasing industry. His mind 
is now unfolding in every direction, and Geyer's earlier words, 
"Richard is growing big and a good scholar," are gaining full 



* In the " Chronik der kgl. Schaubtthne : CeturetUola^ ossia la bonid. m 
Irium/o" of the Dresden Abemheitung Na 116, May 14, 1824, we read: 
"In this piece a young pupil of our Chorus-durector Mieksch, Dem. Clara 
Wagner, the sixteen-year-old sister of our court-actress Rosalie Wagner, 
made her first appearance at the Italian Opera. The audience was pleased 
to remaric that the debutante's voice is most excellent in quality, volume and 
compass, and affords great promise for the future. To go into particulars, we 
found distinctness and expression in declamatory song, especially in recitative, 
a free, well-accented and intelligible enunciation, a pleasing sostenuto, taste 
and agility in ornament, and a correct distribution of the breath ; the acting 
was well-judged and unconstrained. If she continues as she has b^gun, this 
young artist will certainly take honourable rank among the songstresses of 
Germany." 

t Thus Alfred von Wolzogen in his life of Schroder-Devrient quotes a com- 
parison once drawn between the Gipsy-maids of these two artists : " Rosalie 
Wagner lent her rdle a fresher colouring and livelier realisation of its mirth 
and archness ; Frau Schroder-Devrient, on the other hand, with the charm of 
her lofty figure and the nobility of her carnage, gave more prominence to the 
sovereign power which Preciosa's beauty exerts over the rough gipsy-horde. 
. . . She recited the impromptu in the first act with grace and correctness, 
but here we preferred her predecessor (Rosalie Wagner), who gave more 
point to Preziosa's inner wrestling with the spirit of prophecy ; for in this 
scene the audience should be led to believe that the lyrics spring fresh from 
the depths of the soul." 



THE KREUZSCHOLER. 9 1 

conoboradon. The time of clambering on to the schoolhouse 
roof is over; ready as ever for a merry prank, he has higher aims 
in view. His reference to his boyish ''enthusiasm for classical 
antiquity '^ would appear to apply to this period of his school- 
days in particular. Fortune had favoured him with the proper 
teachers at the Kreuzschule to flEui and feed the flame, and 
occasion soon arose to wake his dormant faculties. On the iSth 
of November 1825 his class was robbed by scarlet fever of one 
of its most popular members, a lad of equal age with Richard, 
full of bright hopes, deeply mourned by teachers and comrades. 
The death occurred in the middle of the night: the following 
rooming the sad tidings were announced to the assembled school, 
together with the task of writing an appropriate poem for the 
burial on the morrow, when the body was to be accompanied 
to the graveyard of S. Elias by the whole gymnasium, masters 
and boys. Richard's poem won the prize, and was accordingly 
printed, though not before he " had cleared of it much bombast. 
I was eleven years of age then,'' he says, " and promptly deter- 
mined to be a poet" * He sketched out tragedies on the model 
of the Greeks, instigated by acquaintance with August Apel's 
Folyidos^ Die Aitolier^ Kallirhoe etc., with all the wonders he 
had heard at school about the grandeur of the old Greek Theatre 
and its national significance. We have already mentioned Apel's 
Folyidos and Adolf Wagner's direction of a private performance 
thereof at Leipzig (p. 25) ; the KaUirhot also had been success- 
fully produced at a small ducal theatre, with incidental music 
expressly composed for it All three works of this talented 
author are to be regarded as a poetic embodiment of the results 
of his study of antique tragedy,! and their clever imitation of 
Greek forms of verse was better suited to the youthful mind 



* We here have one of the extremely rare instances of a slip in the master's 
memory, else so accurate even in such minor details as immaterial dates ; to 
be exact, he was just twelve and a half years old at the time. 

t *' It would be absurd to find fault with him for having adopted this par- 
ticular course, instead of writing philologic treatises, perhaps in Latin," sajfs 
Adolf Wagner. "The rapidity, poignancy, mass, of Pofyuhs point to aa 
imitation of the u^schylic; the difiiiseness, pathologic expansion of the 
AUolier to the Euripidean style; the musical feeling of the Ktdlirhoe to a 
transition from the ancient to the modem. ThemistokUs was the subject 
chosen for an imitation of Sophocles ; whilst a HerakUs in Lydien was com- 
pleted for a satyr-play, but never printed." 



92 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

than stiff and clumsy literal translations by Voss or Stolberg. 
They may have been recommended for this pmpose to the young 
enthusiast either by his school-teachers or by uncle Adolf himself, 
who paid a visit to Dresden in the summer of 1825 in order to 
give sister Rosalie a well-meant piece of advice. 

Neither these tragic sketches of Richard's, nor the printed poem 
on the death of his schoolfellow, have been preserved ; for nothing 
was ever farther from Wagner's thoughts, than to become the 
curator of his own intellectual by-products. Numerous inquiries 
were made by various persons in the master's lifetime, with a view 
to discovering the prize-poem and offering him a similar experience 
to that afforded Goethe, for instance, by the unearthing of his 
HolUnfahrt Christi. But the proper Eckermann was not to be 
found, though — bearing in mind the German's well-known fondness 
for hoarding up — it would still seem a simple matter to search the 
exercise-books etc. left behind by Wagner's schoolfellows and 
masters for a printed copy. 

About this time the boy had a great sorrow to bear, in the news 
of his beloved Weber's death. Early one morning in February 
1826 the ailing master had taken his last farewell of his family, to 
set out with his friend the flautist Fiirstenau for London, vii Paris 
and Calais, for the production of his Oberon, The reception 
accorded to his work at Covent Garden was good, to some extent 
enthusiastic; but he was not spared bitter disappointments, all 
the more trying to him after the struggles and exertions of his 
Dresden years. During the whole course of the thirteen personally- 
conducted performances of his opera his life was flickering to its 
end, and at last on the morning of June the 5th he was found 
dead in his bed : "weary and exhausted, through the magic horn 
of Oberon he breathed away his life's last breath." 

This grief was partly alleviated by the return of Rosalie from a 
brilliant success at Prague. She had appeared in several rdles 
there, and gained the renown of "an actress of true vocation " as 
Katchen von Heilbronn, Goethe's Marianne, and Juliet in par- 
ticular. With regard to the last-named we read in a Prague letter 
to the Dresden Abendzeitung of July 8-9, "this gifted young artist 
was fully equal to her task, and held the audience spellbound. . . . 
The bail and balcony scenes, with Herr Moritz as Romeo, were 
particularly well conceived and carried out" At the same time 
Shakespeare is definitely dawning on Richard's horizon. The 



THE KREUZSCHttLER. 93 

boy does not content himself, however, with the current transla- 
tions ; accustomed to conquering difficulties, and getting to the 
root of a matter, he throws himself heart and soul into study of 
the English language, '' merely to make a thorough acquaintance 
with Shakespeare," and produces a metrical rendering of Romeo's 
monologue into German as its first-fruit 

In addition to Shakespeare, he rushes with all the fervour of 
youth into Homer's world of heroes and adventure. Since Easter 
1826, just thirteen years of age, he had entered the Third Class 
of his gymnasium ; *^ in the third class I translated the first twelve 
books of the Odyssey," he tells us, and the archives of the Kreuz- 
schule confirm his tale. lists of works read by the various pupils 
appear to have been regularly entered up at that time ; among those 
of Michaelmas 1826 we find under the heading "Extra private 
studies of the Third Class, 2nd div." a record of Richard's Homer- 
reading and his written translation of the first three books of the 
Odyssey, — a supplemental note, " Achilleus' Siegesfireude, Blum.," 
would seem to refer to some Blumeniese^ or "golden treasury," of 
Greek poetry then in fashion. This brief specification does not 
acquire its true significance, however, until we compare it with 
what his schoolfellows achieved at the same time: only two of 
them ventured on Homer at all, and one of these had confined 
himself to one book of the Odyssey, the other to 200 verses of the 
Iliad ; the rest had chosen easier or shorter tasks.* At Michael- 
mas we find him transferred to the Upper Third, as the fortieth 
of 56 ; half a year later he has passed over the heads of about 
thirty of his class-mates, and become ninth of 40 in that division. 
Studies and aspirations in common led to school-friendships in 
which the ardour of his disposition would temporarily lift the chum 
above his natural level, only too often to drop back into the 
mediocrity of philistinism when the stimulus was removed. Thus 
he writes from Riga, eleven years after, to remind an old Dresden 
schoolmate how they had once " sworn in noble Hofrath-Bdttiger 
enthusiasm, at the Elreuzschule, a death to all Creuzerian sym- 
bolism,"! how he had commenced philological epopees and 

* According to an article in the Drescktur Antis^ger of 1883, '* Richard 
Wagner auf der Kreuzscbiile in Dresden." 

t Geo^ Friedrich Crenzer (Heidelberg), Symbolik tmd MythohgU der 
4iUen Volker^ four vols., Darmstadt 1810-22. The well-known scholar found 
just as vigorons opponents, as adherents to his treatment of Classical 
mythology; most prominent among the former were Joh. Heinrich Voss 
and the much-mentioned Dresden '* Hofrath" and archseologist Bottiger. 



94 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

tragedies, how Schelling's transcendental idealism had tripped 
them up at Leip2ig, etc, etc. So far as lay in his power, the 
bond wks never broken, and this letter goes on to say — ^with 
obvious reference to some boyish compact — that if the friend 
were so far away as Timbuctoo, he would certainly receive a letter 
from him (Wagner) "from Nova Zembla." Only, the other party 
would mostly fall off, having lost in the crush of daily life all 
breath for freer soaring. 

At Easter T827 Richard moved up into the Second Class with 
excellent credentials ; on Palm Sunday, the 8th of April, he stood 
with a group of schoolfellows before the altar of the Kreuzkirche 
to receive his confirmation in the Evangelical Lutheran faith, 
when he bore the name of Geyer for the last time in any official 
document Most of his fellows on that occasion were strapping 
lads of like age with himself, though lower in the school* In 
an article from Paris, 1 841, he jokes about "that old dress-coat 
in which I was confirmed, the coat I also wore when first I heard 
the Water-carrier^ But we possess a more serious memento of 
that first Communion, namely in the second half of the Grail-theme 
in Parsifal, particularly in die purely vocal form it takes at the 
close of the first act, where the sopranos wing their " Selig im 
Glauben" in a threefold flight of ascending sixths. It is well 
known that this exactly corresponds to the "Amen " of the Saxon 
liturgy, both protestant and catholic, which Wagner had heard in 
childhood from the choir of Dresden churches. At what time, 
upon what occasion, could it have sounded more solemn to him^ 
than on this Palm Sunday? 

We have seen the boy studying English in private, for trans- 
lations from Shakespeare : he soon laid English by, but kept to 
Shakespeare as his model. Among his poetic efforts of this 
period we have yet to mention a grand tragedy that occupied him 
for two whole years; modelled on Shakespeare, it outbid his 
longest catalogue of terrors ; its author was a young Hercules 
strangling serpents in his cradle. " In drama the main point is 

* For the benefit of the curious in such matters, we append a list of these. 
From the upper and lower Third we have fntr^ — Richard Rose, Karl Julius 
Sperber, Ernst Moritz Zacharias, Harald Julius Bosse ; from the Fourth, ome, 
— ^Tamann; from the Fifth, /tw, — ^Hermann, Stein, Pfotenhauer, Ronthaler^ 
Dressier. What became of all or any of them, we are unable to say. 



THE kreuzschCler. 95 

to have something happening," he said to himself, and boiled 
down King Lear and Hamlet into a play of which the following 
is his apparently ironical account : " The plan was gigantic in 
the extreme; two-and-forty human beings perished in course of 
this piece, and in its working-out I saw myself compelled to 
call the greater number back as ghosts, as I should othenirise 
have had no characters left for its latter acts ^ {P. W. I. 4). Many 
anecdotes have been handed down in the family about this earliest 
child of his tragic muse. At one blood-curdling situation a living 
character is said to have approached a spectre, who warns him 
back in sepulchral tones : " Touch me not ! for this nose of mine 
must fall to dust, should mortal seize it" Or again, a lady visitor 
inquired how far he had got with his tragedy, and was answered, 
"I've killed them all off but one." Jests of the latter kind were 
common enough with him at any period, even about the most 
serious subjects ; but we must take these stories with a grain of 
salt, for it is beyond dispute that the lad was in deadly earnest 
with this drama. Not one of his self-imposed labours had en- 
grossed him like this, and when he shut himself in his room with 
it, or even played truant for its sake, "the progeny of his fancy 
swarmed around him with such vigour, that he himself was scared." 
While the young poet was still at work on his harrowing drama, 
a great change took place in his outward life. The professional 
duties of his sisters, with their varying stage-engagements, had 
much decentralised the family. Half a year back (Sept 1826) 
Rosalie had requested to be released from her Dresden appoint- 
ment, in which she complained of a lack of sufficient occupation, 
and had removed to Prague, where her efforts had already found 
such recognition. The public of the latter city had longed for 
her return as a member of their regular company, and the warmth 
of her second welcome was the index to a favour that increased 
with every week of her two-years stay (1826-28). As Emilia 
Galotti, Louise in KabaU und lAebe^ Thekla in Walknstein^ 
Portia in The Merchant of Venice^ Louise Cardillac in the then 
popular Goldsckmied von Paris (adapted from £. T. A. Hoff- 
mann's masterly novel, Das Frdulein von Scudery*\ she won 

* At this time Hoffinann's tales were largely drawn on for the stage ; thus 
m particular with MHster Martin der JCii/er und seine Gesellen^ in which 
Looise Wagner played Rosa the cooper's pretty daughter most charmingly 
at Breslau. 



96 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

well-earned laurels ; with the great tragedian Sophie Schrdder as 
Sappho and Medea, she also took the more sympathetic parts 
of Melitta and Creusa, as once before at Dresden. Sister Clara 
too, though the early strain upon her voice forbade her appearing 
too frequently, had continued her career as singer by accepting 
an engagement at Prague (Zerlina in Don Giovanni forming one 
of her favourite parts), whence she had gone on to the newly- 
organised Town-theatre at Augsburg with brother Albert, who 
at last had terminated his engagement as actor and singer at 
Breslau. On the top of all these changes in the summer of 
1827, came an offer from Leipzig to Louise. She had been 
away from the family for several years, passed in the Breslau 
company together with her brother; when he broke off that 
engagement she temporarily joined the KOnigstadter theatre in 
Berlin, but, accustomed to the warmth of her Breslau audience, 
found no pleasure in the atmosphere of chill Berlin, and gladly 
embraced the Leipzig offer. Reason enough foi^ the mother to 
give up the already broken Dresden home, and return with the 
remnant of her family to Leipzig. 

Richard soon followed them ; not without the rapidly-accumu- 
lating manuscript of his grand tragedy. The latter, in effect, was 
nearing completion ; but before he could put the last touch to it, 
a fresh stock of impressions and experiences was to supply him 
with the answer to many a riddle in its constitution. 



VI. 

LEIPZIG. 

Quarters in the ^^ PichhofJ* — Louisas artistic successes, — She 
marries Friedrich Brockhaus, — Uncle Adolf and aunt Sophie, — 
The S, Nicholas SchooL^Beethoveti s Symphonies and ''Egmonf' 
music, — Richard resolves to become a musician, — Intercourse with 
uncle Adolf, — Reading Hoffmann. — First lessons in harmony. 

At the Leipzig Gervandhaus coruerts I made my first 
etcquairUancewith Beethaveris music; its impression upon 
• me was overpowering, 

Richard Wagner. 

When Richard reached Leipzig he found his family in pleasant 
quarters, arranged with all a woman's eye to comfort, in a little 
house (now pulled down) on what was formerly the Winter- 
garden, the "Pichhof" outside the Halle Gate. The thorough- 
fare to the inner city crossed the Briihl, and the boy accordingly 
had frequent opportunity of gazing at the house where he was 
bom. It vexed him to find this region usurped by Polish Jews, 
who had here established their new Jerusalem and drove a 
roaring trade in furs. With their shaggy pelisses and high 
fur-caps, strange faces, long beards and pendent curls, their 
jumble of Hebrew and bad German, and their wild gesticula- 
tions, they at once amused and terrified him, like Hofifmann's 
phantoms. The old Rannstadter Thor of grandfatherly memory 
was standing yet, though its days were numbered ; for the imposts 
of the General Excise had been abrogated some years since, and 
the carrying out of fresh improvements involved the demolition 
of this gate : in its place, when the moat had been filled up, an 
esplanade was to link the theatre directly with the Zwinger. Not 
far from the Pichhof lay the municipal weigh-bridge beside the 
old weighing-house, whose upper storey was devoted to a savings- 
bank and pawnbroker's, — the latter once hymned in impromptu 
verses by a customer : 

G w 



98 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

KnoVst thou the hoose ? On pillars stands its roof, 

Its presses bulge and burst with weft and woof, 
And overcoats all tearful to me shout : 
'* O wherefore didst thou put us up the spout?" 

Besides Frau Geyer and Louise, the Leipzig contingent of the 
family consisted of no more than the two youngest sisters, Ottilie 
aged sixteen and Cacilie aged twelve, with Richard just midway 
between. Louise, now two-and-twenty and an uncommonly 
attractive young lady, had utilised the brief period of her engage- 
ment to become one of the greatest favourites on the Leipzig 
boards. As "Preziosa" she was made the subject of poems in 
the papers; Goethe's Laune des Verliebten owed its success in 
great part to her charming acting (with Frau Devrient, n^ Bdhler, 
as Egle), and had to be repeated frequently ; whilst in later years 
her brother Richard cherished memories of her "Silvana." The 
revival on Dec. 12, 1827, of this early work of Weber's was a 
triumph for Louise, and mainly through her cooperation Silvana 
became a certain " draw," as may be seen from reports of the day. 
"Dem. Wagner, who played Silvana with all the magic of her 
naivety and grace, was received with thunders of applause ; the 
same distinction fell to her at the second performance," says the 
Abendzeitung of Dec. 23, 1827. "Silvana has been several times 
repeated; Dem. Wagner is delightful in the title-role. It is 
matter of general regret that this amiable, talented and modest 
artist is about to be robbed from art by a happier lot Though 
she has of late had to bear with much hostility and envy from 
rival comedians, that surely would have soon been laid ; for true 
merit must make its way sooner or later, and then the more 
brilliantly," and so forth (Jtbid. Jan. 26, 1828). The nature of 
this "hostility" eludes our present knowledge, but the story of 
the " happier lot " was true enough : soon after removal to Leipzig, 
Louise had become engaged to the pushing young publisher 
Friedrich Brockhaus, much to Adolf Wagner's satisfaction. She 
was the special favourite of her uncle, who years ago had wished 
her " a sensible husband " in preference to stage successes, and 
must have been doubly rejoiced at the suitor's turning out to be 
the son of an old friend. 

Not to lose sight of Richard for too long, we may introduce a 
little tale in this connection. In the Bayreuther Taschenbuch for 
1894 Albert Heintz repeats the following from the mouth of a 



LEIPZIG. 99 

fiiend of Cacilie's girlhood : " At the time of Louise's courtship 
by the publisher Fr. Brockhaus her mother Frau Geyer was much 
in the company of my mamma, and I often overheard their 
conversation. Frau Geyer would praise Cacilie as a great help 
in the extra housekeeping entailed by the daily visits of the 
wealthy bridegroom. One day, the maid being out, Richard also 
had to be pressed into the service : deep in his studies, he was 
horrified at the request — that a gymna.sia.st should go and fetch 
beer ! At last his common sense prevailed. He came back 
laughing merrily, with both hands plunged in his pockets. In 
those days stone-bottles had handles to suspend them, and he 
had cut holes in his pockets to carry several unobserved. I was 
filled with admiration by this practical device, and thought that 
young man would get on in the world. " 

Uncle Adolf himself had given up bachelorhood in his fifty- 
first year, married the clever and handsome sister of his friend 
Amadeus Wendt on October i8, 1824, and gone to live in the 
" Hut " outside the PeterVgate, away from the noise of the town.* 
As the marriage proved childless, but little was altered in his outer 
mode of life. Aunt Sophie was "gentle, conciliatory and un- 
assuming," with the tenderest care for his comfort and wellbeing : 
she respected her husband's previous ties, by now become a 
second nature ; so he made his regular excursions to the Thoma 
house, to see how his former fellow-inmates were faring, and paid 
many a visit to his brother's children. " I am still the same old 
horse," he writes to Albert about this time, **at liberty, my own, 
only belonging a little — as much as needful — to my Sophie. I'm 
always thinking, pondering how to take the world into my mind, 
and make as much as possible thereof my organ. . . . Married 
folk, in the lump, are but scholiasts of the book of Love, the first 
edition of which will ever remain a legend; meanwhile the 
commentatoos run about with traditionary fragments of it, like 
children with their golden bows at Christmas, and the ladies deem 
all reference thereto a breach of manners ; although we men are 



* Christiane Sophie Wendt, born at Leipzig on the first of April 1792, was 
consequently eighteen years younger than Adolf Wagner, whom she long 
survived (dying Nov. 10, i860). After her husband's death she also appeared 
as a writer, under the name of Adolfine, with ''Lotosbliitter," three stories, 
1835 ; ''Ideal und Wirklichkeit," a novel, 1838 ; and two sets of fairy-tales, 
**M£rchen und Erziihlungen," in 1844 and 1846. 



lOO LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

merely pointing to a deeper treasure that one might raise, were the 
incantation not so difficult" 

Chief among the houses with which Adolf kept up intimacy, 
were the Quandt, the Trager, and the Lacarribre. Here readings 
aloud, particularly of Shakespeare, were a favourite pastime, in 
which Adolf Wagner was fond of taking the prelector's part, 
assisted from time to time by professional artists such as the 
elocutionist Solbrig. He would not hear of these reunions being 
treated as "shallow sesthetising," but wished them to form the 
focus of a higher social life, and, as he quaintly puts it, " like sweet 
perfumes, drive away bad vapours." The consequences of ad- 
vancing years and over-application he combate^l by good long 
walks — Si time-honoured recreation of his, and practised down to 
his sixtieth year. He found this regimen agree with him better 
than " physicings for the spleen, or baths devised by quacks and 
Nature's kitchen-prentices." 

At home he was busy just now with a task that took him back 
to his spiritual home, the world of medieval Italy : namely his 
edition of the great Italian poets, the Parnasso Italiano, a work 
of most painstaking industry and thorough German erudition. 
This edition gives the very marrow of all previous critical com- 
mentaries on the four classical poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto 
and Tasso, at that time more or less neglected by their own 
compatriots. It is ushered in by a dedication in Italian terzine, 
to Goethe as "principe dei poeti" : the author imagines himself 
transported to the Garden of Poetry, where the four great Italians 
appear to him and endorse his admiration of Goethe, in whose 
works they recognise features of their own spirit; finally they 
encourage him to dedicate to the German poet this new collection 
of their works. In collating the Dante text it was the editor's 
endeavour to restore it to its pristine form, ridding it as much as 
possible of the Tuscan elegance imposed upon its noble rugged- 
ness by the della-Cruscans. In this labour, which marks the 
whole edition, and presupposes the minutest knowledge of the 
language and its principles of versification, consists the work's 
peculiar merit* Among the various annoyances attending the 
publication of this magnum opus, was the impossibility of giving 

* *' Only he who has spent Duny yean in the study of Dante» knows rightly 
to estimate the enonnous mass of material exploited here, and the laboars of 
the editor," says L. G. Blanc, a contemporary reviewer of this Pamassa. 



LEIPZIG. lOI 

forth all that the editor had meant to: thus, in contravention 
of a promise expressed in the introduction, the indexes and 
bibliographic appendices had to be sacrificed to mercantile con- 
siderations, not to increase alike bulk and expense. Another 
unfortimate circumstance was the simultaneous appearance of a 
similar work in Italy, embracing the selfsame poets and bearing 
an almost identical title.* False patriotism, coupled with jealousy 
that a German should presume to understand their national poets 
more thoroughly than they themselves, prompted Italian pedants 
to fall foul of the Italian style of this interfering German, whilst 
they shut their eyes to the immense critical value of his edition. 
However, Adolf Wagner was richly compensated by the friendly 
interest shewn by Goethe ; and it was in acknowledgment of this 
work's importance that the University of Marburg, when celebrating 
its tercentenary in July 1827, conferred on him the degree of 
" Doctor of Philosophy and Master of the Liberal Arts." 

Shortly after this event in the family dates the commencement 
of closer relations between uncle Adolf and nephew Richard, who 
had arrived in Leipzig at the end of 1827. We shall return to 
these in a moment, first ascertaining the present condition of the 
yoimgster's mind. Indeed it was a time of inner crisis: the 
passion for classical studies, which had consumed the lad at the 
Kreuzschule, threatened to succumb at Leipzig to a " deadly false 
system." There were two higher schools here, the S. Nicholas 
and the venerable Thomana; but the latter, where both father 
and uncle had received their education, was just now in a state 
of interregnum : the old schoolhouse was going through a total 
transformation, from roof to cellar. Richard therefore was sent 
to the Nikolai-Gymnasium. *' I well remember how my teachers 
at the S. Nicholas school entirely rooted out these tastes and 
likings, and moreover can explain it by the manners of those 
gentlemen," says the master himself in that reminiscence of his 
schooldays already quoted (-P. W. V. 292) ; and in the Auto- 
biographic Sketch of 1842: ''At the S. Nicholas school I was 
rel^ated to the Third Class, after having already attained to the 
Second at the Kreuzschule. This circumstance itself embittered 
me so much, that I lost all liking for philologic study. I became 
lazy and slovenly, and my grand tragedy was the only thing left 
me to care about" While finishing it he came under an influence 
* Pamasso Ciassico Italiano^ Padua, 1827. 



I02 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

destined to stamp his whole future development : at the Gewand- 
haus Concerts he heard Beethovef^s musk for the first time in 
his life. 

He had never heard of Beethoven before the tidings of his 
death (March 1827); the riddle of that death attracted him to 
the immortal legacy. With other masterpieces of classic instru- 
mental music, the Symphonies of Beethoven were regularly played 
through every winter at the old Gewandhaus, without any actual 
conductor, but under the lead of the "Konzertmeister" — or 
"first violin" — Matthai (died Nov. 1835). A. new world dawned 
on the astonished youth, with an effect we may gather from the 
Pilgrimage to Beethoven^ where the hero of the tale informs us : 
" I know not what I really was intended for ; I only remember 
that one evening I heard a Symphony of Beethoven's for the 
first time, that it set me in a fever, I fell ill, and on my recovery 
had become a musician. This circumstance may haply account 
for the fact that, though in time I also made acquaintance with 
other beautiful music, I yet have loved, have honoured, worshipped 
Beethoven before all else" {P.W, VII. 22). A hearing of the 
Requiem brought him nearer to Mozart as well ; but it was to the 
inexhaustible mine of Beethoven that he ever returned, and this 
it was that turned the conscious passion of his heart to Music. 

The impressions gleaned from the Gewandhaus were sup- 
plemented by acquaintance with the music to Egmont at the 
theatre. It became clear to him that he must never let his 
tragedy, by now completed, " leave the stocks until provided with 
such music." Of his ability to compose it, he had no manner of 
doubt; only, he "thought just as well to make sure of a few 
general principles of thorough-bass first" So he borrowed Logier's 
" Method," and devoured it in a week. The new graft of study 
did not bear fruit so early as he had expected ; yet its difficulties 
incited him, and just as he had determined off-hand to be a poet 
a couple of years ago, he now resolved to be musician. Mean- 
while the grand tragedy had been unearthed by his family, much 
to their distress of mind; for it was plain as daylight why his 
school-tasks had been so wofiilly neglected. Small wonder that 
he concealed his second call till he could furnish plainer proofs in 
vindication : so soon as he felt sufficiently advanced in his private 
studies, he would come boldly forth ; for the present he composed 
in silence — ^a sonata, a quartet and an aria. 



LEIPZIG. 103 

In the midst of all this doubt and ferment he was thrown into 
closer contact with his unde Adolf, whose stimulating presence, 
with his rich fund of knowledge, his breadth of view, his animated 
mode of address, his irony and humour, the noble expression of 
his face — ^that still preserved the traces of its earlier beauty, despite 
the ravages of ill-health and disappointment, — took a prominent 
place in these new impressions and experiences. Richard's passion 
for music led to many a battle with his immediate family: he must 
often have felt that his unde understood him better here. And 
then the elder's appreciation of the great poets of every age and 
dime ; his lively interest in matters of the Theatre, however little 
be might relish its ** present disfigurement and perversion " ; his 
reverence alike for Tieck and Weber, though the pair had been 
all but at daggers drawn in Dresden ; and the serenity with which 
he shrugged his shoulders at his own few literary opponents! 
Quite recently the uncle had published his essay on " Theatre 
and Public," prompted by the disgraceful scenes attending the 
production of Calderon's " Dame Kobold " at the Dresden Court- 
theatre, when the audience had revolted against what they termed 
an attempt to force the Spanish poet down their throats, and 
raised such a hubbub that the actors had to leave the boards. 
This was the *' sovereignty of the mob" against which Adolf 
Wagner protested; and the same voices that had been raised 
against Tieck's presuming to "educate" the public, now com- 
bined against himself for taking the offender's part He was 
accused of absolutism : "With a banner inscribed with the name 
of Goethe in his upraised hand, and the cry of Tieck upon his 
lips, he was hieing to a windmill-tilt with the rebellious taste of 
the public ; pretending to shew directorates the road whereon to 
lift the German stage from 'confirmed corruption'" (Leipmger 
lAtteraturzeitungy June 12, 1827). To a like intent, but in still 
less bridled language, sounded the hoots of the "Midnight 
Journal"; but their victim held his tongue, and let the storm 
rage out "I haven't many enemies," he would say, "but 
fortunately as many opponents as needful for my own develop- 
ment and ripening." In other instances he deemed it no in- 
dignity to "have a little bout with these jack-puddings. . . . But 
Dick, Tom and Harry, everywhere, are terribly obtuse. . . . 
Nowadays one can hardly call a man an ass, without being 
reproached for putting too fine a point on it And those 



I04 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

peddlers can quarrel for the ear of such a crew? God forbid 
that such a thing should ever enter your mind ! " He had a 
great respect for Weber's depth and versatility: "Reflect how 
thorough was the cultivation of Karl Maria v. Weber, and that 
virtuosity too often bears the curse of onesidedness. Art, like 
everything engendered of the spirit, is an infinitude, and must 
be followed on the grander scale." — He took a wide view of the 
world's history, and could not shut his eyes to the senility of 
our civilisation : " Our quarter of the globe is an over-ripe fruit, 
which a storm will shake down; the march of history trends 
towards America," — The above are phrases borrowed from Adolf s 
letters : by word of mouth we may be sure he expressed them 
to the keen young listener in a livelier, more pointed form. 

From another side we have the influence of an author with 
whose writings Richard had commenced acquaintance in the 
latter part of his Dresden time. The Collected Works of E. 
T. A. Hoffmann had recently appeared in a complete edition 
by Ed. Hitzig ; here the young Beethoven-enthusiast was greeted 
by a conception of Music akin to that which had already 
glimmered on him in earliest boyhood with the mysterious 
accents of Der Freischutz. In the Autobiographic Sketch he 
tells us that this fantastic writer fired him "with the wildest 
mysticism. I had day-dreams in which the keynote, third and 
dominant, seemed to take on living form and reveal to me 
their mighty meaning: the notes I wrote down were raving 
mad." Fanciful as this account may seem, at least a quarter 
of a century later we find the idea repeated in a private jotting 
among the posthumous papers : " In the perfect Drama the full 
shapes of the dream vision, the other world, are projected before 
us life-like as by the magic-lantern. . . . Music is the lamp of 
this lantern" {P.W. VIII. 373). So that even in those early 
days the boy's passion for music is not for the mere surface 
pleasure of agreeable tone-patterns, but to him they convey a 
definite, a plastic or dramatic S3rmbol, pointing to that magic 
region whence the musician draws " his wonder-drops of sound 
to dew our brain, and rob it of the power of seeing aught save 
the inner world," as he says in the Beethoven essay of 1870. 

Now, his own intuitive grasp of the matter would gain ample 
confirmation from many a pregnant utterance of Hoffmann's, such 
as the suggestive improvisations of the crazy Kreisler, or the 



LEIPZIG. 105 

enthusiastic debates of the Serapion brothers, where we have a 
plain foreshadowing of that philosophy of music which Schopen- 
hauer was the first to crystallise and embody in a general system. 
But apart from all theory, there was the speU of Hoffmaim's mode 
of story-telling, his matchless mixture of the weird and ironical, 
the association of a mystic awe with the immediate reality of 
familiar places, — Dresden for instance. The living host of his 
creations, from the student Anselm * to the archivist lindhorst, 
from KLrespel to Kreisler, invaded the brain of their youthful 
reader to such a point that they never left the adult master, and 
these stories were his constant resort in after life for freshening 
up the memories of his youth. 

From Hoffmann came the first poetic germ of the " Minstrels' 
Contest at Wartburg" ; Tieck's narrative of Tarmhauser also fell 
into young Richard's hands, presumably about this time. Though 
neither made a deep impression on him, it is possible that a 
feature here and there may have lingered in his mind till the 
drafting of his opera-poem some fourteen or fifteen years later. 
Thus the poet's dream in the introduction of Hoffmann's tale 
might have supplied the earliest notion for the closing tableau 
in the first act of Tannhauserj whilst Tieck's purely episodic 
account of Tannhauser's last appearance — wan, haggard, and in 
tattered pilgrim's-robes — might have sown the first seed of that 
powerful scene in the last act where the outcast narrates his 
fruitless pilgrimage. But we must not insist too much on sup- 
positions of this sort, unvouched for by the master's recollections. 

For the present the boy's poetic bent was subordinated to 
the musical, and merely " called in as aid." Thus, after a hearing 
of the Pastoral Symphony he set to work on a pastoral play, its 



* According to the testimony of Z. Funck in his ** Life of Hoffmann," it 
was actually none other than Adolf Wagner that gave the first impulse to the 
genesis of Anselm through his translation of an English work by James 
Beresford, *'The Miseries of Human life" {Menschliches Elend^ Bayreuth- 
Lttbeck, 1810). Funck tells us : " A year before leaving Bamberg, Hofimann 
found the book in my library ; it entertained him so much that he read it 
about half a dozen times over, made extracts from it, and told me that this 
book had given him the idea of writing a tale round a character doomed by 
fiUe to spread and suffer misery wherever it went. At Dresden he resumed 
the idea, and turned it into the romance of Dor Goldene Topf** The English 
book's sub-title, '* Or the Groans of Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy," 
will supply a key to this quotation. 



I06 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

dramatic subject prompted by Goethe's Laune des Verliebien; 
making no attempt at a preliminary sketch, he ?nrote verses and 
music together, and left the situations to take care of themselves. 
By now his musical penchant had become in turn a matter of 
anxiety to his fieimily, who feared it was merely a transient hobby, 
as he had displayed no [particular gift in that direction heretofore, 
nor was he skilled on any kind of instrument At last, however, 
he was allowed to take lessons of an able musician, Gottlieb 
Miiller, subsequently organist at Altenburg. The poor man had 
no end of trouble with his pupil : " He had to convince me 
that what I took for curious shapes and powers were chords 
and intervals." For that matter, in a letter to R^isseur F. 
Hauser, of 1834, Wagner himself declares that his " lessons with 
Herr Miiller were one long string of proofs of the depressingness 
of pedantic candour " ; they had simply '* hardened him against 
the most deterrent attacks on his youthful fervour." Moreover 
the whole theory of music seemed far more addressed to what 
one shouldn't do, than to what one really should : the rules he 
learnt were finger-posts all warning him, "No thoroughfare"; 
whichever way he turned, he was greeted like Tamino, or the 
hero of his juvenile tragedy, with an " Avaunt ! " His mother 
was grieved to find him careless and slovenly in this branch of 
study also ; his teacher shook his head : once again it looked as 
if nothing would come of him. But he knew better. 



VII. 

LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY- 
REVOLUTION. 

Courf'tkeatre at Leipzig. — GoeMs Faust : Rosalie Wagner as 
GreUhen, — Aubet^s Muette : Rosalie as Fenella. — RossinVs TelL — 
The July Revolution makes Richard "a revolutionary," — Leipzig 
riots. — From the Nicholas to the TTumas School — Overtures for 
grand orchestra.— Petformance of the ''big drum" overture at 
the Court-theatre. — Transference to the University. 

After many a digression to right and left^ at tho com' 
mencement of my eighteenth year of life I was confronted 
with thefuly Revolution. The effect upon mo was briskly 
stimulant in many ways. 

Richard Wagnbr. 

The standing theatre at Leipzig had brought the eleventh year of 
its existence to a close with the performance of Calderon's " Life's 
a dream" on May ii, 1828. Its director Kiistner made some 
further attempts to keep the enterprise on foot, but in vain — the 
town-council was treating with the Government for the foundation 
of a Court-theatre at Leipzig under the supreme control of the 
Dresden Intendanz, though with an internal management of its 
own. These n^otiations proving successful, on the 2nd August 
1829 the theatre was re-opened with Shakespeare's yf^//»5 Ccesar. 

The new undertaking at least equalled what had been achieved 
under Kiistner's management, and for a city of second rank its 
performances were meritorious enough. Thus it was not without 
its influence on the gradually expanding mind of our hero, who 
had free admittance owing to the continuance of his family's con- 
nection. Louise, indeed, had said goodbye to the stage at the 
termination of Kiistner 's contract, and was already wedded to 
Friedrich Brockhaus (June 16, 1828); but, with the opening of 
the establishment as a Court-theatre, sister Rosalie had joined 

107 



I08 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the company. The last time we saw her was at the Prague 
theatre, where she stayed for two years, from 1826 to 1828; 
since leaving Prague she had accepted temporary engagements 
at Hamburg, Darmstadt and Cassel, but declined to bind herself 
to any other than her native dty, where she knew that this project 
of a "Court-theatre" was already under way. In contemporary 
accounts she is uniformly described at this time as a beautiful 
blonde, of slim and elegant figure, with a melodious and 
sympathetic voice, her "cupid's head" being said to bear a 
striking resemblance to Henriette Sontag.* 

The " Musikdirektor," or musical conductor of the new under- 
taking was Heinrich Dom, appointed on the recommendation of 
Reissiger. Bom at K6nigsberg in Prussia in 1804, he was only 
nine years older than young Wagner; his half-brother, Louis 
Schindelmeisser, was of the same age as Richard, who came 
into friendly relations with them both through their frequent 
attendance at F. Brockhaus' hospitable house. Dom sprang 
from a well-to-do mercantile family ; his late stepfather Schindel- 
meisser, a man of independent means, with musical and literary 
leanings, had given bo^ brothers an early and careful musical 
education. Dom had already profited by it to produce two 
operas of his composition at Berlin and Kdnigsberg, for one 
of which {Die Bettlerin) Holtei had written the text During 
his Leipzig conductorship he became a successful teacher, among 
his pupils in the theory of composition being Robert Schumann, 



* Concerning her appearance at Darmstadt (May 1828) we read in a report 
to the Abendzeitungx " Albeit this young lady had been preceded by a con- 
siderable renown, in a great variety of r61es Dem. Wagner surpassed the 
expectation of her audience. She has a most charming presence, a graceful 
figure, and a pleasant yoice that goes straight to the heart. . . . Portia in the 
Merchant of Venice had been spoken of as one of our visitor's most successful 
efforts ; and so we found it. . . . Overtures have been made by the Intendanz, 
to gain this distinguished young artist for our court-theatre in permanence ; 
the public has declared in Dlle. Wagner's £ELVour as in no other instance for a 
long time past " And in a report from Cassel : " Dem. Rosalie Wagner from the 
Hamburg Town-theatre has treated us to five different r61e8, in each of which 
she shewed herself a thoughtful artist. Every one of these characters formed 
a perfect whole ; but I should give the palm to her personation of Portia, as 
our visitor appears to have seized the finest nuances of Shakespeare's intention. 
• . . As I hear, this welcome guest has been offered an advantageous engage- 
ment by our directorate ; let us hope she will accept it " {Abcbtg. May 28, 
1829). 



LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY-REVOLUTION. IO9 

who had just abandoned the study of jurisprudence for that of 
music, and on the vocal side Henriette Wiist, whose talent he had 
discovered in the Leipzig stage-chorus.* According to his own 
account, he took an active share in Wagner's earliest musical 
development, and his natural bonhomie — unclouded at that date 
by any envy of his junior's fame — brought the pair into an un- 
forced attitude of prot^^ and patron. 

The theatre had been opened with great ceremony and Shake- 
speare's Julius Casary as said, in Schl^el's translation. Rosalie 
had spoken the prologue, followed by a festival overture composed 
by Dom, whilst the performance itself was distinguished by Rett's 
acting of Brutus and an excellent stage-management of the ''crowd." 
Within four weeks occurred an event of prime importance in the 
Leipzig annals, namely its first performance of Goethe's Faust^ on 
the poet's eightieth birthday, August 28, with Rott as Faust and 
Rosalie as Gretchen. As Wagner says in his German Art and 
German Policy, "The German spirit seemed inclined to shake 
itself up a little. Old Goethe still was living. Well-meaning 
literati hit upon the thought of bringing his Faust to the theatre. 
. . . The noble poem dragged its maimed and mutilated length 
across the boards: but it seemed to flatter the young folks, to 
obtain the chance of cheering many a remembered word of wit 
and wisdom, — and Gretchen proved a 'grateful r61e"' (P.W, 
IV. 100). Klingemann at Brunswick had been the first to transfer 
the mighty poem to the stage, on January the 19th of the same 
year; since when the larger German theatres had hastened to 
share in the profits of what seemed so sound an investment, — 
Dresden, Leipzig and Weimar each selecting this memorable 
birthday for the purpose. Crowds assembled for the festival 
firom all the environs of Leipzig; an hour before the curtain's 
rise the house was packed to its utmost holding power with an 
expectant throng. A prologue by Tieck opened the evening; 
the performance lasted from 6 to half-past 10, without a sign of 
diminution in the audience's interest, despite the suffocating heat ; 
at its close a perfect tempest of applause broke forth from patriots 
conscious that at this moment a similar demonstration was going 

* She made her d^but as Zerlina in Don Gwvanni Dec 1829 ; in 1833 she 
wms transferred to the Dresden Court-theatre where she received her finishing 
lessons from the celebrated singing-master Miecksch, and eventually took the 
part of Irene at the first performance of Rienuij Oct. ao, 1842. 



no LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

on throughout the length and breadth of Germany. To be sure, 
Tieck's lavish cuts were among the smallest of the " mutilations " ; 
was the Leipzig production not marked by an imposing final 
tableau, to point the moral of the catastrophe? Above poor 
Gretchen swayed a guardian angel with a palm, in blue light; 
while Faust, prostrate upon the ground, was triumphed over by 
a Mephistopheles aloft in flames of fire 1 

In the accounts of Rosalie's stage-career (of which we have a 
tolerably voluminous collection) her Gretchen is unanimously 
described as the most affecting and well-conceived of all her 
tragic r61es. In every report of this her first appearance in the 
part, however, we find her taxed with want of muvety and a 
certain affectation ; only as the play proceeded, did she warm to 
her work, until towards the end she gave it a resistless charm. 
It was precisely the same with her Cordelia in KingLtar,* Four 
years later, when Gretchen had long become " a grateful r61e " to 
many a personatrix, Rosalie's rendering found an ardent eulogist 
in Heinrich Laube, particularly in respect of the mad scene: 
<< Never have I seen Gretchen played with such intense emotion. 
For the first time did I feel a shiver down my spine at the out- 
break of her madness; and I soon discovered why. Most 
actresses so put on the screw here, that it becomes an unnatural 
raving ; they speak their lines in hollow, ghostlike tones. Rosalie 
Wagner spoke them with the selfsame voice as her words of love 
awhile before ; this awful inner contrast had the most powerful 
effect For a moment I felt that this superhuman grief lay be- 
yond the scope of art, and, if madness could be so harrowingly 
portrayed, poets should leave off writing it" 

To what eictent our Richard may have become acquainted with 
the Faust poem before its Leipzig representation, we cannot 
ascertain ; but his constant absorption in it about this time is 
attested by a reminiscence of one of his comrades in the second 
class of the S. Nicholas school, who says that Wagner always 
kept the book beneath his desk, and furtively would draw it out 
at every favoiuring opportunity, oblivious to whatever was going 
on around hinu We cannot quite accept as gospel this deponent's 

* '* Her first scene suffered from an undue excess of naivety ; on the other 
hand in the catastrophe we had nature, soul, poetic inwardness of feeling, 
affording the most welcome evidence of a fine talent, if this artist would only 
give it freer rein " (Abdhtg,), 



LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY-REVOLUTION. 1 1 1 

outline of an "opera-text" said to have been contemplated 

hy Eichard in connection with the Goethian work, especially 

in the words somewhat adventurously put into the boy's own 

mouth; but there is a natural ring about the passage where 

Wagner jumps from one subject to the other : "Were you at the 

theatre last night? — Idomeneo is tedious. I'm sorry for the 

singers, having to stand alone like that by the prompter's box 

with their aria, — nothing near them but empty wings, and some 

ancient stool which they're not even allowed to sit down upon."* 

Under Dom's expert control the Leipzig Opera did not content 

itself with Idomeneo. According to the master's recollections, 

among the various provocatives of this period must be numbered 

Marschner's Templer und Jiidin^ Spontini's Vestale^ and Auber's 

Muett€y which had just b^;un to take the public's ear. 

Chief of these was Auber's Muette^ — known in England as 
MasanieliOy — or to give it its German title. Die Siumme von Portici. 
Fully forty years after we find the memory of its first production 
reviving the warmth it once had kindled in the young enthusiast 
for Faust and Beethoven ; for Wagner always considered this the 
sole truly national product of the French artistic spirit " It quite 
revolutionised our notions at the time," he says. " We latterly 
had known French Opera in none but the products of the Op^ra 
Comique. Boieldieu had just delighted and enlivened us by his 
Dame blanche \ Auber himself had entertained us most agreeably 
with his Afofon ; the Paris Grand Op^ra was forwarding us nothing 
but the stilted pathos of the Vestale etc., and seemed more Italian 
than French. . . . But a sudden change of front took place, with 
the coming of the Siumme. Here was a ' grand opera,' a com- 
plete five-act tragedy clad from head to foot in music, yet without 
a trace of stiffness, hollow pathos, sacerdotal ceremony, and all 
the classical farrago ; warm to burning, entertaining to enchant- 
ment . . . The recitatives shot lightning at us ; a veritable tempest 
whirled us on to the ensembles ; amid the chaos of wrath we had 
a sudden energetic cry to keep our heads cool, or a fresh command 
to action ; then again the shouts of riot, of murderous frenzy, and 
between them the affecting plaint of anguish, or a whole people 
lisping out its prayer. Even as the subject lacked nothing of 
eidier the utmost terror or the utmost tenderness, so Auber made 

* See a brief article by A. Lobn-Siegel in KUrscbner's Wagner- Jahrbuch^. 
1886, " Ricbard Wagner auf der Nikolaiscbule in Leipzig." 



112 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

his music reproduce each contrast, every blend, in contours and 
colours of so drastic, so vivid a distinctness as one could not 
remember having ever seen before; we might almost fjsmcy we 
had actual music-paintings before us, and the idea of the musically 
Picturesque might easily have found substantiation here, had 
it not to yield to a far more apposite denomination, that of the 
most admirable theatric Plastique " {F, W. V. 40-1). — In passing, 
it is instructive to note how the very memory of this youthful im- 
pression takes the ripened master back to his boyish '' visions." 

The first Leipzig performance of the Siumme took place on 
September 28, 1829 ; its success was so great, that it filled the 
theatre twice and thrice a week for months to come. According 
to the Abendzeiiung Ubrich, the Masaniello, ''did better than any 
tenor we have seen on our boards for the last few years,'* especially 
i^nth his acting. Rosalie played the dumb girl with more passion 
than people would have expected from her gentle nature, so that 
"the passive, suffering character wellnigh became an actively 
heroic. Through her impassioned rendering, and an altogether 
exceptional musical sense, she surprised the house by the eloquence 
of all her gestures, and was accompanied by one continuous volley 
of applause." The ensembles, the choruses and orchestra were 
led by Dom with a verve that did full justice to the fire of this 
volcanic work; and the impression made on Richard Wagner, 
though it lay for some time dormant, was deep and lasting. 

Very different was the effect of Rossini's TcU^ produced at 
Leipzig not long after (Aug. 1830). In the article dted above, 
Wagner contrasts the reception of these two works in Germany : 
"Whoever witnessed the first appearance of the Siumme on the 
German stage, must remember the astounding sensation it created ; 
whereas Tell could never really make its way." And in German 
Art and German Polity he gives the reason : " Someone in Paris 
had turned Tell into an opera-text, and no less a man than Rossini 
himself had set it to music It was a question, however, whether 
one durst offer the German his 'Tell' as a French translated 
opera? . . . £very German, from the professor down to the 
lowest gymnasiast, even the comedians themselves, felt the shame 
of seeing that hideous travesty of his own best nature. But — ^hm ! 
— ^an opera, — one doesn't take that sort of thing so seriously. 
The overture, with its rattling ballet-music at the end, had already 
been received with unexampled applause at concerts devoted to 



LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY-REVOLUTION. II 3 

dassica] music, cheek by jowl with a Beethoven Symphony. 
People shut one eye. And after all, this opera's goings-on were 
distinctly patriotic . • . Rossini had taken great pains to com- 
pose as solidly as possible : listening to these ravishingly effective 
numbers, one could contrive to forget all about our 'Tell' itself" 
(jP, IV. IV. loo-i). As a fact attested by contemporary notices, 
a natural dislike of seeing the highly popular work of the German 
poet disguised as a French-Italian opera was at first the prevailing 
feeling in educated circles at Leipzig ; despite the splendid mount- 
ing *' the audience seemed bored," as we read in the Abendzeitung 
iii September 1830: ''The great expectations long aroused by 
this opera have been justified by neither its music nor its text 
Poor Schiller, to have had his noble drama suffer such a wretched 
transformation I Immoderate length impelled the management to 
effect omissions at the two immediately succeeding performances. 
Nevertheless the audience seemed bored, and applause was feint 
throughout The more the pity that no expense had been spared 
on the outward trappings of scenery and costume." A comparison 
with this work's reception at Dresden about the same time may 
prove instructive : at the one place apathy, at the other enthusiasm ; 
here strenuous cutting, there spreading of the opera over two 
evenings, not to lose a fraction of its musical deUghts. Plainly 
the sentiment of the Leipzig public was saner, in those days, than 
that of the Saxon capital with its many years of Italianisation. 

But this resultful 1830 soon brought quite other factors into play. 
Political events had already roused the ardent spirit of young 
Wagner from time to time, and always won his lively sympathy 
for the suffering side. Now came the second Paris revolution : 
the event that set all Europe in commotion was the stroke that 
made of him "a revolutionary at one blow." Very likely the 
Stumme had something to do in preparing him for it Just as it 
put an end to the mere life-of-pleasure of the Restoration, artistic- 
aUy speaking, and began to shake Rossini's throne, it might well 
be regarded as virtually "the stage precursor of the July Revolu- 
tion," as which indeed it actually figured in the case of Belgium. 
However, it would be a mistake to imagine the seventeen-year-old 
Wagner guided in his views of life by specifically artistic tenets. 
The opposite was in fact the case, even so early as this. In his 
Communication he refers to his own evolution as follows : — " That 
vrhich first determines the artist as such, is certainly the purely 

H 



114 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

artistic impression. If his receptive force be completely engrossed 
thereby, the impressions receivable from life thereafter will find 
his capacity already exhausted ; he will develop as absolute artist, 
along the line which we must designate the feminine . . . where 
art plays with itself, drawing sensitively back from every brush 
with actual life. . . . The case is otherwise where the previously 
developed ardstic force has merely formed and focussed the faculty 
for receiving life's impressions ; where, in place of weakening, it 
has the rather strengUiened it . . . This is the masciiline, the 
generative line of art" 

Since our hero has designated this particular ''impression" as 
one of the turning-points in his life, we may deal at somewhat 
greater length with the events that occurred in Leipzig at the 
beginning of September 1830 in consequence of the Parisian 
July-revolution ; events that happened under Richard's eyes, and, 
involving his own brother-in-law Friedrich Brockhaus, bore quite 
a personal interest For a long time past there had been brewing 
a sullen opposition to the department of criminal-justice and police, 
at whose head then stood a certain Herr von Ende as Police- 
president and Royal Commissary. The entire organisation of 
this department was held to be as extravagant as it was faulty; 
people spoke of enormous sums devoured yearly, and the main- 
tenance of a wholly unnecessary town-guard, so easily to be 
replaced by a moderate garrison. Grave scandals of all kinds^ 
such as the systematic establishment of gambling-hells under the 
auspices of the magistracy and the protection of the police — ta 
say nothing of the smaller tripots, locally known as ''Ratten" — , 
roused public ire. An extraordinary commission of inquiry was 
awaited from Dresden, but delay in despatching it increased the 
natural impatience ; the labouring class was incensed at a wanton 
neglect of its interests in the farming out of orders for communal 
works; the students were offended by an order of the RoyaL 
Commissary derogatory to the Rector of the university, and 
demanded unconditional restoration to the academic senate of its 
jurisdiction over undergraduates. Thus in every class of the 
inhabitants there was an accumulation of inflammable material ; 
small causes led to open conflicts with police-agents and gens- 
d'armes. On the 2nd of September a family in the Briihl were 
holding a wedding-eve carouse, or " Polterabend," which attracted 
a crowd to the quarter; the police interfered, but were drivea 



LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY-REVOLUTION. II5 

back with bleeding heads by a knot of brawny smiths. Late in 
the evening, just as a lunar eclipse became total, the streets were 
plunged into darkness by smashing of lamps ; the mob rushed off 
to the house of the President of Police, broke his windows for 
him, hooted several members of the town-council, and so forth. 
The turmoil of the next few days was great : in defiance of all 
censorship, the most seditious attacks on the Police and Council 
were published in the newspapers and by means of placards. 
The student-corps "Saxonia" assembled its members in con- 
ference ; labourers and mechanics from the environs and farther 
still swarmed into the city by hundreds, and at dusk filled the 
streets and market-place with threatening groups. The windows 
of unpopular magistrates were broken in, the interior of their 
houses wrecked by stones — the roads being completely stripped of 
paving in many places. A picket of cavalry patrolled the town ; 
it suffered no bodily harm, but was too weak, and without orders 
to use force. 

Still larger were the crowds on the evening of September the 
4th, when brilliant moonshine lit the inroads of the rioters. The 
release of prisoners taken by the police during the last day or two 
was effected by superior force; divided into several bands, the 
mob tore shouting through the streets, scattered the police-patrols, 
broke uproariously into the houses of officials belonging to the 
police and coimcil, and destroyed or flung out of window their 
furniture and effects. A few houses of ill-fame in the suburbs, 
known to be the resort of certain magistrates, were razed to the 
ground in a few hours with the help of crowbars ; a like fate over- 
took the villa of Banker and Town-architect Erkel at Gohlis. Not 
that there was any thought of plunder : it was simply the act of 
popular vengeance; thieves caught were promptly punished by 
the rioters themselves. One special object of malevolence 
was the machinery so hateful at that time to handicrafts- 
men; a raging crowd drew up before the Brockhaus printing- 
house, to wreck its mechanical presses. Friedrich Brockhaus' 
courage saved the situation; he laid the storm by representing 
that he gave employment to a hundred and twenty men per day, 
and promising that the machines should be stopped for the next 
four weeks. 

The following Sunday morning saw a renewal of tumult and 
destruction. At last, after a solemn conclave at the Rathhaus, 



Il6 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the city armed itself, forming a provisional Municipal and National 
Guard under the command of Town-captain Frege, whilst the 
university accorded its students the right to carry arms, and 
conjured them to share in defending the town against anarchy. 
The day before, rector Krug had set free on parole a few students 
detained in the academic lock-ups for other offences, to give the 
rabble no excuse for acts of liberation ; this Sunday he summoned 
his senate and all the students to the university-chapel in the 
Paulinum after morning service, strongly impressed on them the 
need of actively contributing to the preservation of peace and 
order, and received their unanimous assent At 5 o'clock 
in the afternoon, in six armed companies with white bandelets 
on the arm and the password Leges et ordoj the students trooped 
out of the Pauline courtyard, patrolled the streets alternately with 
the rifle-bands and municipal guard, and shared with them the task 
of keeping watch and ward. Police and soldiers having disap- 
peared, the city-gates were guarded by armed students, proud in 
the consciousness of their public service, and prompt to avert fresh 
excesses by good-humoured words. 

Meantime the Commissioners had arrived, and were doing 
their best to calm the still-excited populace by reasonable inquiries 
and provisions. The word " police " was proscribed ; apart from 
the criminal department, a '' Deputation of Safety " was enrolled 
from among the authorities of the university, the dty and sur- 
rounding district. But the most important step of all, spreading 
joy throughout the whole of Saxony, was the prompt elevation 
of the enlightened and popular Prince Friedrich — subsequently 
King Friedrich August 11. — to co-regency with King Anton; 
Cabinet-minister von £insiedel being at like time dismissed and 
a whilom member of the Diet, von Lindenau, appointed in his 
stead. The proclamation was read in Leipzig at midday of the 
15th of September; at night the whole town was brilliantly 
illuminated. The rifle-bands, the citizens and students paraded 
the streets with music ; on the esplanade they raised a rousing 
cheer for the well-loved prince ; the rejoicings continued till long 
after midnight People flattered themselves that a new era of 
civic life had begun in their Saxony. 

All these stirring incidents, particularly the students' intervention 
and final triumph of the popular cause, found a lively echo in 
young Richard's breast Nor did his keen interest in public 



LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY-REVOLUTION. II7 

events meet with any opposition on the part of his family. Even 
the old uncle rejoiced at the signs of awakening public spirit, and 
waxed eloquent about the manifold good the Leipzig "revolu- 
tionlet" had brought with it, in that "amid a state of universal 
lethargy many a wholesome truth had come to tongue, and the 
criminally self-sufficient materialism of the commercial world been 
sent to the dogs. In higher r^ons there had been a display of 
good and upright will, and even though discords of the old 
aristocratic dub-law had sounded too, they were destined, as in 
music, to be resolved by counterpoint." Simultaneous risings 
all over the fatherland, in Brunswick, Hesse, Hanover etc, 
confirmed the lad in his nascent faith in the triumph of liberalism ; 
as he says in 1842, with perhaps a tinge of over-coloiuring, "I 
came by the conviction that every decently active being should 
occupy himself exclusively with politics. I was only happy in 
the company of political writers, and commenced an overture on 
a political theme." 

His days at the S. Nicholas school had come to end The 
famous old Thomana had been reopened on November 29 of the 
previous year, with a brilliant celebration of its centenary, in the 
new building for whose completion the town authorities had 
shirked no cost; in the autumn of 1830 Richard Wagner, who 
had never got beyond the second class in the Nikolai, entered 
the first of the S. Thomas school. Nevertheless all zest for 
systematic school-work had been killed out of him : he preferred 
writing overtures for grand orchestra. It needed no great pressure 
to induce Dom to perform one of them, in B flat, f time, at the 
Court-theatre. "I still can see the little octavo score, neatly 
written in two different-coloured inks and grouped into three 
systems for the strings, wood-wind and brass," says Dom more 
than thirty years later ; 'Mt bore in it the germs of all those grand 
effects which at a later date were to set the whole musical world 
by the ears." To be exact, Wagner had written it out in three 
different colours, for the better understanding of those who might 
wish to study his score: the strings in red, the wood-wind in 
green, and the brass in black. Of this work the lad was mighty 
proud, though in after years he called it the culminating point 
of his folly : " Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was a mere Pleyel 
Sonata by the side of this strangely complicated overture." There 
really lay no small significance in that marshalling of the instru- 



Il8 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

ments: the division of the orchestra into three distinct con- 
stituent bodies, the strings, the wood-wind and the brass (instead 
of their former arbitrary fusion according to conventional rules) ; 
their grouping into families^ with careful adjustment of the tone- 
colour to the various characters and situations of the drama, — 
is one of the most marked of Wagner's innovations, and strikes 
the eye at the first glance down a page of his scores. The 
parallels first followed in this early work must inevitably lead in 
course of time to his system of triads of a similar timbre, and 
his weaving with them instruments erewhile employed apart, till 
at last he gave the orchestra a power of expression unmatched 
for clearness and variety.* 

When Dom commenced to rehearse this fledgeling he had 
some trouble in overcoming the opposition of his band. Old 
Konzertmeister Matthai at its head, the whole orchestra was 
convulsed with laughter, and declared the unknown yoimg gentle- 
man's overture arrant nonsense. However, as the conductor 
insisted on it, the work was " thoroughly rehearsed in the morn- 
ing, and played through pat at night." The effect was not at 
all improved by a fortissimo thump on the big drum recurring 
at every fifth bar ; at first astonished at the drummer's pertinacity, 
the audience soon shewed symptoms of impatience, and finally 
exploded with most disconcerting mirth. "The puzzled public 
couldn't make it out," says Dom, "when the players suddenly 
laid down their instruments, after a protracted hurly-burly; it 
still had hoped that some nice bit would come at last Yet there 
was something in this composition that compelled my respect, 
and I consoled its visibly dejected author with assurance of the 
future." According to another version of Dom's — ^which we must 
leave the reader to reconcile with the above as best he can, — 
Wagner joined heartily in the general laughter at his firstborn, 
and agreed that its fate was deserved. The composer himself 
merely says, " This first performance of a composition of my own 
left a great impression on me." Next day he called on Dom to 
thank him, when the latter assured him that he had been struck 
with his talent and was especially pleased not to have had to alter 
a single note, as needed almost always in the orchestration of 
beginners' works. Moreover a kindly notice of the overture is 

* See Liszt's Lohengrin et Tannhauser de Richard Wiagner^ Leipzig 185 1, 
pp. 106-7. 



LEIPZIG COURT-THEATRE, AND JULY-REVOLUTION. II 9 

said to have been inserted, at Dom's suggestion, in a journal 
called the "Comet," edited by Herlossohn. 

The youth's first brush with publicity had by no means damped 
his spirits, and he determined to pursue his path. He felt him- 
self no more a boy, and very soon exchanged the restraint of 
school for the freer atmosphere of student-life. In fact he did 
not^wait for the Thomana term to end at Easter, for we find him 
inscribed as student at the University of Leipzig on the 23rd of 
February 1831, — a step taken with no idea of devoting himself 
to any learned profession, as his musical career was already 
resolved on, but with the desire of widening his artistic horizon 
by a course of "philosophy and aesthetics." 



VIIL 

THE STUDENT OF MUSIC 

TAe university. — A " smoUis " offered to the Senior of the Saxonia. 
— Student excesses.— -Return to music. — Study with Weinlig: his 
method. — Immersed in Beethoven. — Personal relations. — Three 
overtures. — Polish emigrants. — Overtures in D minor and C at 
the Gewandhaus. 

These impressions^ of the fuly Revolution and the 
struggling Poles ^ were not as yet of perceptible formative 
influence on my artistic development; they were stimulators 
only in a general sense. Indeed^ so much was my receptive 
faculty still dominated by purely artistic impressions^ 
that it was precisely at this perioa that I occupied myself 
the most exclusively with music, wrote sonatas, overtures, 
and a symphony. 

Richard Wagi^kr. 

The Leipzig "student" was clothed by the moving events of the 
year 1830 with a nimbus that eclipsed even the glory wherewith 
he had been invested in the eyes of his enthusiastic reader by the 
magic of Hoffmann's fancy. In the days of uproar and disquiet 
the Student had proved himself a trustworthy member of the 
commimity, while punctiliously asserting his own imperilled rights. 
On the day of announcement of Prince Friedrich's regency a public 
declaration had been made by the Royal Commissaries sent from 
Dresden, to the effect that the students would in future be under 
the supervision of a re-oiganised police. But that had been the 
very ground of their commotion : stung to the quick, the youngsters 
left the watch they still were keeping since the days of danger, tore 
the placards down from walls and street-comers, and marched 
under arms, to the number of three of four hundred, to the 
quarters of the Royal Commissaries von Karlowitz and Meissner. 
Six of them stepped out of the ranks, and stated their collective 
grievances in a solemn address, encouraged and applauded by the 
burghers gathered in the street They succeeded in obtaining 
the repeal of the objectionable decree : the interference of the 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC. 121 

President of Police was done away with, a strong directorate of 
the University appointed from the academic Senate, and, to 
obviate friction between the students themselves, "a Seniorat'^ 
was constituted of the Seniors of the various student-corps, 
responsible solely to the Rector and Senate. Rector Krug, whose 
presence of mind had directed the young men's energy into the 
proper path, and kept it within the bounds of order, was presented 
by the citizens with a loving-cup in honour of the great reform ; 
whilst the students were favoured by the young ladies of Leipzig 
with an embroidered banner. 

Our hero's craving for the university must have dated from some- 
where about this period. Indeed we learn on the authority of 
A. von Wurzbach ("Zeitgenossen," Vienna 1871) that Wagner 
much affected the manners and society of students in the latter 
months of his school-time. Now, if the so-called " Fuchs " was 
an object of the loftiest condescension to the full-blown Student, 
what shall be said of a mere aspirant to the university, not yet 
matriculated, not even a " Fox " ? * But young Wagner was not 
to be deterred from frequenting the students' haunts, aping their 
customs, and using their slang ; in fact, he so far forgot himself 
as to offer a " smoUis " t to that dreaded personage, the Senior of 
the Saxonia. There was the devil to pay for his impudence. 
However, this Senior soon discovered that the young man was a 
cut above the ordinary, and made no further bones about admitting 
him to brotherhood, though he coupled it with one condition : 
" Within a month you produce your matriculation papers, or are 
sent to Coventry." The tale goes on that Richard returned in 
triumph at the end of a week, greeting his brother Senior with 
" If s all right now ; I've got the papers in my pocket." " Out 
with them ! " replied the Senior, and was confronted by " Student 
of Music." This unprecedented designation — the Leipzig Con- 
servatorium not having as yet come into being — evoked loud 
peals of laughter from the " hoary head " ; but the duly-authorised 
Fox was not to be put off; he claimed and received his Fox 
baptism in optima forma^ a solenm feast from which he was 
conducted home by his faithful senior in the small hours of the 
morning. 

This being the only plausibly recorded episode from Wagner's 

* See Appendix. 

t Or * ' SchmoUis "—student slang for brotherhood pledged by clinking glasses. 



122 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Student-life,* we give it for what it is worth, though it presents the 
failings common to all such anecdotes: on the one hand, the 
immoderate prominence of the narrator, — with whom, in the first 
instance, we may safely identify that worthy "senior'' himself; 
on the other, the absence of a single really individual trait to 
stamp it with the personality of Richard Wagner. From the 
story, however, we may glean these three facts : that the student- 
glamour was greatest for him when he stood without; that 
nothing less than intimacy with the head of the crack corps of 
the day could satisfy the youngster's sense of his own importance ; 
and finally, that his longing for the rank of actual Student made 
him anticipate the usual term and hasten his matriculation — as 
proved by the date of his inscription (Feb. 23, 1831). The 
" peals of laughter from the hoary head " assuredly owed their 
origin not so much to the surprising novelty of the designation 
chosen^ as to that far deeper misconception of which Beethoven 
himself had been unable to rid the layman's mind. "In my 
time," says Wagner once in joke, •" the Leipzig students made a 
butt of a poor devil whom they would get to declaim his poems 
in return for the settling of his score. They had his portrait 
lithographed, above the motto: 'Of all my sufferings Love is 
cause.'" It is tolerably certain that that "hoary head" would 
have been far more prone to class Music with the sentimental 
lyrics thus ridiculed, than to allow it a serious place beside the 
hall-marked scientific "faculties"; throughout his life it was in 
his own person, and in virtue of his individuality, that Wagner 
had to prove that it was no question here of a feminine, but 
in very truth a masculine art. If we were to strike out the 
influence of Richard Wagner from the post-classical development 
of German music, what meaning would this latter have for the 
non-musician ? 

As Immermann has aptly said, in all those "swaggering, 
hectoring students there lurks the grub of the future Philistine," 
and it is not in their ranks one must seek the budding geniuses 
and kindling lights of the world. Not that Wagner was at all 
inclined to dispense with his share of the fun, while the humour 

* Praeger tells a story, garbled from an allied conrersation of Wagner's 
concerning an adventure in one of those gambling-hells which had surviTed 
the Leipzig fracas of September; for the true account, as also its proper 
connection, we must await the publication of the master's memoirs. 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC. 1 2$ 

lasted : what of wit and fancy the revels of the students of those 
days fell short in, he amply made up from his own resources ; 
but he took the tempo of the usual academic excesses — to use 
his own words — " with such reckless levity, that they very soon 
revolted him." The deeper he plimged in the mire, the more 
convinced he became that the narrow round of sottish follies, 
which was all that remained after the bloom of civic distinction 
had worn off, could never satisfy his needs. To perceive this 
and to turn his back forever on the twofold stage of student 
prowess, the pothouse and tbc duel-ground, for him were one 
thing and the same. 

His people had had " great trouble with him " about diis time ; 
he had almost completely forsaken his music Not only that: 
of the opportunity of r^ular attendance on philosophic and 
sesthetic lectures he profited as little as Goethe, for instance, 
during the time of his Leipzig studies. It was not entirely his 
fault, for the Leipzig philosophers and aesthetes of those days 
could in no case have been of much service to him ; almost at 
the selfsame time as Richard Wagner was seeking in vain for the 
proper guide to a philosophic grasp of problems in art and life, 
Arthur Schopenhauer said goodbye to the Berlin University and 
his brief career as lecturer, because of the impossibility of finding 
the proper hearers for his teachings ! Thus the youth had to 
fall back on the light of nature for his view of things, and, sick 
of his madcap wanderings, returned to his senses. He felt the 
instant necessity of a strict and regular study of music, and 
providence directed him to the right man. 

That man was Christian Theodor Weinlig, cantor at the 
S. Thomas school in Leiprig since 1823.* He set bit and bridle 
on the riotous fancy of his pupil, and gave his mobile brain due 

* Weinlig died in March 184a, at the age of sixty-one. Had he lived but 
•even or eight months longer, he might have witnessed the production of 
Hiemi at Dresden, and satisfied himself as to that ''self-dependence" for 
which he had prepared his pupil ; in all probability he would have shaken 
his head at the work, but certainly would have shewn a better understanding 
of it than did his successor at the Thomas-school, the fairly well-known 
Moritz Hauptmann. His wife would appear to have taken a good deal of 
interest in the young musician at the period when he came to their house for 
his daily lesson, and Wagner's gratitude to her is proved by the dedication 
of his Liebesmahl der AposUl in 1843 "To Frau Charlotte Emilie Weinlig, 
widow of his never-to-be-forgotten teacher.*' 



124 LIPS OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

equipoise. The young musician had abready tried his hand on 
fugues, but it was with Weinlig that he first began a sound study 
of counterpoint In the letter of 1834 to Regisseur Franz 
Hauser already-cited Wagner gives a retrospect of this course 
of study: ''Weinlig must have felt at once where lay my chief 
deficiency ; he put a stop at first to my learning counterpoint, to 
ground me thoroughly in harmony. In this he took me through 
the strict and closer style, and would not budge from it till he 
thought me quite sure of my footing ; for he held that this soUd 
style was the sole foundation alike for handling freer and richer 
harmonies, and, in all essentials, for learning counterpoint Then 
he gave me the firmest grounding in the strictest principles of 
the latter, and after he felt that I was quite at home in this most 
difiEcult field of musical study he discharged me with the words : 
' I now release you from your lessons, as a pupil who has learnt 
everything his master could teach him.' " His account is corro- 
borated by a reminiscence of sister Cadlie's, how Weinlig paid 
a call one day during this six-months course : much to the 
mother's alarm, who feared a repetition of the old, old story, the 
worthy gentleman began with " I have felt it my duty to pay you 
a visit," but pleasantly surprised her by continuing, "of con- 
gratulation upon the wonderful progress made by your son. 
What it was in my power to teach the young man, he abready 
knows wellnigh of himself, — 'tis quite remarkable ! " 

As to Weinlig's mode of teaching, Mr Edward Dannreuther in 
his admirable article in Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians 
gives the following report of what Wagner told him in 1877 : — 
"Weinlig had no special method, but he was clear-headed and 
practical. Indeed you cannot teach composition ; you may shew 
how music gradually came to be what it is, and thus guide a 
young man's judgment, but this is historical criticism, and cannot 
directly result in practice. All you can do, is to point to some 
working example, some particular piece, set a task in that direction, 
and correct the pupil's work. This is what Weinlig did with me. 
He chose a piece, generally something of Mozart's, drew atten- 
tion to its construction, relative length and balance of sections, 
principal modulations, number and quality of themes, and general 
character of the movement Then he set the task : — ^you shall 
write about so many bars, divide into so many sections with 
modulations to correspond so and so, the themes shall be so 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC. 12$ 

many, and of such and such a character. Similarly he would set 
contrapuntal exercises, canons, fugues — he analysed an example 
minutely and then gave simple directions how I was to go to work. 
But the true lesson consisted in his patient and careful inspection 
of what had been written. With infinite kindness he would put 
his finger on some defective bit and explain the why and wherefore 
of the alterations he thought desirable. I readily saw what he 
was aiming at, and soon managed to please him. He dismissed 
me, saying, * You have learnt to stand on your own legs.' My 
experience of young musicians these forty years has led me to 
think that music should be taught all round on such a simple 
plan. With singing, playing, composing, take it at whatever stage 
you like, there is nothing so good as a proper example, and careful 
correction of the pupil's attempts to follow that example." 

Under Weinlig the young man acquired an intimate knowledge 
and love of Mozart, though it was put to a severe test by the 
orchestral performances at the Gewandhaus concerts: ''things 
that had seemed so full of life and soul when reading the score, 
or at the pianoforte, I scarcely recognised in the form wherein 
they skimmed before the audience. Above all, I was astonished 
at the mawkishness of the Mozartian cantilena, which I had 
imagined so full of charm and feeling. . . . My genuine delight 
in Mozart's instrumental works remained in abeyance till I had 
occasion to conduct them myself, and thus to follow my own 
feeling of the animation demanded by his cantilena '' {P. W. IV., 

Among his tasks of this period was the writing of an "ex- 
tremely simple and modest" pianoforte Sonata in B flat, four 
movements, in which he freed himself "from all shoddy," but 
repressed his inner promptings; at WeinUg's request it was 
printed by Breitkopf und Hartel, simultaneously with a Polonaise 
in D for four hands.* Neither work affords an inkling of the 

* In a list of '* New music published by Breitkopf und Hiirtel, Leipzig, 
Easter 1832," under the heading of Pianoforte Solos we find "Wagner, R., 
Sonata, 20 gr.," and in that of Pianoforte Duets, " Wagner, R., Polonaise Op. 
2> 8 gr." (see the '* Litterarisches Notizenblatt, Nr. 20" of June 9, 1832, a 
supplement to No. 138 of the Dresden AUndseitun^, The title-pages of the 
original edition have been reproduced, on a slightly smaller scale, in Jos. 
Ktirschner's Wagner-Jahrbuch of 1886. The Sonata bears the dedication, 
"To Herr Theodor Weinlig, Cantor and Musikdirektor at the Thomas- 
school in Leipzig, respectfully dedicated by Richard Wagner." 



126 LIFE OF KICHARD WAGNER. 

later Wagner, but they have a unique interest as being his 
earliest publications and bearing the conventional " opus " number^ 
— a fashion he never adopted again. It would be impossible, 
so Dom says, to detect in this sterile sonata a single trace of the 
author of its extraordinary predecessor, that amazing overture. 
The more the pity that the Sibyl should have saved the one, and 
not the other. However, in compensation for his self-restraint, 
Weinlig allowed the lad to write a piece at his own sweet will. 
Thus arose a Fantasia for the pianoforte in F sharp minor, 
hitherto unpublished, but described by W. Tappert as far more 
interesting and characteristic than the Sonata and Polonaise. 

The Fantasia was followed in the same half-year by a Concert- 
overture in D minor (Sept 26, 1831, — revised Nov. 4, 1831) 
composed " on the model of Beethoven, which I now understood 
somewhat better." Says Dom, " I doubt if there has ever been 
a young composer more familiar with the works of Beethoven, 
than the eighteen-year-old student Wagner. He owned the greater 
part of the master's overtures in score, copied by his own hand ; 
with the sonatas he went to bed, and rose with the quartets ; the 
songs he sang, the quartets he whistled (for he couldn't make 
headway with his playing) : in short, it was a veritable /uror 
teutantcus" Wagner himself puts his enthusiasm into the mouth 
of his German Musician in Paris: ''I knew no other pleasure 
than to plunge so deep into the genius of Beethoven, that at last 
I fancied myself become a portion thereof; and as this tiniest 
portion I began to respect myself, to come by higher thoughts 
and views — in brief, to develop into what sober people call an 
idiot'' Still later in life he recalls his midnight porings over these 
" cryptic pages " in the silence of his garret in the Pichhof, and 
declares that to them he owed what no teacher in the world could 
have given him, a practical initiation into the sacred mysteries of 
Beethoven, and in particular of the Ninth Symphony. He had 
made himself a pianoforte arrangement of this latter work, and 
his surprise may be imagined when he heard the symphony 
performed by the Gewandhaus orchestra— as an occasional point 
of honour — and could make neither head nor tail of the jumble 
of sounds. 

Two memorable letters afford us a glimpse into this period of 
burning the midnight oil before the shrine of Beethoven. The 
one, dated August 6, 1 831, is addressed to C. F. Peters' Bureau 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC. 127 

de Musique at Leipzig : in it young Wagner desires, "for lack of 
occupation," to be employed on proof-correcting and pianoforte* 
arrangements; he offers to furnish exemplars gratis, guarantees 
accuracy and punctuality, and signs himself "Richard Wagner, 
stud, mus" The other, dated October 6, is addressed to the firm 
of Schott in Mainz, and treats of no less an undertaking than a 
pianoforte-arrangement of the Ninth Symphony: "I long have 
made the glorious last symphony of Beethoven the object of my 
deepest study," writes young Wagner, "and the better I became 
acquainted with the work's high worth, the more has it distressed 
me to find it still so misconstrued, so terribly neglected, by the 
musical public The way to make this masterwork more popular, 
to me appeared to be a proper version for the pianoforte, such as 
I much regret to say I have never met as yet ; (for that four-handed 
arrangement of Czemy's can scarcely be called satisfactory). In 
keen enthusiasm I therefore ventured on an attempt to prepare 
this symphony for two hands^ and have succeeded thus far in 
arranging its first and wellnigh hardest section with as much 
clearness and fulness as possible. Accordingly I now approach 
your respected firm to ascertain whether you would feel disposed 
to accept such an arrangement. For, naturally, I should not care 
to proceed with so arduous a task without that certainty. So 
soon as I shall be assured of this, I will immediately set to work 
and finish what I have commenced I therefore beg for an early 
answer" etc, to be addressed "Leipzig, at the Pichhof, outside 
the Halle Gate, first floor." The answer was by no means " early," 
for it did not arrive until two months later, namely December 8, 
1831 ; and, much as we may sympathise with the young man's efforts 
to contribute to his own support, we cannot but be grateful that 
it was in the negative — like other replies to his repeated offers — 
and he thus was kept for something better. Meanwhile, not 
only had the arrangement of the Ninth Symphony been completed 
for his private delectation, but he had composed and instrumented 
in the selfsame key, D minor, the unpublished Overture already 
mentioned. Its first fair copy, of September 26, falls between 
the two letters just quoted ; its revision, Nov. 4, in the interval 
between the letter to Schott and its rejoinder. In a second 
Concert-overture, the composition of which he appears to have 
also finished before the close of the year, he exchanged the 
gloomy minor key for the cheeriness of C major. 



128 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

His musical activity did not preclude his mercurial nature from 
enjoyment of the society of friends. We have already referred to 
his intercourse with Dom — whose pupil Robert Schumann was at 
that time — and his younger half-brother, Schindelmeisser ; among 
his student comrades we have to make special mention of Guido 
Theodor Apel, just two years older than himself, who had been 
with him at the Nikolai, and left it to become a student of Law 
at the Leipzig University at the same time as Wagner. In 
Heinrich Kurz's History of German Literature (IV., 619-20) we 
read that, after the untimely death of his father, August Apel, 
this young man ''had received in the house of his cultured 
mother a careful education by Gottfried Fink, a well-known writer 
on music and editor of the Allg. musikal, Ztg. Richly blest with 
earthly goods and gifted with a lively fancy, he cultivated poetry 
and music with especial ardour, much assisted by the heartiest 
friendship with Richard Wagner and other composers." 

In Richard's family circle, sister Clara had been married two 
years since at Magdeburg (where she was following her career as 
singer) to operatic regisseur and singer Wolfram; but Rosalie 
remained the centre of attraction, together with her two engaging 
sisters, Ottilie the blonde and Cacilie the brunette. The mother's 
house maintained its reputation as a meeting-place for many lead- 
ing figures in art and literature, whilst visits to sister Louise Brock- 
haus, who had already become the happy mother of a little 
Marianne, were frequent as ever. So that there was no lack of 
enlivening company, little parties and excursions, etc Indeed 
until fifteen years back there stood — ^perhaps still stands — an old 
inn at Eutritzsch near Leipzig, then known by the nickname of 
the "Klavierschenke" (subsequently, Alte Oberschenke) through 
its possession of a pianoforte, where Wagner remembered having 
danced in his student days and improvised for others to dance to. 

With the best will in the world, on the other hand, we are 
imable to regale the reader with interesting anecdotes of Richard's 
"first love." True that, to fill this aching void in the master's 
youthful history, F. Praeger gives allied particulars from Wagner's 
mouth ; but the whole tale is sheer romandng, coloured with the 
author's racial passion for dragging in the Jews, — ^as we shall sub- 
sequently find to be the case with the Paris " Louis." Beyond 
doubt the young man's heart was vulnerable, and in more than 
cne direction, as may be judged from the fact that the honour of 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC. 1 29 

having been the object of his tenderer feelings has since been 
claimed in several quarters. We here need only mention Marie 
Ldwe, eventually mother of the two celebrated singers Lili and 
Marie Lehmann. At this time a member of the opera^^mpany 
(see Dom's Ergebnisse^ p. 150), she had come to Leiprig in 183a 
as a banner, became acquainted with Wagner through his sisters, 
and got him to accompany her on the pianoforte in her vocal 
practices. Richard is said to have conceived an '' infatuation '^ 
for her, which she did not return in consequence of his ''very 
morose and melancholy frame of mind " ! The one thing certain, 
is that Frau Lehmann always retained a sincere affection for the 
master during her ensuing career at the Cassel Court-theatre, 
at its prime under Spohr, and as harpist in the orchestra of the 
German National-theatre at Prague after her retirement from the 
stage; whilst Wagner, on his side, preserved for her a special 
friendship and esteem. It was she, who sent to him at Zurich 
a full account of the Prague successes of his Tannhduser and 
Lohengrin^ directing his attention to the signal achievement of 
Frau Dustmann (then FrL Louise Meyer) as Elsa; and at the 
b^^inning of the seventies, when occupied.with his first prepara- 
tions for the Bayreuth enterprise^ the master did not forget to 
apply to his staunch old friend for the co-operation of her two 
best pupils, her daughters named above. 

To turn to the more historic influences at work on the young 
man, we find him deeply interested in the struggles and sufferings 
of the downtrod Poles, just as a year or so back he had been 
fascinated by the July Revolution and its Leipzig epilogue. In 
the autumn and winter of 1831 came the last tragic throes of the 
Polish rebellion, so hopefully begun: Warsaw had been taken 
by the Russian army under Paskewitsch ; a portion of the Polish 
host, cut off by the Russians, had laid down its arms on the 
Galician frontier; the remainder of the Polish army, one-and- 
twenty thousand strong, had crossed over into Prussia. With 
tears the bearded riders embraced their horses for the last time, 
flung themselves sobbing to the ground, and broke the swords 
or sprung the muskets they might use no more in service of their 
&therland. Thousands resolved to seek in foreign lands a new 
home and centre whence to stir up interest in their nation ; the 
larger number found hospitable sanctuary in France ; others went 
to England or America, to Belgium or Algiers, or scattered far and 

I 



130 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

wide. Toward the year's end the refugees began their march 
through Germany, and on the 8th of January 1832, a brilliant 
winter's day, the first detachment reached Leipzig. A league 
from the town they were met by an expectant crowd; at the 
outer Grimma Gate the cheers of many thousand voices welcomed 
them. The whole length of the broad Steinweg was packed with 
people who had no other thought, for the moment, than how to 
prove to these unhappy wanderers their hearty sympathy. The 
Poles could not find words enough to express their joy and grati- 
tude, and tears flowed fast on either side. Accompanied by a 
cheering multitude, the emigrants traversed the city to the inns 
which a charitable " Poles-Committee " of wealthy citizens had 
had prepared for their reception. 

In view of the great excitement caused among the populace, 
it was arranged that the succeeding columns should not march 
through the town, but make a wide detour towards the Rannstadt 
Gate, near which stood the inn that was to put up the most of 
them. However, the number of private families who declared 
their readiness to take in a refugee or two for the four-and-twenty 
hours aUowed them soon increased to such a point that there 
were days on which but a handful, out of a column of 90 to lao 
men, had to be accommodated in the hostehies. The students 
figured among the most enthusiastic, exchanging souvenirs, the 
kiss of brotherhood, or vows of eternal friendship ; those of them 
who had not means or room to house an emigrant, at least sought 
out his company, and listened breathless to his tales of heroism. 
Among these latter was Richard Wagner, who tells us in 77ie 
Work and Mission of my Lift of his personal acquaintance with 
Polish emigrants, fine, stalwart men, who filled him with deep 
pity for their fatherland's sad fate. 

Each afternoon the strangers made a pilgrimage to the monu- 
ment of Poniatowsky in the Gerhard Garden ; from the wreaths 
that decked the simple masonry they would pluck a flower, and 
hoard it up as if sprung from the actual grave of the unfortunate 
prince. Wherever they appeared in public they were received 
with all possible respect ; not only were balls and parties given 
in their honour, but a Grand concert at the Gewandhaus, when 
the *' Denkst du damn " figured as a concert-piece, yielded a very 
material contribution to their sustentation-fund. A most striking 
scene was presented at seven each morning of the day after their 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC. I3I 

arrival, on their departure from their head-quarters, the inn of the 
Green Shield ; it was all life and bustle, cries and counter-cries, 
questions and answers, now in Polish, now in French, and again 
in German — which last was spoken by an astonishing proportion 
of the strangers ; there seemed no end to vows of gratitude, to 
touching farewells, repeated promises of tidings to be sent from 
here or there to their new-found friends. 

So it went on for the greater part of the month of January. In 
February merely a few stragglers passed through the town, but the 
arrival was still awaited of several columns of officers and some 
thousands of men in batches of five-hundred apiece, as to whose 
transit Artillery General Bem, the hero of Ostrolenka, was in 
treaty with the district authorities. In fact the tide of emigration 
was not yet spent, as we may gather from a report of March 1832, 
** Everybody in Leipzig is aflame for the Poles " ; and it is from 
these rousing days that dates the inspiration for Wagner's over- 
ture ** Polonia,'' though it was not to be realised until 1836, at 
Kdnigsberg. 

For the present, in the words of this chapter's motto, artistically 
these impressions were "stimulators only in a general sense." 
The overtures in D minor and C major, already mentioned, were 
followed by eC third that owed its origin to Raupach's blood-and- 
thunder tragedy JCtng Enzto^ then storming every German stage ; 
its manuscript is dated February 3, 1832. Raupach's piece, in 
which Rosalie played the Lucia di Viadagoli, accordingly had the 
honour at its repeated Leipzig performances (commencing the 
middle of February) of being ushered in by an overture expressly 
composed for it by Richard Wagner. The next larger work to 
engage his attention was a grand Symphony in C, composed 
somewhere about the month of March; as it is the first, and 
only completed work of this order ever penned by Wagner, we 
shall return to it at greater length in the succeeding chapter. 

Meanwhile the 16th subscription-concert. at the Gewandhaus, 
of February 23, had been opened with the D minor Overture.* 



* A photographic reduction of the original programme will be found in 
Kttrscbner's Wagmer-Jahrhtuh (1886, p. 371), together with the above extract 
from a report in No. 18 of the Allg. tnus. Ztg. (editor, G. W. Fink ; pub., 
Breitkopf und Hllrtel) of May 2, 1832. The programme simply says " Ottver' 
ture, von Richard Wagner" ; neither it nor the report states the ksy^ which 
has been erroneously given in xhtjahrbuch as C major. 



132 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

''We were much pleased," says the Ailgemeine AfusikaUsche 
Zettungj " with a new overture by a very young composer, Herr 
Richard Wagner. The piece was thoroughly done justice to, and 
indeed the young man shews great promise ; his composition not 
only sounds well, but has grit in it, and his been worked out 
with skill and diligence, with a visible and successful aim at the 
most honourable mark. We have looked through the score. '^ 
The audience also was warm in its acknowledgment, and the 
young artist reaped the double advantage, of that experience 
which is only to be gained from an actual hearing of one's work, 
and the knowledge that the eyes of his fellow-citizens were turned 
on him with expectation. 

Besides the classical Gewandhaus there was then a second 
concert-union in Leipzig, under the name of Euterpe, with an 
orchestra composed of professional and amateur musicians, young 
and old ; once a week they gave performances in the "old rifle- 
gallery" outside the Peter's Gate, before a less pretentious but 
most sympathetic public. The first-named concerts, Leipzig's 
musical pride, were at that time under the direction of kindly 
August Pohlenz*; the management of this humbler rival had 
recently been assimied by Wagner's former teacher, Musikdirektor 
Chr. Gottlieb Miiller (a valued member of the theatre-band), 
who had raised it to the reputation of a kind of "popular 
Gewandhaus." In the case of Wagner's early works the Euterpe 
concerts repeatedly formed the stepping-stone to an audience in 
the higher forum: "I was in the good books of this minor 
orchestral imion," he says himself at the end of 188 1, "which had 
already performed a fairly fugal concert-overture of mine in the 
Altes Schiitzenhaus." This was the C major overture with the 
elaborate closing fugue; but even before its promotion to the 
Gewandhaus we hear of the yoimg composer's making his first 
public appearance in the dramatic field with a "Scene and Aria." 
On the 22nd April the aged reciter Solbrig (see p. too) gave a so- 
called "declamatorium" at the Court-theatre, with a fair amount 
of musical relief: the instrumental portion was furnished by 
Spontini's Nurmahal overture and an overture of Dom's \o Julius 
Citsar-y among the vocal pieces we find mention of this "Scene 
and Aria by Richard Wagner, capitally sung by Dem. Wiist " — ^the 

* Christian August Pohlenz, born 1790 at Saalgast in the Niederlausitz, died 
1843 at Leipzig. 



THE STUDENT OF MUSIC 1 53 

Henriette Wiist already referred to, and of whom we shall have 
to speak again. Unfortunately it has proved impossible to dis- 
cover any further particulars about this aria, which would seem to 
have disappeared entirely. 

On the 30th April the C major Overture itself advanced to the 
Gewandhaus ; not, however, at one of the regular twenty subscrip- 
tion-concerts, but at a " musical academy " given by the Italian 
singer Matilda Palazzesi, who, on the dissolution of the Italian 
Opera at Dresden, had just received the honorary title of a Royal 
Saxon Chamber-singer, and was making a concert tour through 
Leipzig, Hanover and other German towns, prior to returning to 
her native country. On the authority of a discoloured old pro- 
gramme which he found among the master's papers, we are told 
by W. Tappert that this overture figured as the first number of 
the concert's second part, with the designation "new." Five-and- 
twenty years later, namely Nov. 30, 1877, it was played in public 
once again by Bilse's band in the German capital, from the well- 
preserved score. Before that, however, it had been rescued from 
oblivion to celebrate the master's sixtieth birthday. May 22, 1873, 
at a surprise performance in the old Margraves' opera-house at 
Bayreuth. One of the audience on this latter occasion has recorded 
his opinion that the work most eloquently reveals the influence of 
Beethoven, and its clear, decided features and plastic themes already 
shadow forth the future master of the musical drama, whilst the 
fruit of Cantor Weinlig's teaching is evident in the powerful and 
effectively instrumented fugue at its dose. But a more attentive 
hearer would perhaps have traced a greater likeness to Mozart, 
than to Beethoven, in consonance with Weinlig's tenets. 



IX. 
THE C MAJOR SYMPHOHY. 

Composition of the Symphony in C: its construction and themes^ 
-—Journey to Vienna : " Zampa " and Strauss's waltzes, — Prague : 
Dionys Weber has the Symphony played by his Conservatoire pupils. 
— Mozart traditions. — Tomatscheh; Friedrich KittL — ''Die 
Hochzeit^* — Return to Leipzig. — Heinrich Laube. — '' Kosziusko^^ 
text. — Ferformaftce of the Symphony at the Gewandhaus. — De- 
parture for Wiirzburg. 

Of great poets we know that their youthful works at once- 
proclaim the whole main theme of their productive life ; we- 
find it otherwise with the musician. Who would expect 
to recognise in their youthful works the true Mozart^ the 
genuine Beethofoeny with the same distinctness as he detects 
the toted Goethe, and in his striking works of youth the 
veritable Schiller f 

Richard Wagner. 

A YEAR rich in experiences, and marked by great personal diligence^ 
had passed over the keen young artist, now nineteen years of age. 
The approach of summer tempted him to an excursion into the 
larger world outside, with his completed Symphony in his pocket 
But before we can accompany him on his trip, we must return to 
that work's composition. 

Since the beginning of 1832, with various interruptions, he had 
devoted his full energy to this his first long work, principally, as it 
would seem, in the month of March ; though we have no definite 
data to go by, as the original manuscript is irretrievably lost, and 
fifty years later a new score had to be compiled from the recovered 
orchestral parts. Lucky that even that was possible. For this 
Symphony played no insignificant role in young Wagner's artistic 
development: with it his apprenticeship comes to end. As 
he says in his own account of the work, signed just six weeks 
before his death, " When the musician has dallied for a sufficient 

t34 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 1 35 

length of time with what he supposes to be the production of 
Melody, at last it frets and shames him to discover that he has 
merely been stammering out his favourite models : he longs for 
self-dependence ; and this he can win through nothing but obtain- 
ing mastery of Form. So the precocious melodist becomes contra- 
puntist : now he has nothing more to do with melodies, but with 
Themes and their working out ; it becomes his joy to sport with 
them, to revel in strettos, the overlapping of two or three themes, 
till he has exhausted every possibility conceivable " {F, W. VI., 319). 
How far he had progressed in this direction, without losing sight 
of the firm and drastic contour of his two great model symphonists, 
Mozart and Beethoven, the C major Symphony reveals at a glance. 

In addition to these more general qualities of his youthful work 
the master recognised but one distinctive feature of his personality, 
a feature that pervades the work : " If anything of Richard Wagner 
were to be detected in it, it would be the boundless confidence 
with which he stuck at nothing even then, and which saved him 
from that priggishness so irresistible to the German. This con- 
fidence reposed at that time on a great advantage I enjoyed over 
Beethoven : for when I took up something like the standpoint of 
his Second Symphony, I already knew the Eroica, the C minor 
and the A major, which were still unknown to the master at the 
time he wrote the Second, or at most could have been floating 
before him only in dimmest distance" {ibid. 319-20). 

This work, though performed at many laige centres in the 
season 1887-8 (and then withdrawn), has never been published; 
but the reader will find a comprehensive analysis of its construc- 
tion, with examples of its principal themes etc., in an excellent 
little monograph by O. Eichberg.* The chief theme of the first 
movement is distinguished, according to Eichberg, not only by its 
truly Beethovenian cut, but by the extraordinary searchingness of 
its expression, and the master was certainly too severe upon him- 
self when he wrote that such a theme " lends itself quite well to 
counterpoint, but has little to say " ; for it is just this theme that 
lends the whole first movement its eminently symphonic character. 
The second principal theme (in G major) with an imitative section 
attached to it, is followed by a melodic passage which not only 

* " Richard Wagntr^s Sympkonie in C dur^ analysirt von Oscar Eichberg "— 
28 pi^es, with 25 musical illustrations— Berlin, 1887, published by Hermann 
Wolfs Concert-direction. 



136 



LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



points distinctly to Wagner's later manner, but is also interesting 
through its presenting the earliest example of that turn, or 
mordente, which appears so often and so characteristically in 
the master's dramatic works : 



Ob, 



^M 




Quart, without Basses 



The first movement begins sostenuto e maestoso, but changes to 
an Allegro con brio \ towards its powerful close a yearning question 
is put by the wood-wind : 



This forms the thematic link connecting the first with the 
second movement, Andante }, which it opens, sounded by oboes 
and clarinets, and in which it plays a very prominent part. The 
principal motive of the Andante has an elegiac character, 
forcibly reminding us — not so much by its actual notes, as by its 
general build — of the Andante in Beethoven's C minor. Perhaps 
this relationship struck the aged master himself, for he refers in 
particular to that symphony of his great forenmner. However 
that may be, he was sufficiently fond of it, not merely to use it 
again for a New Year's office 1834-5 (as we shall presently learn), 
but to make it serve as peroration to the account already cited, 
where he rightly calls it " not a theme, but an actual melody " : 



V€.Vi0la 




THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 



137 




The third movement, C major Allegro assai f , is at once the 
most rapid and the longest, mounting up to 587 bars if we include 
the usual repetitions. The final movement, in Rondo form, 
afforded a fine field for contrapuntal ingenuity ; and the '' daunt- 
less energy that dashes on from one end of the work to the other," 
as remarked by an early reviewer, " conducts with lofty passion to 
a brilliant close." 

His Symphony finished, its author was free to set out for 
Vienna in the summer of 1832, with no other object than a 
fleeting taste of this once-fiuned musical centre. In his Pilgrimage 
to Beethovefiy written eight years later, he makes his German 
Musician say : '' How delighted I was with the merry ways of the 
dwellers in this empire<ity. I was in a state of exaltation, and 
saw everything through coloured glasses. The somewhat shallow 
sensuousness of the Viennese seemed the freshness of warm 
life to me; their volatile and none too discriminating love of 
pleasure I took for frank and native sensibility to all things 
beautiftiL" Indeed the proud consciousness of being the author 
of a completed grand Symphony might well "exalt" the actual 
artist to an almost equal degree with the hero of his tale, though 
he had come five years too late for a visit to Beethoven. But 
whereas the imaginary character had the joy of seeing on one of 
the five stage-posters for the day the announcement of a performance 
of Fidtlio^ and hearing the very finest personatrix of the title-role, 
Wilhelmine Schr()der, there was no such luck for the real young 
man : " What I saw and heard," he tells us in the Autobiographic 
Sketchy "edified me little; wherever I went, it was Zampa and 
Straussian potpourris on Zampa — both, and especially at that time, 
an abomination to me." 

Moreover — or should we say "because"? — it was the terrible 
year of Cholera, and a Viennese news-letter of tliat summer informs 
us that its ravages were still more awful than on the occasion of 



138 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

its first appearance, killing its victims in a few hours, with hardly 
an exception rescued by the doctors. These horrors altered little 
in the outward aspect of the city. " It is inconceivable,'' continues 
that news-letter, " how flighty and heedless our populace can be 
in the midst of so perilous a situation : here and there one hears 
expression of anxiety ; but nobody alters one tittle in his mode of 
life, and the places of public amusement are packed to overflow- 
ing.'' The Zampa mania is also referred to : ''This opera has 
almost the same success with us as the Stumnu von ForHd\ every 
performance is given to crowded houses, and the box-office is 
mobbed." 

In quite another region our young German musician met some- 
thing more to his liking, namely the waltzes of Strauss the older 
and Raymund's fairy-dramas. Thirty-one years later he refers to 
at least one of these features — though the Strauss he then alludes 
to would probably be the younger Johann : * " What Vienna of 
itself can do, with an imaginative, gay and genial public, is proved 
by two of the most original and delightful products in all the 
realm of public art, — the Magic-dramas of Raymund and the 
Waltzes of Strauss. If you don't wish for higher things, then be 
content with this : indeed its intrinsic value is nothing to make 
light of, for in respect of grace, refinement and genuine musical 
substance, one single Straussian waltz as much outtops the most 
of our imported foreign factory-wares as the Stephen's-tower those 
hoUow pillars which line the Paris boulevards " {F. W, III., 386). 
Taking all in all, his stay at Prague on his journey home was 
more resultful to him than the few days he passed in gay Vienna. 
Among the most fruitful acquaintances he made here, was that of 
the estimable director of the Prague Conservatorium, Dionys 
Weber. The young musician's earnest zeal went straight to the 
heart of this strict and highly conservative master, and won him 
the welcome encouragement of hearing several of his own composi- 
tions, including the Symphony, played by the orchestra of the 
conservatoire pupils. Contemporary accounts inform us that^ 
although their solos made it manifest that one was dealing with 
talents in course of formation, these young people's rendering of 
ensemble-pieces, overtures and symphonies, ofiered a pleasure 
scarcely to be rivalled by an assemblage of the greatest virtuosi. 

* On the other hand the Strauss mentioned in the Parisian Fatalities (1841)^ 
as one of the pleasures missed in Paris, is of course the fitther. — W. A. E. 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 1 39 

Apropos of a visit he once paid to the establishment, Spontini is 
said to have remarked : " Over fifty young folk — ^at the happy age 
when one devotes oneself to art with that fresh enthusiasm whose 
bloom is partly rubbed away by advancing years, partly by other 
interests in life — ^with their teachers at the first desk of every instru- 
ment, are led by the expert staff of Director Dionys Weber, who 
knows so well to check the fire of youth when threatenii^ to out- 
leap due bounds, and thus attains an ensemble that kindles laity 
alike and connoisseurs to the highest delight" So our young 
friend, to whom it was of the utmost importance that his worics 
should materialise fix)m ink and paper into living sound, might 
well be pleased with the good fortune that had placed such means 
in his way. Perhaps the shortening of his symphony's Finale 
by forty bars, noticed by Tappert when going through the old 
orchestral parts, may be traced to this Prague rehearsal ; even if 
the cut was not effected till a later date, there can be no doubt of 
its origin in the impressions made by this first hearing of the work 
on its composer, who at no time was careful for an idle show of 
cleverness, but always for firm and clear expression of his dominant 
idea.* 

What he further learnt from the older musician was in part 
instructive, in part distressing to the ardent student of Beethoven ; 
though the opinions of the Prague director were capped by those 
only too current in the easy-going musical world of Leipzig. As 
late as 1869, in his essay on Conducting^ Wagner refers to Dionys 
Weber's having spoken of the Eroica as '* an utter abortion," and 
hastens to add: "True enough: he knew no other than the 
Mozartian all^ro, which I have characterised before ; he let his 
pupils play the Allegro of the Eroica in the strict time of that ; 
and whoever witnessed such a performance, must surely have 
agreed with Dionys. But no one played it otherwise " {F. W, IV., 
325). The young man was already beginning to form his own 
standard of criticism, though it would naturally remain for the 
present undivulged. On the other hand, it was of superlative 
value to receive from his Bohemian mentor the true traditions of 



* According to Tappert's reckoning, the final movement originally embraced 
492 bars, which were reduced by the cut aforesaid to 452, and erentnally 
by another (made when ?) to 397. *' To judge by this outward sign," says 
Eichberg, '* the Finale would appear to have been the movement that pleased 
its author least, at any rate that struck him as containing superfluities." 



140 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

tempo and rendering in the case of Mozart's works. Friedrich 
Dionys Weber belonged to those exclusive Mozartians, by no 
means rare among the older musicians of that day, with whom it 
was difficult to agree upon Beethoven because their own develop- 
ment had not kept step with his giant strides ; all the richer was 
he in information about Mozart, a considerable number of whose 
works he had heard conducted in person. As eye and ear witness 
of the rehearsals and first performance of Figaro, he informed his 
eager young listener " how the master could never get the overture 
played fast enough to please him; and how, to maintain its 
unflagging swing, he constantly urged on the pace wherever 
consistent with the nature of the theme " {P. W. VIII., 208) so 
that "when he had forced his bandsmen at last to a pitch of 
angry desperation which enabled them to take YAs presto, to their 
own surprise, he encouraged them with the cry, * Now that was 
splendid I This evening, though, a trifle faster ! ' " {P. W, IV,, 3 1 7). 
Many another priceless hint and detail anent the rendering of 
Mozart's works did Wagner glean from the ample harvest of 
the old Prague Nestor's recollections, to be treasured up for 
application to problems arising in the future.* 

Another local celebrity whose acquaintance Richard made in 
the Moldau city, was the composer Wenzel Tomaschek, a man 
whose opinion upon every musical occurrence within the bounds 
of his Bohemian fatherland was eagerly sought *' He had made 
no art-tours, nor taken any other steps to circulate his composi- 
tions," says Hanslick, " yet the older he grew, the firmer he sat — 
like a spider in its web — the centre of an admiring little circle ; 
and it was held sheer madness for a stranger artist to take his 
leave of Prague without having introduced himself to Tomaschek." 
Though this last necessity was by no lAeans so vital to Wagner, 
who was very far from angling for Prague successes, he did not 
throw away the chance of visiting a man with so much influence, 
and was again repaid by kind encouragement To so devout a 



* In the same letter to the Dresden Anseiger of August 14, 1846, from 
which is taken the first of the two passages just quoted, he writes : *' Not 
only my natural feeling, but also tradition derived from the source above- 
mentioned, determine me to read the tempo of the so-called Letter-dnet 
between Susanna and the Countess as an actual allegretto, in accordance with 
its title . . . whereas most of our German lady-singers have accustomed them- 
selves to delivering it more in the fashion of a sentimental love-duet" 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. I4I 

disdple of Beethoven, Tomaschek had at least one interesting 
side : in earlier years he once had seen the great master face to 
face in his own lodgings, just about the time of the revival of 
Fidelia after its initial failure ; and gladly would he dwell upon 
that meeting. Just as the youth had sounded Dionys Weber on 
the subject of Mozart, we perhaps may attribute certain lifelike 
touches in Wagner's subsequent description of the Bonn master's 
outward appearance {Pilgr, to B.) to the faithful remembrances 
of an eye-witness. Rash as it would be, to trace that clear-cut 
cameo of Beethoven's personality to any one particular source, we 
cannot help feeling that there is an inner relation between the 
scenes in this tale and the impressions of the summer trip of 
1832 ; nor would it be inconceivable that the first germ of the 
story should already have taken shape in the mind of the lad of 
nineteen years, to gather round it certain drastic details learnt by 
word of mouth, and coloured with the memories of his recent 
visit to Vienna. 

Turning to the lighter aspect of his stay, he could not possibly 
go short of company in a town where sister Rosalie had for some 
years been a favourite actress in the enjoyment of every species 
of artistic recognition and social regard. Earlier in the same 
summer, after a longish interval, she had played a number of 
guest-r&les at the National theatre. The simultaneous presence 
of tenor Wild from Vienna, who was earning Zampa triumphs 
here as well, led to a performance of the Stumme in which Rosalie 
took the title-role in her own impressive manner.* She had also 
appeared before the public of Prague as Lucia in Konig Enzio^ 
as Mirandolina in Goldoni's Locandieray and in many other 
characters. How little she had lost her old power of attraction, 
is proved by her farewell performance in Kdtchcn von Heilbronn, 
It fell upon the evening of the feast of Saint Margaret (July 13 : 
" the first pear is plucked by Margaret "), a holiday kept by every 
class of Prague society with the result that even the greatest stars 
were greeted as a rule with a half-filled parterre : at this farewell 
of Rosalie's the house was full. 

* Besides that of the Neapolitan fishermaid, she played another dumb-show 
part during this temporary engagement, namely in Th. Hell's then popular 
melodrama Yelva (adapted from the French, with music by Reissiger) ; con- 
temporary reports decUiring that she made of " every limb a tongue," and that 
almost each of her mute harangues raised a storm of applause (see news-letter 
in the Abenduitung^ also the Prague Bohemia^ 1832). 



142 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Among those with whom our hero struck up friendship in 
Prague was Johann Friedrich Kittl, at that time drafter of briefs 
in the fiscal bureau of his native city, but also studying simple 
and double counterpoint with Tomaschek, and fairly on his way 
to abandoning law and civil practice for a musical career : only 
his father's wish held him back for awhile. As composer and 
conductor Kittl had decided talent ; for the rest, he was owner 
of a goodly double-chin, notwithstanding his youth, and the 
enfant gdti of the aristocracy, particularly its fairer portion. He 
was passionately addicted to the chase, — ^witness his imaginative 
Hunting Symphony, which Mendelssohn considered good enough 
in later years to conduct it at the Gewandhaus, also to accept its 
dedication — and it was probably in Kittl's company and the 
summer forests of Bohemia that young Wagner allowed himself 
to be drawn into the only hunting expedition of all his life, the 
echoes from which we may hear in Die Feen^ ay, in Parsifal 
itself. Wolzogen tells us in his Richard Wagner und die 
Tkierwelt\ "Ever full of life and energy, the lad had let his 
boon companions bear him with them to the chase. A hare 
was started : at random his unpractised hand fired ofi* his fowling- 
piece ; he knew not whether he had hit or not ; every thought 
was drowned in the excitement of an imaccustomed 'sport.' 
Later, when he and his noisy comrades were merrily lunching 
in the open, a wounded leveret dragged itself their way: the 
eloquence of its appealing eye told the young man's conscience 
that this was the victim of his thoughtless pleasure. Never could 
he forget that look of anguish in his fellow-creature, — ^never again 
take up a gun against an animal." 

His friendship with Kittl outlasted this brief holiday in the 
smiling valleys of the Moldau, but it was not until ten years 
later that he saw " dear fat friend Hans " again, newly elected 
Director of the Prague Conservatorium and successor to the 
worthy old pedantic Dionys. They reminded each other of " the 
happy days of never-failing fun and laughter when they both 
were gay young sparks unknown to fame," and their excellent 
relations were heartily renewed whenever Wagner came that 
way. 

But the stay in Prague had gained another meaning for the 
lad. He had not been altogether idle, for it was here that he 
sketched and versified an operatic text of tragic aim, Die Hachzeit 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 1 43 

Wherever he had lit upon its medieval subject, so sombre in 
such blithesome times, he could not afterwards remember: a 
frantic lover climbs to the window of the sleeping-chamber of 
his friend's bride while she is waiting for the brid^oom; the 
bride struggles with the madman and hurls him into the court- 
yard below, where he gives up the ghost; at the funeral the 
bride sinks lifeless on his corpse. This his earliest text is 
remarkable for the names of its dramatis personse, partly old 
German, partly old Norse or Ossianic: Morald (?), Hadmar, 
Harald, Admund, Cadolt; Arindal is already met here, and 
among the women Ada and Cora (? Lora). All these names are 
distinguished by the fulness of their vowel sounds and the pre- 
ponderance of soft or liquid consonants (d, 1, m, n, r) ; the most 
conspicuous in this respect are "Arindal" and "Ada," to be 
encountered again in Die Feen. With this libretto Wagner left 
the field of instrumental music for his own artistic sphere. What 
has been preserved of it, shews that same contempt for " well- 
turned verse and charming rhymes" which continues to the 
time of Rienzi; neither is the later enricher of the German 
language to be detected here, as indeed the stuff presented no 
necessity for daring innovations. However, in the loose-built 
opening verses we find an involuntary union of end-rhyme and 
alHteratipn : 

Vereint ertonet jeUt ans unsrem Munde 
des Friedens freandlicfa froher Gesang I 
Denn Hadmar und Morald, nach langem Kampf, 

nach blQt'gem Streit, 
sind ausgesohnt, Tereint ni dieser Stunde, 
da wir, ein frohes Fest zu begeh'n, 
die Hilnde freudig uns reichen &c. 

Inwardly advanced in many things, he returned home toward 
the end of November, and at once proceeded to the musical 
setting of his book. "Leipzig, the 5th of December 1832," is 
the date at the foot of the sketch for the first scene, closely 
written on eight folio pages, with many a correction. This scene 
consists of an introduction, followed by a chorus and septet The 
Maestoso introduction is most energetic in its rhythm, according 
to W. Tappert (Musikalisches Wochenblatt 1887, No. 27), but very 
un-Wagnerian here and there in its melody, as proved by the 
subjoined example : 



144 



LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



ft %jir> tii^ \ ^z f. si^tn^ jtjin c jj 



The male chonis, following directly on the Introduction^ 
celebrates with vigour and swing the peace concluded between 
two ancient enemies, the houses of Hadmar and Morald : 



mW i r iifili'r^ 



■ym- 

Ver - eint« 

\ 



^^ 



er-t&-net jeUt au« un-srem Munde 

v\.N I ^ : . ^ J 



J .j;v , j 



^m 



^ 



^m 



J i M- J 



^^ 



i 



^ 



e 



Frie - dens 



freand 



lich 



^ 



^ 

^ 



fro - h«r 






sang. etc. 



1- 

A three-part female chorus takes up the strain : 

Willkommen ihr, von Morald's fernem Lande, 
anf Hadmar's froher Burg ! 

At the first pause in the general jubilation there ensues a 
duologue between Cadolt (bass), the son of Morald, and Admund 
(tenor) of the house of Hadmar. In the gloomy Cadolt we 
recognise that " frantic lover," without being able to say for certain 
if his passion has already seized him, or merely thrown its first 
shadow across his path. The orchestra would appear to have 
taken an active part in the expression of this section, the second 
and fifth bars of which are characteristic of the Rienzi and 
Tannhauser Wagner : 

Admund CmdoU 



Wekh* mir nicht sos! Vertna' mir, wm dich qolk. Icfa 



|AJ_ir k8,d_ i rp p^ 



g'^v-g-ir k ! ;iJ \o.\ 



Miz: 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 



145 



m\ T' n c r ^ 



trdss es nidit, mem Frvund,- 



tf^ij.. j^M ■ ^^ 



n jMi" J rTi'LTf^ 1 



l^Tr " 



The recitative leads on to an Allegro maestoso. With trumpets 
and drums the orchestra announces a chorus of Welcome, written 
mainly in four parts, but extended to six when the men and maids 
address the " happy pair " in three-part alternation : 

Seht, o seht, dort nahet schoa, 
in Jugendflille und hehrer Pracht, 
neuvermShlt das jange Paar, 
in Lieb' and ewiger Treu' vereint I 

Men. 

Preis Dir, der Schonsten aller Schonen I 

JnrOfneti. 
Preis Dir, dem Edelsten der Edlen ! etc. 

But, immediately before the entry of the bright C major Allegro 
of the chorus, that threatening bass-figure attached to Cadolf s 
rejoinder to his friend is heard once more : 



Moreover it suddenly cuts short the pompous tag of the full 
orchestra, foretelling that grief shaU follow joy, and we may 
accordingly claim it as an earliest '' Leitmotiv." 

AndanU 








It now conducts to a recitative, "Sie sind vermahlt" From 
the castle chapel comes the bridal couple, Arindal and Ada, with 

K 



146 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

a numerous retinue; Cadolt's lurid gaze is magnetically attracted 
to the bride of his former enemy, and so compels her own that 
she shudders at sight of this stranger : 

Ada (catching sight of Cadolt). 
Mein Gatte, sprich ! wer ist der fremde Mann ? 

ArindaL 
Cadolt ist's, Morald's Sohn, Tor Kunem noch 
mein Feind, doch jetzt fUr xmmerdar mein Freand I 

The lines of the future plot are thus concisely mapped, whilst 
the sentiments animating the various personages combine at 
the end of the scene to form a well-conceived Septet (Ada, 
Lora, Arindal, Harald, Admund, Cadolt, Hadmar), which much 
delighted Weinlig. Rosalie was by no means so pleased with 
the book^ when her brother shewed it to her. Reason enough 
for him to destroy the whole of his poem, and break off his 
composition. The musical sketch and completed score of its 
first scene, however, remained for a while in his hands. 

Through that inexplicable fate which has befallen so many of 
Wagner's manuscripts, this sketch, together with a number of 
other papers from Wagner's first period (mostiy drafts of letters 
and essays down to 1842 and beyond), was offered for public 
auction a few years after the master's death. By the nature of 
the thing, they cannot but have issued from the personal effects 
his first wife left behind her, and one would have thought it the 
first duty of her executors to hand them over to their author, or 
at least to the survivors of his family. But even in his lifetime 
the master had a strange experience of the legal status of intel- 
lectual property, in connection with this selfsame fragment of 
Die Hochzeit As he was no longer in possession either of the 
sketch or the scene's completed score, after wellnigh half a century 
(1879) he was interested to hear of the latter's existence in good 
preservation, as a manuscript of 36 folio pages announced for 
public sale without notice or exhibition to himself. Wishii^ to 
renew acquaintance with the long-forgotten relic, also to ensure 
its restoration to his family, he declared his readiness to buy 
his own handiwork, and inquired its price. The man in posses- 
sion, a Wiirzburg music-dealer, asked him the sum of five-thousand 
marks (;£25o) I Little inclined either to make himself a victim 
of shameless extortion or to compete with hardened autograph- 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 1 47 

collectors in the pursuit of their expensive hobby, yet averse to 
abandoning his wish vrithout an effort, after protracted n^otia- 
tions he commenced a lawsuit against this grasping Fafner. The 
latter, according to existing laws, could not possibly raise any 
claim to the contents of the manuscript, which would have involved 
the right of publication ; for the mere paper and ink the price 
demanded was too preposterous, and had a suspicious air of 
blackmailing.* But German Justice in two earthly courts decided 
otherwise. The result of the action was a dismissal of his claim, 
with costs amounting to 600 marks to be paid by the plaintiff, — 
a pretty penalty for his brazen attempt to renew relations with a 
juvenile work I 

It was upon his return from Prague that Wagner made his first 
acquaintance with Heinrich Laube, who was six years older and 
basking in the sunshine of a newly-gotten fame. Bom at Schrottau 
in Silesia, even at the gymnasium he had '' shaken the security " 
of the weekly papers of that province with his poems. During 
his two years of student-life at Halle he had belonged with dis- 
tinction to the interdicted Burschenschaft,t and thereafter entered 
at Breslau into literary relations which brought the youthful 
"theologian" into contact with the theatre. The vortex of the 
July Revolution had drawn him into politics, and just as Wagner 
became "a revolutionary at one blow," had Laube become with 
all his heart a "red-hot partisan of liberalism" — which seemed to 
him "applied Theology and the modem Sermon on the Mount" 
At the beginning of 1832, while Wagner was composing overtures 
and enthusing for the Poles, Laube had published his novel Das 
neue Jahrhundert ("The new Century"), His heaven-storming 
thoughts of freedom, expressed with all a student's pertness and 
hurling the approved catch-phrases at ancient use and custom, 

* On this side Wagner had already had an experience in 187 1, at Strassburg, 
which he had no desire to repeat. A local dealer offered him a packet of his 
own letters for 100 thalers (;^I5) ; the contents were not disclosed, merely : 
so many letters, including one from Frau Richard Wagner. Supposing that 
they might treat of private affairs, and anxious to prevent impertinent gossip, 
not to say publication, he consented to pay the purchase price, — and found in 
the mysterious bundle a few unimportant business notes, whose recovery would 
not be of the smallest moment to him. But the transaction had been com- 
pleted, and he could not go back on it. 

t See Richard Wagnef>s Prose Works, Vol. IV., p. 47-— W. A E. 



148 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

above all at our "effete" marriage^ found ready ear among the 
younger generation. The money reaped by his work's success 
he intended to spend on a trip to Paris, to study Saint-Simonism ; 
but he got no farther than its first stage, Leipzig. While writing 
in a dismal garret of the Nikolaigasse those letters which the 
Hippolytes and Constantines of his "Young Europe" send to 
one another, he received from bookseller Leopold Voss, pro- 
prietor of the Zeitung fur die elegante Welt^ the offer of the 
editorship of that widely-circulated journal, to commence with 
the new year. 

At a ball in the H6tel de Pologne, soon after his arrival at 
Leipzig, he asked his sprightly partner whether she shared his 
view that our present marriage-laws must be altered. " Luckily," 
he adds, " my audacious question had been put to an awakened 
damsel She replied: 'At once, do you think?' and laughed. 
It was the sister of Richard Wagner." Presumably Ottilie is 
meant, for Laube already knew and admired Rosalie as a poetic 
artist at the theatre. Before long he met Richard too : "I 
became a visitor at the house of his family," he continues, "and 
the anxious mother would always ask me, ' Do you really think 
anything will come of Richard?' She was an intelligent little 
woman, not without humorous turns in conversation. In her 
second marriage, with a painter, she had imbibed some knowledge 
of artistic matters, and two of her daughters were actresses. For 
that very reason she had great fears of a purely musical career for 
Richard : he himself was so flighty, she said, and when it came 
to the question of making money by his music, so fantastical ; he 
had had the advantage of a thorough musical education, as was 
to be expected at Leipzig since the time of Bach, and was burst- 
ing with self-confidence." Subject to a few inessential curtail- 
ments, such is Laube's story; in the main it appears correct, 
though we cannot endorse its sequel, namely that Wagner had 
{isked him for an operatic text In fact we read the very opposite 
in the Communication to my Friends^ to wit that Wagner had 
declined a proffered opera-text on the subject of " Kosziusko " 

Now, there is a delicate way of rejecting an offer, that may be 
interpreted, if one pleases, as half an acceptance ; but it is harder, 
without embroidery, to convert it into a request Even at the 
beginning of his artistic life, Wagner had a rooted dislike of 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 1 49 

setting texts he had not himself created word by word and scene 
by scene ; and he would have credited his new-found friend with 
anything in the world sooner than a knowledge of what was only 
gradually dawning on his own mind, namely the proper choice 
and treatment of an operatic subject. In any case the would-be 
librettist soon learnt what the time of day was, and cut his labours 
short : " I began my ' Kosziusko,' " says Laube, " but got stuck in 
the first act, at the Diet of Cracow ; and Richard himself seemed 
to take no special interest in it," — an indifference which appears 
to have caused no breach, at present, in their mutual good re- 
lations. But the fact of Laube's choosing a Kosziusko subject, 
and hoping that it would impress his friend, was surely no accident : 
enthusiasm for the Poles plays an important rdle not only in 
Wagner's student-days, but also with the heroes of Das junge 
Eurapa, These two young men, indeed, had many points in 
common : both were of hot young blood, both full of energy and 
enterprise ; both bom improvers of the world, shrinking from no 
consequences ; to both the world, alike political and aesthetic was 
a yet untrodden field, and Wagner's leaning toward the company 
of " political writers" found in this new acquaintanceship a welcome 
encouragement and satisfaction. 

The head-quarters of " elegant " and " modem " letters in the 
Leipzig of those days, particularly at fair-time, was Kintschy's 
restaurant Here flocked the cultured and polemical "Yoimg 
European " world, to sip its coffee, grog or chocolate, to taste its 
ice or pastry, and, between one mouthful and the next, devour 
the papers. Hither, besides Laube, came the unfortunate author 
of the " Polish Lays," Ernst Ortlepp, who had recently arrived 
at Leipzig to pursue his literary studies;* Gustav Schlesier, 
Wagner's comrade from the Dresden ELreuzschule, who had passed 
with him into the Nikolai, and whom we have already met as his 
coadjutor in the discussion of " Schelling's transcendental idealism" ; 
with many another. It was probably of these Leipzig reunions 
in his unclouded youth that Wagner was thinking, amid the chill 

* Ortlepp makes a merely episodic appearance in Wagner's life, but 
possessed at least one great attraction for him — ^his boundless reverence of 
Beethoven, as proved by bis panegyric, Beethoven^ eine phantastische Charak- 
ieristik (Leipzig, Hartknoch). Bom 1800 at a hamlet near Nattmburg, he 
removed to Leipzig aboot the time of Laube's first sojourn there, but was 
compelled to leave the place soon after Laube's banishment, on account of his 
political poems. With G. Schlesier he went to Stuttgart, where Lewald» 



I50 UFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

of Parisian hardships, when he wrote : *' To be a German at home 
is splendid, where one has soul, Jean Paul, and Bavarian beer ; 
where one can quarrel over the philosophy of Hegel, or the waltzes 
of Strauss" etc. {P, W. VIII., a;). Indeed it was a time of in- 
souciance never to return, when the young man felt himself helped 
forward by his entourage, and his own artistic individuality had 
not yet roused the opposition of that entourage both near and 
for. 

Soon after his return to Leipzig he had handed in the score 
of his Symphony to the directorate of the Gewandhaus concerts, 
with a view to its speedy performance. The result we cannot 
do better than relate in his own words, from that account 
(Berichi iiber die Wiederauffuhrung eines Jugendwerkes) already 
dted: — 

''In Leipzig's pre- Judaic age, beyond the memory of more 
than a handful of my fellow-townsmen, the so-called Gewandhaus 
Concerts were accessible even to beginners of my ' line.' The 
ultimate decision as to the admittance of new compositions lay 
in the hands of the Principal, a worthy old gentleman, Hofrath 
Rochlitz by name, who took things seriously and with a method. 
My Symphony had been laid before him, and I had to follow it 
up by a visit. When I introduced myself in person, the stately 
gentleman thrust up his spectacles and cried: 'What's this? 
You are a very young man: I had expected someone much 
older, a more escperienced composer.' — ^That promised well : the 
Symphony was accepted; though with the request that it first 
be played by the ' Euterpe,' if possible, as a sort of trial-trip. 
Nothing easier to accomplish : I was in the good books of this 
minor orchestral union, which had already performed a fairly 
fugal Concert-overture of mine in the Altes Schiitzenhaus outside 
the Peter's-gate. At this time, about Christmas 1832, we had 
moved to the Schneiderherberge ("Tailors' house of call") by 
the Thomas-gate — a detail whidi I make a present to our 

publisher of the Europa^ fonned the centre of a brilliant literary circle ; but 
he tumbled ere long into such a state of penuiy, that he was obliged to return to 
his home. A combination of bodily and mental suffering at last undermined 
his moral fibre ; he took to drink, and fell into deeper and deeper misery. 
On the 14th of June, 1864, he was found dead in a mill-race on the lesser 
Saale, near the village of Almrich. His numerous literary works, chiefly firom 
the years 1838 to 1856 (with a Collected Edition in 3 vols., 1845) are ptetty 
fully catalogued in Brttmmer's Dtutsthu DiekUrUxikon. 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. I5I 

witlings, for improvement I remember^that we were very much 
incommoded by the bad lighting there ; after a rehearsal in which 
a whole concert-programme was attacked, however, we saw quite 
well enough to strug^ through my Symphony : * not that it gave 
myself much pleasure, for to me it seemed to scout all thought 
of soundiiq^ well. But what is faith for? Heinrich Laube, who 
at that time was making a name by his writings at Leipzig, not 
troubling his head how things sounded, had taken me under his 
wing ; he praised my Symphony in the Zeitung fur die elegante 
Welt with great warmtii, and eight days afterwards my good 
mother saw my work transplanted from the Tailors' Inn to the 
Drapers' Hall, where it suffered its performance under conditions 
somewhat similar to the first People were good to me in Leipzig 
then : a little admiration, and good-will enough, reconciled me 
to the future " {F. W. VL, 316-17). 

To this vivid scrap of autobiography we may add a few 
external details. 

The Gewandhaus concert, which Richard's symphony opened, 
formed one of the regular subscription-series under August 
Pohlenz, and took place on January the loth, 1833. We append 
the programme, on which figure two very young artists, the one 
a debutante aged fifteen years, Li via Gerhard,! the other still 

* A Leipzig correspondent writes to the Allg, Mus, Ztg. of Feb. 13, 
1833— exactly half a century before the master's death — << Our Euterpe^ an 
orchestral society consisting of amateurs and junior members of the standing 
orchestra, has been extraordinarily active this year, giving ns many com- 
positions old and new, for the most part executed very well. Besides several 
symphonies by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, we have beard a new and 
well-constructed sjonphony by a member of the society already known to the 
public, Herr F. L. Schubert, also one by Richard Wagner," and so on. (This 
Schubert must not be confounded with the great Franz Peter Schubert, 
•deceased in 1828.) 

t Dr £. Kneschke in his History of tiie Gewandhaus Concerts (p. 58) 
speaks of her as " that talented and charming singer Li via Gerhard. Bom 
1818 at Gera, she received her vocal instruction from Pohlenz, and set foot 
on the Leipzig stage at the early age of fifteen with brilliant success. What 
Rosalie fVagner, sister of Richard Wagner, was to the Leipzig theatre as 
jictress, namely a truly poetic and soulful artist, Frl. Gerhard was as singer, 
her by-play uniting with the bell-like timbre of her soprano voice to produce 
the profoundest and most agreeable effect. In 1835 she went to the Konig- 
stUdter theatre in Berlin, but took leave of the stage the year following" 
^contemporaneously with Rosalie), ''to give her hand to Dr. jur. Woldemar 
Frege of Leipzig." 



152 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

younger, Clara Wieck aged thirteen, subsequently wife of Robert 
Schumann : — 

(i) Symphony by Richard Wc^er (new). 

(2) Scene and Aria from Sargino by Paer, sung by Dem. Gerhard. 

(3) Pianoforte Concerto by Pixis, played by Dem. Klara Wieck. 

(4) Overture to KmigStephan by Beethoven. 

(5) Trio from La Vilanella rapita by Mozart, sung by Dem. Grabau,. 

Herr Otto and Herr Bode. 

(6) Finale from / CapuUti e Montechi by Bellini 

Again, though Wagner's reference would seem to assign to 
Laube's public praise of the work a hand in its acceptance by 
the directorate, we are obliged to rob H. Laube of that honour^ 
as his eulogy did not in fact appear till fully three months after* 
It is to be found in a review of the subscription-concerts in No. 
82 of the Ztg, / d. eleg. Welt^ April 27, 1833, and reads as 
follows : '' In course of the winter I heard at these concerts a 
Syn^hony in the style of Beethoven by a young composer, 
Richard Wagner^ which much prepossessed me in favour of this 
new musician. There is a brisk and buoyant energy in the ideas 
that join hands in this symphony, a bold impetuous stride from 
one end to the other, and yet such a virginal naivety in the 
conception of the fundamental motives, that I build great hopes 
on the musical talents of its author." 

There are at least two public criticisms that claim priority in 
point of time : the one by Ernst Ortlepp in Herlossohn's Komet^ 
the other in the Allg. Mus, Ztg.^ presumably by its editor G. W. 
Fink. As the earliest substantial reviews of any composition by 
Wagner, they both distinctly have historic interest, and we there- 
fore give them at length, taking the later-published first on account 
of its closing sentence. 

Ortlepp's critique, in the Komet of March i, 1833, runs thus : 
"The concert began with a new Symphat^ by a very young 
gentleman, Richard Wagner. A first attempt can scarcely ever 
be a masterpiece, especially when almost purely imitative ; never- 
theless it may reveal a very significant talent This is ^e case 
with Wagner's Symphony. He has taken Beethoven, in fact one 
particular symphony of Beethoven's, the A major, as his pattern, 
and planned the architecture of his work thereby. Far from 
blaming the beginner, we congratulate him on having chosen sp 
high a model ; and that the more, the happier has he been iu 



THE C MAJOR SYMPHONY. 1 53 

approaching it in many respects. . . . What to us appeared 
peculiarly successful, was the Andante, though it follows almost 
the exact lines of the A major ; but we cannot approve of the 
trumpet-fiigue in the last movement When Wagner shall have 
planted himself on his own feet, and his heart instead of his 
brain has command of the mechanism of tone, we are convinced 
he will do great things. His S3nnphony was loudly applauded. 
As we hear, he will soon come out with an opera." This "opera" 
was plainly Laube's Kostiusko^ the fate of which was not yet 
settled in the eyes of Ortlepp, who of course had heard of it from 
Laube. And we may take it as tolerably certain that, if Wagner 
at any time had allowed himself to be guided solely by considera- 
tions of outward advantage, he would not have declined coopera- 
tion with a friend whose literary and journalistic connections were 
bound to ensure a conspicuous success. But he had other aims 
— with fatal consequences ; for the work that he was brooding in 
his heart, and presently created, never attained to performance in 
his lifetime. Easy as it had been for him to win the favour of 
the public in the concert-room, despite his links with the theatre 
it remained impossible for many a year to get any of his dramatic 
works represented in Leipzig; a matter offering no insuperable 
difficulties to countless products of contemporary authors. How 
different might his lot have been, had he been enabled to pursue 
his evolution step by step before the eyes and ears of his native 
dty ! Yet, perhaps it was better so. 

The other report, that in^the AUgemeine Musikalische Zeitung^ 
appeared on February 13, 1833, and runs as follows : "The new 
Symphony of our still youthful Richard Wagner (he scarcely 
numbers 20 years) was received, with the exception of its second 
movement [!], with loud applause, as indeed it merited. We 
hardly know what more could be demanded of a first attempt 
in a class of tone-poetry that already has mounted so high, unless 
we wished to set all reasonableness aside. The work deserves 
the credit of great diligence, and its inventive contents are 
nothing less than insignificant; the combinations bear witness 
to originality of conception, and the whole intention shews so 
right an endeavour, that we look with joyful hope to this yoimg 
man. Even though the effort to remain true to himself is as 
visible as his use of orchestral effects is inexperienced; even 
though the working-out of one and the other idea is still too 



154 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

long and laboured: yet these are points that come right of 
themselves with continued application. What Herr Wagner has, 
can come to no one who has it not within his breast already. 
The young artist left a few weeks since for Wiirzbuxgi where his 
brother is employed as a teacher of singing." 

The journey to Wurzburg, referred to in the last sentence, 
originally had no other object than not to let the grass grow 
under his feet Its first motive was a visit to brother Albert, 
whom he had not seen for several years; its second an invitar 
tion, probably suggested by Albert, to conduct one of his over- 
tures at a performance of the local Music-union. Wagner accepts 
it in a letter of January 12, 1833, written two days idter the 
public production of his Symphony. A few days later he is on 
his road to Wiirzburg, with no definite idea as to how long he 
shall stay there. 



SECOND BOOK. 



STRAYINGS AND WANDERINGS. 
(1833-1843.) 

Durch Sturm und bosen Wind versehlagen^ 
irt^ aufden Wassern ich umher^ — 
wie langt f weiss ich kaum zu sagen : 
scAon zdhT ich nicht die/ahre mehr. 
Unmoglich diinht micJis^ dcus ich tuntu 
die Lander aHe^ die ich f and: — 
deu eini^ge nur^ nach dem ich drenne, — 
ich find es nicht^ mein JSeimathland/ 

(Dbr Fliegends Hollander, act L sc 3.) 



>55 



WURZBURG: "DIE FEEN." 

Albert Wagner, — Richard as Chorus-master, — Birth of ^^ Die 
Feen*';textandfnusic.— ''You have only to dare r— The ^^ Vampyr'' 
aria. — Performances at the Wurzhurg Musical Union. — Completion 
of ''Die Feen:'— Return to Leipzig. 

What took my fancy in GomzCs fdiry'iaU^ was not 
merely its adaptability for an operatic text, but the charm 
of the subject itself, 

RZCHAKD WAGNBR. 

Wagnbr reached Wurzbuig in the second half of January 1833, 
after a journey through the winter snow. Here brother Albert 
had been occupied for some years as singer, actor and stage- 
manager. During his previous engagement (Augsburg 1827-29) 
he had married an actress Elise GoUmann of Mannheim,* younger 
sister of the not un-noted Julie Gley ; the elder of his two little 
daughters, Johanna and Francisca, was already rehearsing in the 
nursery the preliminaries of her future famed career. 

Albert's experience as singer was of the utmost moment to his 
younger brodier. He possessed a very high and brilliant tenor 
voice, and his delivery was full of fire and feeling. A trouble of 
the throat, rendering him suddenly hoarse at times, caused him 
to devote more than ordinary attention to his acting, and his 
varied accomplishments made him a great fisivourite with the 
Wurzburg public. In parts such as Jean de Paris, George Brown, 
Count Armand in the Water-carrier^ and the like, he earned 
ample recognition, and the strength and passion with which he 
imbued even Rossini's Othello always roused the audience to the 
highest pitch. As Roger in Auber's Mafon — under its German 
title of Maurer und Schlosser — ^he put such refinement into his 

* August 12, i8a8, at the Augsburg parish-church "of the Barefoot 
Friars." 

«S7 



158 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

rendering of the B flat aria in the third act, without interpolation 
of the hackneyed ^'fermata" effect, that it probably was his 
delivery of this ''almost entrandngly spirited aria" of which the 
master was thinking when he deplored the impossibility of getting 
anything remotely like it from the tenors of our day (F, W. V.» 
371). His Flprestan, also, made such a lasting impression on 
his younger brother, that in after years the master declared he 
" had never heard so good a Florestan." 

With his longing to put his musical abilities to some practical 
test, it was not difficult to persuade Richard to fill the vacant 
post of chorus-conductor at the Opera. A year later he writes of 
this engagement, ''To oblige the management I undertook to 
rehearse the choruses at the Wurzburg theatre, and thereby often 
gained an influence over the general get-up of an opera." His 
first theatrical appointment brought him in the princely " honor- 
ariiun " of ten guldens a month (about ;i^i), which pocket-money, 
paid him only for the actual duration of the season (three months)^ 
barely covered the rent of his modest apartment. He had taken 
lodgings in a little two-storeyed house (still standing) at the comer 
of the Kapuzinergasse, opposite the Hofgarten ; his windows did 
not look over that pleasaunce, however, but across a court into a 
narrow alley leading in the direction of the Kleine Kapuzinergasse, 
where dwelt his brother. His landlady, a spinster on the sunny 
side of forty, in 1878 repaid his indifference to her charms by 
writing reminiscences (at the age of eighty) brimful of admiration 
for Albert's Masaniello, but very vague about her sometime lodger. 
If only the chorus-master had appeared in person on the stage ! 

Our young musician found his new command no sinecure. 
Zampa^ Paer's Camilla^ the Water-carrier^ Freischuiz and FideliOy 
foUowed each other in swift succession during the month of 
February; March brought the Stumme van Foriici^ Rossini's 
Tancred^ Fra Diavolo and Oberan ; after Easter the Wurzburgers 
were offered the sensation of a first performance of Meyerbeer's 
Robert the devily with Albert in the title-r&le (April 21, 35 and 
30).* Richard's earliest active taste of life behind the scenes 
was not without its fascination ; he was delighted with its merry 

* Production of Jipbert in Paris Nov. 32, 183 1 ; first perfonnanoe in 
Germany, conducted by the composer himself at the Berlin Opera-house* 
June 30, 1832 (from 6 to 11.15 P.M.) ; between the two came Lomion alone» 
but imperfectly, Feb. 1832. 



wurzburg: "die feen." 159 

tone, and the chorus soon became devoted to him. And then 
the local Music-miion, with its regular choral and orchestral 
performances, would oflfer many an opening for his co-operation. 
It will be remembered that this sodetjr's invitation to conduct 
one of his overtures had been a determinant cause of his trip to 
Wurzburg ; on which, or how many, of his instrumental works 
the choice ix>w fell, we caimot ascertain. In his Paris article on 
German Music (1840) he refers to die surprising wealth of musical 
resources possessed by middling German cities in those days: 
instead of one weU-organised band, you had two or three ; and a 
footnote, added in 1871, says that in Wurzburg, "besides a full 
orchestra at the theatre, the bands of a musical society and a 
seminary gave alternate performances." One souvenir of his 
friendly relations with this Union has been preserved : it is that 
selfsame manuscript whose attempted recovery cost its author so 
dear in after years (see p. 147) ; a neat copy in Wagner's hand of 
the completed first number of his Hochzeity dated March i, 1833, 
with the dedication on its title-page "Dem Wiirzburger Musik- 
verein zum Andenken verehrt" The precise reason for its dedica- 
tion to the Wurzburg Musio-union is not apparent : Tappert opines 
that the composer may once have got its chorus sung there; 
only, it would be strange that Wagner should nowhere have 
breathed a word of what would thus have been the solitary 
performance of his earliest dramatic work. 

The first quarter of a year at Wurzburg slipped swiftly by in the 
numerous distractions of a new career. The last performance of 
Robert^ April 30th, was also the close of the theatrical season ; 
fifom the begiiming of May the vacation lasted imtil towards the 
end of September. The company dispersed in every direction ; 
even brother Albert left town with his wife, for a two-months 
star-engagement at Strassburg, where he played eighteen times with 
uniform success from the 7th of May to the 30th of June, 
exclusively in operas by Auber and Rossini save for winding up 
with Robert, 

Thus Richard was left to his own devices in the ancient city, so 
picturesque with its Episcopal palace. Cathedral and University 
on the one side of the Main, linked by a statue-guarded bridge to 
an imposing fortress on the other ; the whole enclosed by vine- 
clad hills, the birthplace of its famous potent Leistenwein and 
Steinwein. Nearly forty years afterwards he revisited the town 



l6o LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

(187 1 ), and so deep had been the impression made on him in 
youth, that he recognised each square and street at once, crying 
" That's the Pfaffengass', and that the Eichhomgass'," and so on. 
In reply to his companions' astonishment that he should have 
retained such details in his mind, he laughed and said, " I Ve not 
retained at all ; but it's all coming back to me." True, he has 
made a little slip in /Religion and Art^ where he speaks of the 
stone relief over the northern porch of the Marienkapelle as 
belonging to a "church of St Kilian" {F.W. VI., 219); but 
that was written nearly another decad later, when the memory of 
the second visit would have somewhat blurred the sharpness of 
the first. As a matter of fact, there is no church of St Kilian, 
though tradition has it that this patron saint of vine-dressers 
suffered martyrdom on the spot where stands the twelfth- 
century Neumiinster church with its tomb of Walther von der 
Vogelweide. 

If solitary, Richard was by no means idle in this summer of 
1 833. With that fair copy of the fragment of Die Hochzeit he had 
bidden farewell to his abortive work; but a greater had been 
maturing in his bosom, and the spell of quietude and sunny days 
was seized to give it birth. The first conception of Die Feen 
appears to date from the end of his last residence in Leipzig, and 
it would seem that he had brought at least the complete scenario of 
his new work with him, if not the commencement of its poem. We 
now can understand why Laube's Kosziusko project had had so 
little charm for him. 

Whoever remembers £. T. A. Hoffmann's repeated recommenda- 
tion of Gozzi as a perfect mine for librettists, will not be surprised 
that Hoffmann's fervent devotee should have struck this very course. 
In the works of the imaginative Italian he found the dramatic 
fairy-tale La Donna Serpente^ and turned it into an operatic poem 
such as he required.* The same subject had already been 
exploited in 1806 by a Berlin Kapellmeister Himmd for his 
opera, Die Sylphen \ but Wagner certainly knew nothing of this 
long-expired predecessor, and his choice was determined solely 



* The German student will find a comparison of Wagner's poem with the 
Goizian original much £Bicilitated by Herr Volkmar Mtlller's ezceUent transla- 
tion of some of Gozzi's Fiabe teairaiif under the titles of Das grune Vogekhen^ 
Die Frau als ScAlangf, Der Konig der Geister and Das blaue Ungehtuer^ 
Dresden 1887-89. 



wurzburg: '*die feen." i6i 

by the opportunity he saw in Gozzi's tale for a "romantic" opera 
in the then-prevailing style of Weber and Marschner. Very 
characteristic of his profoundly artistic instinct, even in these early 
days, are his deviations from the original. The subject of Die Feen 
is closely allied to those Undine and Melusina legends of the 
Middle Ages, which also tell us of a mortal's love towards a 
supernatural being ; the ethical lesson, that true love is based on 
unconditional faith and unwavering confidence, we meet again in 
Lohengrin : but the ancient myth at bottom had been distorted by 
the bizarre fancy of the Italian people ere Gozzi laid his hand on 
it Unconsciously, and led by nothing but his own artistic need, 
Wagner returned in his denouement to the prototype of all these 
l^ends, the old Indian mjrth of the love of Puru-ravas for the 
heavenly nymph Urvasi, whom he loses through breaking a pledge, 
and regains through penances, yet so that not she becomes his 
mortal wifsy but he himself one of the divine Gandharvas* In 
various other points, despite his medieval Northern scene of 
action, indicated by the choice of proper names etc, we find our 
dramatist unwittingly adopting features of the Indian myth ; but 
his restoration of the lost beloved through the power of Song is 
a return from fabular caprice to the eternal myth of Orpheus, 
dictated by sound insight into the musical needs of his plot 
Wagner's story is as follows : — 

Arindal, son of the King of Tramond, chases a roe of wondrous 
beauty. It disappears in a river, whence resounds a voice so 
ravishing that he dives into the stream, f His faithful henchman 
Gemot leaps after him, and finds his master in a glittering magic- 
castle, at the feet of a fairy whose love he is wooing. 



* llie oldest fonn of the story may be found in Max MUller's Oxford 
JSssqys ; also in A. Kuhn's Dis Herabkunft des Feuers und des GiftteriranMes^ 
1859, pp. 79-84, and in J. Dowson's Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology. 

t This transference to another world through a leap into a stream or lake is 
of frequent occurrence in old Indian legends, e.g. in the Katha-sarit-sagaia. 
gridatta sees a damsel sinking in an eddy of the Ganges, and springs to her aid ; 
scarcely has he dived under, than he finds himself in a magnificent temple of 
giva ; in like manner, plunging into a lake, he regains the upper world. In 
another tale gaktideva returns by a similar route to the long-lost ''golden 
dty" of his home: a sumptuously-caparisoned horse excites his envy, he 
pursues it, and it casts him into a lake ; in an instant he finds himself in 
the garden of his father. Wagner's "fairies" exactly correspond with the 
Gandharvas and Apsarases of Indian mythology. 

L 



1 62 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Bent down to him, she breathed these words : " I love thee» as myself thoa 
lovest ; yet ere I wholly am thine own, an ordeal must thou overcome. And 
first, till eight long years have flown thou ne'er must ask me who I am." 

Ada is a fairy's daughter by a mortal; to belong entirely to 
Arindal, she would fain put off her immortality ; by edict of the 
Fairy King, she may not do this till her lover has withstood all 
proofs. Arindal is protected by Groma, a mighty magician, the 
guardian genius of the house of Tramond ; whilst the fairies, on 
the other side, put forth all their power to keep their princess in 
their country. The hero, with his human aspirations, is thus 
twixt two opposing hosts of superhuman might Eight years 
less two small days has he observed his vow, and enjoyed the 
utmost happiness beside his fairy wife, who has presented him 
with two sweet children. On ihe day before the last, he is 
betrayed to the forbidden question; Ada and the fairy-garden 
vanish, and he finds himself transported of a sudden to a desert 
place. During the prince's absence a sad fate has befallen the 
realm and house of the kings of Tramond : the aged King has 
died of grief for his long-lost son ; the enemy has laid waste the 
land, and demands Arindal's sister Lora in marriage. 

At this point begins the action. Directed by Groma, the 
noble Morald has set out with his companion Gunther to search 
for Arindal and induce him to return to his duties. Their arts 
of transformation, carried out under Groma's auspices — when 
Gunther appears to the hero in the guise of a sapient hermit, 
and Morald in that of his dead father — ^avail but little in the 
precincts of the Fairy King ; nor has Gemot any greater success, 
with his song about the " Witch Dilnovaz," in rousing Arindal's 
mistrust against his wife ; but Ada herself appears to her sorrowing 
husband, and sends him forth to his imperilled land, with the 
promise that he there shall see her on the morrow. First, how- 
ever, — in the highly dramatic scene that ends this act — he must 
swear not to oirse her, whatever evil may betide him. Arindal 
swears; his friends suspect some dreadful secret; the fairies 
triumph at the certainty that he must break his oath and wreck 
his happiness for ever ; Ada is terrified at thought of the trials 
to which she herself must submit him. 

The second act takes place in the halls of the royal burg of 
Tramond. Arindal's brave sister Lora, clad in armour, revives 
the courage of her beaten soldiers. Arindal, returning bowed 



wurzburg: "die feen. 163 

with sorrow by his severance from Ada, and filled with dire 
forebodings, finds his kingdom in the last extremity. It is Ada 
herself, who appears to be pushing the land's distress and his 
to their utmost height ; before his eyes she throws hb two children 
into a gulf of fire ; she stands by the foe, routs the long-awaited 
allies, and rains terrors upon the besieged. The seed of doubt 
shoots up in Arindal ; he can curb himself no longer, and curses 
the faithless wretch. All is explained at once ; Ada restores to 
her husband their children, made immortal by the fire, and dis- 
closes to him that the "trusty Harald," whose army she had 
routed, was plotting treason and had fjedlen to the sword of 
Morald, whom everyone had given up for slain. In despair, 
Arindal recognises that this was the test appointed, a test he 
had withstood so ill that Ada must be turned to stone for a 
hundred years. Ada's lamentations, Arindal's frenzy of grief, 
and the rejoicings of the soldiery returning triumphant under 
Morald's lead, unite to form a majestic closing ensemble. — If 
the first act shews certain weaknesses in its poetic scheme, and 
at the very places where the poet has followed his source too 
implicitly, the second is all the more powerful in construction 
and climax. As Dr H. Reimann has remarked in course of a 
series of articles on this opera in the Allg. Musikuitung (1888, 
Nos. 31 to 37), "The mind that planned this second act was 
predestined to the highest rank in musico-dramatic art Shew 
us in all contemporary operatic literature one single act con- 
ceived with greater energy, or carried out with more poetic 
tact ! It is a milestone in the evolutionary history of Wagnerian 
art" 

In the third act Wagner says goodbye to Gozzi — who had 
changed the fairy into a snake, and disenchanted her by a kiss, 
to allow her as a mortal to follow the hero to his earthly kingdom. 
The story shapes otherwise with Wagner. Arindal, having 
delegated the regency to Morald and Lora, has fallen victim 
to madness. A most touching and dramatic monologue presents 
him to us in this state.* He imagines he is hunting that roe once 
again: 

* In the fourth act of Kalidisa's noted poem Urvtisi (German by Dr K. G. 
A. Hofer, Berlin 1837) there is a scene of striking similarity to this. King 
Puru-ravas, wandering demented through the depths of the primeval forest in 
search of his lost beloved, at last finds her transformed into a bush, and 



1 64 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

see, the hind grows faint already ! 

1 wing the bolt ; lo I how it flies 1 
Good aim, haha 1 That pierced its heart. 

But see, the hind can weep, 
A tear-drop glistens in its eye ! 
What broken glance it turns on me I 

How fair she is I 
O horror ! Nay, no beast is this ! 
Lo there ! Lo there I It is my wife ! — 

{Ife is overcome.^ 

The painful vision is followed by a kindly one: he sees the 
gates of heaven opening, and breathes the balmy air of gods. 
Once more his frantic grief dispels the happy dream, but ends 
in gentle melancholy. He falls asleep, and the voice of the 
beloved pierces to him from the distance : " My husband Arindal, 
what hast thou done to me ? Chill marble holds hot love within. 
. . . Through all confines love thrusts toward thee; hear'st 
thou its cry, so hither speed ! '* The voice of Ada is succeeded 
by that of Groma, urging him to the rescue, and telling of three 
gifts, a shield, a sword and lyre, which he awakes to find at his 
feet With feigned compassion the fairies Farzana and Zemina 
conduct him on the way to Ada, the more surely to compass his 
death ; Arindal rejoices at the prospect of shedding his blood in 
fight for Ada's freedom. They pass through awesome chasms 
filled with subterranean spirits ; to the alarm of his two fairy guides, 
Arindal's magic weapons make him victor ; in a twilight grot he 
at last beholds the stone of human stature into which his wife 
has been transformed. At Groma's call he strikes his lyre ; his 
passionate song dissolves the spell ; the stone takes on the shape 
of Ada, who sinks enraptured in his arms. Moved by their love 
and faith, the Fairy King confers immortal life on both ; Morald 
and Lora, wed, retain the sovereignty of Arindal's terrestrial 
kingdom ; he himself is led by Ada to the throne of Fairydom. — 

On August 6, 1833, the first act was finished as to its composi- 
tion. The music displays those balanced forms which Mozart had 
brought to the height of artistic perfection. But, as Reimann 
says in the analysis above-mentioned, " In Die Fun Wagner goes 

restores her to life by his embraces ; eren the admonishing voice of an invisible 
higher being, who bids him raise the jewel-of-remiion from the ground—^, the 
magician Groma — is not lacking. No scene corresponding to this occurs in 
Goizi. 



i6S 

beyond his models and masters in this respect, that he adds much 
to the effect of his scenes by an extremely characteristic orchestral 
ritomeL Every change of situation is matched exactly by these 
ritomels ; the orchestra is already becoming an organ for expres- 
sion of the unutterable-in-words. We may instance the postlude 
of the B flat quartet ; Arindal's swooning and falling asleep ; the 
apparition of Ada (with its transition to the "fairy" key of £ 
major) ; the ritomel of the A minor aria, and so forth. Above 
all is this the case with Arindal's first appearance : in long-drawn 
notes the clarinets and flutes, echoed by horns, anticipate Arindal's 
plaintive cry of " Ada! " whilst the restless figure of the violins, 
in ascending sequence, depicts the anguish of his soul ; and later 
at his words 'The desert echoes with her name' we hear the 
'Ada' cry repeated with ever greater piercingness, in rhythmic 
diminution, till it reaches jQ^T: — there you have the work of a 
master 1 " 

About this time Albert returned from his starring, and Wagner 
was able to lay his work before him. "In my brother, whose 
judgment as a practised singer was of weight to me," says Richard 
in that often-quoted letter of 1834 to Hauser, " I had the severest, 
I might almost say, the most ruthless critic. He was up in arms 
at once about the inexecutability of some of the vocal part" So 
the author made alterations and improvements, wherever it could be 
done without despite to his intentions ; though it is questionable 
how far Albert's objections were based on reality, or merely 
prompted by experience of the ways of singers. By the latter 
this cry of " inexecutable " or " unsingable " has since been raised 
at each new work of the master's, after practice had silenced it 
in the case of its immediate predecessor. But Richard might 
console himself with the final verdict of his present judge, which 
ran pretty much as follows : " The singers will dispute a lot about 
your work, and, alter as much as you like, they'll always complain 
of its difficulty ; but if one only goes to it with intelligence, he 
may be sure of producing an effect" 

It was Wagner's plan, to finish his opera in Wurzburg and 
return to Leipzig before the end of the year, to get it brought 
out as speedily as possible, counting much on Rosalie's influence 
and his own previous successes with the public of his birthplace. 
Therefore, as he had no wish to be hindered in his work's com- 
pletion, the opportunity of taking another step toward independ- 



1 66 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER* 

ence, by accepting the post of conductor at the Zurich theatre, 
had less attraction for him than it might have had a year before. 
There were certainly a few difficulties in the way of a passport for 
Switzerland, as he was just of age for military service ; but his 
family assured him that, in the opinion of competent persons, the 
legal piapers in his hands were a sufficient permit for him to 
journey "into the world, or rather, to Zurich.** The correspond- 
ence on this subject dates from the month of September: the 
present narrator (C. F. G.) has been accorded a glance into one 
of these letters, now safely housed at Wahnfried; a yellowed 
sheet, its first half written by brother Julius and dealing with the 
Leipzig Police-secretaries' views of the passport question, whilst 
in the second Rosalie takes up the tale : "You have only to dare^ 
dear brother," she writes, "a thousand wishes from ourselves 
accompany you." There is something pathetic in finding this 
motto of his whole career, this meaning of his surname, first 
urged upon him by the gentle voice of his affectionate sister. 
She goes on to regret that his new work must remain uncom- 
pleted, under the circumstances, and they would not see him 
at Leiprig this winter ; but is sure it will be for his good to wait 
a little longer, and bring it out himself as " Musikdirektor." 

Wagner did not go to Zurich, whatever the cause. His own 
disinclination to fetter his hands would have something to do 
with it, though he appears to have resumed his office of chorus- 
master at the Wurzbuig theatre for at least the opening of the 
autumn season ; for in that letter to Hauser he speaks of two 
operas of Marschner's, the Vampyr and Hans Heiling, in the 
rehearsing of which he had assisted, and both of these works 
were given in the new theatrical year. This began on the 29th 
September with Marschner's Vampyr^ followed a fortnight later 
(Oct 15) by Hans HeUing\ both works, in which Albert sang 
the parts of Aubry and Konrad, were frequently rei^eated. The 
Wurzburg Vampyr has an added interest for us, on account of 
the interpolation of a little occasional composition. While study- 
ing the part of Aubry, Albert got dissatisfied with the close of 
his aria (No. 15): 

Wie ein schoner Frtthlingsmorgen 

Lag das Leben sonst vor mxr, 

and expressed his wish for a more effective ending. There was 
still a good week before the Sunday fixed for the performance; 



WURZ6URG 



DIE FEKN. 



167 



but within two days (Sept. 23) Richard handed him a neatly- 
written score^ embradng nineteen pages, with the inscription: 
^' Allegro for Aubry's aria in the Vampyr of H. Marschner, com- 
posed for A. Wagner by his brother Richard Wagner." In place 
of the 58 bars in the original he had furnished 143 bars, ''no 
mere appendage," says Tappert, " but a well-conceived and spirited 
Allegro in F minor," for which he had also indited the text : 

Doch jetzt, wohin ich blicke, umgiebt mich Schreckensnacht, 
mit grausigem Geschicke droht mir der HoUe Macht. 
1st denn kein Trost zu fiaden ? Flieht jeder Ho&ungsstrahl ? 
Wie soil ich mich entwinden der grausen Todesqual ? 

Ich sehe sie, die Heissgeliebte, 

den Schmerzenshlick nach mir gewandt ; 

ein D&mon h&lt sie fest umschlungen 

nnd lecbzt vor scheusslicher Begier ; 

ihr theures Bint ist ihm verfallen, 

ein einzig Wort, sie ist befreit, 

vemiditet ist des Scheusals Werk : 
da bindet mich der Eid — 
ich moss sie sterben seh'n ! * 

Albert was very pleased with the thing; the orchestral parts 
were copied out, and on Sunday the 29th September the extended 
form of the aria made its first appearance, well received by the 
public. In his published writings Wagner himself has not a 
syllable to say about it, but in that letter to Hauser we find a 
brief allusion : *' I wrote my brother an aria for interpolation, 
which certainly is neither better nor worse than any number in 
my opera [w^^»], and it flatters me alike to have been witness 

* Tappert has published a phototype of the last page of the autograph score 
of the ''powerful and original orchestral postlade," with the remark that it 
shews '' an endeavour to shun the beaten path as much as possible " : 

4- 




1 68 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

of its effect, as to heax again from Wurzbuig that it continues 
to elicit great applause." 

During the succeeding months the young artist bent his back 
to his opera; in unbroken sequence rose the imposing musical 
fabric of its second act, and the broad expanse of its third. The 
people's and soldiers' choruses in this second act, the unflagging 
dramatic climax with its unexpected incidents, the delightful 
humour of the bantering love-scene between Gemot and DroUa, 
the impressive aria for Ada, and finally the scene where the recur- 
ring melody of the "Dilnovaz" ballad indicates the first doubt 
awaking in Arindal's breast, to be repeated shrilly at the moment 
when the deluded husband breaks his vow and curses Ada, — all 
these, both in conception and in execution, display the youthful 
master at the height of his scenic and musical inspiration. To 
single out the repetition of that introductory theme from the 
Dilnovaz-ballad at the crucial moment, we here indeed have no 
actual leitmotiv in the sense of his later works, but merely a so- 
called reminiscence — yet of what startling power ! 

While still at work on his opera, Wagner got certain portions of 
it performed by the Wurzburg Music-union. " The numbdrs from 
it which I brought to a hearing at concerts in Wurzburg were 
favourably received," is all that he says in this connection in the 
Autobiographic Sketch, From that letter to Hauser we learn that 
they were a "terzet" and an "aria," — "we got up both with no 
great difficulty, and they went off very well." 

December had come round again ; the vine-city ¥ras clad once 
more in its garment of white, and the trees of the Hofgarten 
stretched their naked arms towards the sky. But in the eight 
months since the melting of that snow which greeted his arrival 
in Wurzburg, his first grand work had thriven to its own broad 
crown of leaves. On Sunday the first of December the second 
act was finished in full score ; a week later, at mid-day on the 
eighth of December 1833, when the bells were all ringing, he 
wrote the words " Finis. Laudetur Deus, Richard Wagner " on 
the last page of the completed sketch for the third act, whose 
successful conclusion he announced to his people at Leipzig, and 
more particularly to his sympathetic sister, in a beautiful letter 
still preserved. The overture bears the terminal date of December 
27, and a few days later — while a terrific storm on New Year's eve 
was unroofing houses and bursting in windows at Leipzig — ^the 



wurzburg: "die feen.' 169 

last note of the score of the third act was committed to paper, 
January i, 1834. 

There was nothing further to detain its author at Wurzburg. 
He was longing to see his dramatic first-bom afoot upon the 
boards ; and that he could only expect in his native city. Even 
before its absolute completion, preliminary negotiations had been 
opened with the Leipzig theatre ; it now was time to set out in 
person, and take the requisite steps on the spot So with the 
new year Wagner left for home — the symphonist and overtiu-e- 
composer developed in this twelvemonth to a dramatic creator. 



II. 
"DAS LIEBESVERBOT." 

Return to Leipzig, — "I*een*' negotiations. — Director Ringelhardt 
and Jtegisseur Ifauser, — Representation postponed. — Schroder- 
Devrient as Romeo. — Article on ^^ German Opera" : against 
^^kamedness in music." — Relations with Robert Schumann. — Poem 
of ''Das Liebesverbot" written at Teplitz.—Off to Magdeburg. 

To the earnestness of my original promptings {in Die 
Feen) there opposed itself in Das Liebesverbot a certain 
wanton turmoil of the senses^ which seemed in crying 
contrast to the earlier mood. The balancing of these two 
^ tendencies was to be the worh of my further artistic de- 
velopment. 

Richard Wagnbk. 

With the best hopes of his completed work and its speedy pro- 
duction Wagner returned to Leipzig at the banning of 1834, 
welcomed all the more warmly by mother and sisters as in his 
absence he had become the object of a twofold pride. He was 
re-entering the family circle as at once the composer of a whole 
grand opera and the approved fulfiller of a first practical function. 
It would be difficult to decide in which capacity his mother set 
most store by him. 

Naturally his first thoughts were for the fate of his work. The 
position of affairs at the Leipzig theatre had altered since its 
abandonment by the Court : it had become a Town-theatre again, 
and for the last two years had been managed by Director Friedrich 
Seebald Ringelhardt, a shrewd man of business, who through his 
predilection for French and Italian operas and many " novelties," 
if only not of German origin, had delighted the municipal council 
by restoring the establishment to its condition when under Kiistner, 
— namely of boasting a constant surplus in its exchequer, instead 
of the usual deficit In the Play his classics were Kotzebue, 
Schr5der and Iffiand, with other antiquated philistines, in whose 



"DAS LIEBESVERBOT. I7I 

pieces he was fond of disporting himself as heavy father or old 
man ; like the Greeks, he had one standing mask for tragedy — the 
Town-musician Miller ; the poetry of drama, as Napoleon many 
another thing, he held for ideology. Such was the man yomig 
Richard had to approach. He reaped the experience that "the 
German composer had had his nose put out of joint on his native 
stage by the successes of French and Italians, and the production 
of an opera was a favour the German author must beg on his 
knees." 

True, Ringelhardt at first declared his willingness to yield to 
Richard's importunity, backed up by Rosalie ; and in March friend 
Laube was able to insert a brief note in the Elegante to the effect 
that, besides Auber's Bal masguS, '' an opera by a young composer, 
Richard Wagner, whom we have aheady praised most highly in 
these columns," would presently be mounted. But it was a long 
cry from promise to fulfilment ; and in the very quarter where the 
young artisf s cause might have been furthered by a hint to the 
director — that of the Kapellmeister and Regisseur — he was met 
by a stubborn rebuff, masked under the outward forms of kindness 
and good-wilL In the preceding pages we have made frequent 
reference to a document from this earliest time of struggle, a letter 
to the operatic manager at the Leipzig theatre, Franz Hauser.* It 
has come down to us merely in its initial form of a hastily scribbled 
draft, with many negligences of diction, but presents so clear a 
picture of the antecedent negotiations by word of mouth that we 
almost hear the two sides speaking. Plainly, the writer is disgusted 
at being compelled to waste his time and breath upon the opposi- 
tion offered him, but he has not yet abandoned faith in the good- 
will of his antagonist, and refuses to lose his temper ; he treats 

• In the possession of the Richard Wagner Museum, now at Eisenach. — 
Regisseur— i.e. stage-manager — Hauser is described in a report to the AU^. 
mm. Ztg. (1S33, No. u) as "a man of many-sided culture and intimately 
acquainted with our older music, particularly that of Bach " ; he is also said 
to be a capital bass singer and character-actor. In the same journal (1835, 
No. 25) reference is made to his passion for old musical manuscripts, of which 
he owned a large collection. To this old fogey was entrusted judgment of 
the Feen score I — His natural gifts and accomplishments as singer are said to 
have not been much to speak of, yet he was credited on all hands with *' intelli- 
gence, artistic education, musical understanding, a penetrative study of rdles 
and a rightly characteristic reading of vocal parts " {AbenoUeitung^ August 20, 
1834). Can't one see the sheer nonentity in the very vagueness of the praise 
dealt out to him ?— He was a personal friend of Mendelssohn's. 



172 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

every objection of a narrow and cross-grained mind as well-meant 
friendly counsel, and does his best to answer it The following 
extracts may be added to those we have quoted before : — 

"You do not like my opera ; what is more, you do not like my 
whole tendency, since you declare it contrary to your own view of 
art. In it you find all the offences of our age ; at the same time 
you allow of no appeal to the latter. You will accept none but 
the forms in which those unattainable models of an older age 
expressed themselves, and even with Mozart you find excessive 
use of outward means ; from which I gather that you sanction 
none save those of Gluck. You ask me why I do not instrument 
like Haydn. . . . You charge me with total ignorance of means, 
of harmony, and want of thorough study ; you find nothing that 
has come from the heart, meet with nothing that could have 
sprung from an inward inspiration. If I mistake not, this is about 
the sum of your charges as regards the value of the work, what I 
am to take as the upshot of your verdict I have given myself the 
pains to piece it together, as nearly as maybe, — and find nothing 
to say in rejoinder. This is the position of the blamed towards 
the blamer, toward blame itself. AU endeavour to refute the 
blame, or even to excuse oneself, I suppose to be impermissible 
and impossible to the blamed. I am silent — for all resistance 
seems to me presumption." He turns from the artistic "value" 
of his work to the other side, its "practicability"; for like 
objections had been raised against its possibility of performance. 
He winds up with a plea " to regard the thing a little less severely," 
concluding : " For my own position and the road I have to carve 
myself, both I and my relatives feel it absolutely necessary to take 
this step, and — illusions, we know, are most common — but I think 
it will not lead me to perdition. Please place no decisive obstacle 
in the path the n^otiations have taken now, and permit me to 
pursue in peace what I may term the regular course, that of 
sending for the score to lay it in the official hands of the Kapell- 
meister. Once again, may God be with me ! " 

So the score passed into the hands of Kapellmeister Stegmayer, 
but without material benefit; the unfavourable verdict of the 
" intelligent " first comt seems to have influenced that of second 
instance. It would be impossible to adopt a humbler or a 
heartier tone, than that of the letter just cited, without some loss 
of personal dignity ; but all conciliation shipwrecked on a crotchety 



"DAS LIEBESVERBOT." 1 73 

wTongheadedness.* The affair was spun to an exasperating length 
of indecision. 

Like so many another turning-point in Wagner's career, we 
cannot look back on this cruel fate of Die Feen without a lively 
feeling of resentment : a creation full of warm young life allowed 
to vanish into Umbo ! If the work had but wormed its way to 
a hearing at Leipzig, how it must have smoothed its author's 
future path ! It would have been impossible for it not to have 
left some impression on his birthplace; once recognised and 
noised abroad, it could not lightly have been shelved again ; and 
we should all along have dated Wagner from this pregnant early 
stage of his development, instead of from Rienzu 

For the present it was, nominally, a mere case of postponement 
If the young master had been content to rest on his oars for the 
next two or three years, and devote all his time to insisting on the 
production of his firstborn, his patience and sterility might haply 
have been rewarded in the long run by gracious acceptance of his 
opera. Laube had announced it in the same breath with Auber's 
Maskenball^ as about to appear. To mount the latter properly, 
the management had thought nothing of an outlay of 2000 thhr. 
G^3oo)> for entirely new costumes, scenery and accessories ] after 
its first performance Director Ringelhardt was called before the 
autain, to receive the thanks of Leipzigers proud to be " the first 
in all Germany to hear Auber's Masked Ball" {Abendzeitung^ 
1834, No. 197). 

Still earlier in the selfsame Spring, just about the time when 
native talent had its access to the stage so studiously blocked, 
Bellini's MontecM e Capuleti had plunged all Leipzig into wild 
excitement This opera was received with thunders of applause, 
and the finale of the second act had to be repeated at every per- 
formance, to enable the audience to hear the enrapturing unison 

* When Spontini put forth all his influence against the Berlin performance 
of Der FretschiiiM, Weber complained to his friend Sir George Smart : " It is 
deplorable that people should have installed an Italian to pass sentence on 
German works, which he is in no position to appreciate. To be sure, I 
mjTself am KapeUmeister, and have to give my verdict on the works of 
foreigners ; hut only when I can conscientiously say with full knowledge that 
a work is absolutely worthless, do I refuse it a performance. Surely every 
aspirant ought to have the chance of appealing at least once to the judgment 
of the public." Here it was "no installed Italian," but that made no difference 
in the complexion of his verdict. 



174 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

of Romeo and Juliet all over again. Frau Schr5der-Devrient was 
shortly to arrive, to sing the part of Romeo ; the music was to be 
heard in every street ; Bellini ruled the dty. Of course the devotees 
of Classic music shrugged their shoulders, whispering dreadful 
things in the pit about careless workmanship^ bad part-writing etc ; 
whilst the feeble adaptation of the very play for whose sake he 
had once learnt English could rouse but little sympathy in the 
breast of the young creator of Die Fsen. But the Queen of the 
Stage at last appeared, at the zenith of her fame and powers. 
Laube paints a word-picture of the dappled March-day, 1S34, 
when sun and shadow played romps like children, chasing 
each other across the market-place, and a breezy German after- 
noon blew away all zest for book-work; to-night the SchrOder- 
Devrient was to sing, and ere the finger of the Rathhaus clock had 
moved to five, and there still was ample time before the office 
opened, the town was streaming in but one direction ; the square 
was alive with frowzy old periwigs, all jogging toward the theatre ; 
the SchrOder-Devrient even drew the philistine. The impression 
left on Wagner by the Romeo of this great tragedian was inefiace- 
able ; never had he more thoroughly agreed with his literary friend, 
than when the latter called Wilhelmine Schroder own daughter to 
William Shakespeare, and the whole family descendants of the old 
Greek gods. In 1872 Richard Wagner writes : "Take the imper- 
sonation of * Romeo' in Bellini's opera once given us by the 
SchrQder-Devrient. Every instinct of the musician rebels against 
allowing the least artistic merit to the sickly, downright threadbare 
music here hung upon an opera-book of indigent grotesqueness ; 
but ask anyone who witnessed it, what impression he received 
from the * Romeo * of Frau Schrdder-Devrient as compared with 
the Romeo of our finest actor in the great Briton's piece itself'* 
{P, fV. v., 141). Like a lightning-flash the thought occurred to 
him, what an incomparable artwork would that be, which in all 
its parts should mate the talents of such a performer, of a whole 
group of artists like her. The ideal, the ideal no longer of 
" opera," but of the perfect word-tone Drama, had shot its first 
flickering ray athwart the clouds. 

But how did the inexpressible beauty of this portrayal accord 
with the feebleness of its textual and musical basis ? Manifestly 
there was no necessary inner relation between that incorporate 
ideal and so-called "charming verse and pretty music" The 



"das liebesverbot." 175 

young artist^ with the cold shoulder just given to a nobly earnest 
work, began to doubt the choice of means to great successes. 
Far firom assigning to Bellini a merit due entirely to the actress, 
yet " the stuff of which this music was made seemed more pro- 
pitious, better calculated to wake warm life, than the painstaking 
pedantry wherewith German composers, as a rule, but brought 
laborious make-believes to birth. The flabby lack of character 
in our modem Italians, equally with the frivolous levity of the 
latest Frenchmen, appeared to me to challenge the earnest, 
conscientious German to lay hands on the better-chosen, more 
successfully exploited means of his rivals, and then outstrip them 
in producing veritable artworks" {P. JV, I., 9). 

The turn now taken by his whole artistic nature is stamped on 
Wagner's earliest literary utterance, a work of little length and 
unsigned with his still un-noted name, but high in its significance 
as a first confession of faith. He was just one-and-twenty years 
of age, *^ inclined to take life and the world on their pleasant 
side." Instead of Hoffmann he had taken up with Heinse's 
Ardinghello^ which paints the joyous sensualism of the South in 
glowing colours, reflected in the literary work of Laube. *' Young 
Europe " was tingling in his every limb, and Germany appeared 
a very tiny portion of the earth. " I had emerged from abstract 
mysticism, and learnt a love for matter. Beauty of material and 
brilliancy of wit were lordly things to me. As regards music, I 
found them both in the French and Italians." Everything around 
him seemed fermenting; it was most natural to yield himself 
resistless to the ferment, too, and forswear his former models. 

So actively was this Cosmopolitan spirit at work on his fiery 
temperament, that he threw together the thoughts it had inspired 
him with in the form of an article on German Opera for the 
journal of his friend, just to throw light on "the confusion of 
ideas prevailing among our Teutomaniac music-savants." The 
article appeared in the Ztg.f, d. elegante Welt of June 10, 1834, 
and thus proceeds: "By all means, we have a field of music 
which belongs to us by right, — and that is Instrumental music ; — 
but a German Opera we have not, and for the selfsame reason 
that we own no national Drama. We are too intellectual and 
much too learned, to create warm human figures. ... In this 
respect the Italians have an immeasurable advantage over us; 
vocal beauty with them is a second nature, and their creations are 



176 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

just as sensuously warm as poor, for the rest, in individual import. 
Certainly, in the last decad or two the Italians have played as 
many pranks with this second native-tongue of theirs, as the 
Germans with their learning, — and yet, I shall never forget the 
impression lately made on me by a BelUnian opera, after I had 
grown heartily sick of the eternally allegorising orchestral bustle, 
and at last a simple noble song shewed forth again," — ^with a 
Schrdder-Devrient as the singer ! — ^Then with all the fervour of 
the future reformer the young artist goes on to break a lance on 
spurious German leamedness in music : — 

" This is an evil which, however ingrained in the character of 
our nation, must needs be rooted out ; in fact it will annul itself, 
as it is nothing but a self-deception. Not that I wish French or 
Italian music to oust our own ; — ^that would be a fresh evil to be 
on our guard against — ^but we ought to recognise the trtu in both, 
and keep ourselves from all self-satisfied hypocrisy. We should 
clear oivselves a breathing-space in the rubble that threatens to 
choke us, hug no more visions of forbidden fifths and superfluous 
ninths, and become men at last . . . Why has no German opera- 
composer come to the front since so long ? Because none knew 
how to gain the ear of the people, — ^that is to say, because none 
has seized true warm Life as it is. For is it not plainly to mis- 
construe the pre3ent age, to go on writing oratorios when no one 
believes any longer in either their contents or their form ? Who 
believes in the mendacious stiffness of a Schneiderian fugue ? and 
simply because it was composed to-day by Friedrich Schneider. 
What with Bach and Handel seems wor^pful to us in virtue of 
its truth, must necessarily sound ridiculous with Fr. Schneider of 
our day ; for, to repeat it, no one believes him, since it cannot be 
his own conviction. We must take the era by the ears, and 
honestly try to cultivate its modem forms ; and he will be master, 
who writes neither Italian, nor French — nor even German." (/*. W, 
VIIL. 55-58). 

Nor even German : no impotence of erudition. Warm human 
figures are what he wants, shapes worthy at each instant of a live 
artist such as the great Wilhelmine ; what stands in their way, 
may go by the board. Here everything springs from a true 
dramatic instinct, foreshadowing the master's later teaching. Six 
years hence, when in Paris, he writes: "The German genius 
would seem predestined to seek out among its neighbours that 



"DAS LIEBESVERBOT. I77 

which is not native to its motherland, to lift this from its narrow 
confines, and thus make something universal for the world P * Is 
not this the identical thought expressed in the closing lines of 
German Opera ? 

Among the younger musicians of Wagner's set in Leipzig we 
here may mention Robert Schumann ; though it never came to 
any actual comradeship, there existed a friendly relation between 
them at this period. In a previous chapter we have spoken of 
Schumann as a pupil of Dom's ; obedient to a thoroughly German 
impulse, he had passed from jurisprudence to music. Friedrich 
Wieck had been his first music-master, when he contemplated a 
career of virtuoso ; but, after a successful commencement as pianist, 
an irremediable injury to the hand had diverted him to the more 
distinguished path of composer and writer on music. Different 
as were their natures — Wagner merry, communicative, fond of 
society, Schumann melancholy, silent and introspective, — they yet 
had many points of contact: a combination of musical and 
literary tastes, for instance Schumann's pronounced passion for 
Hofimann, though in his case it was allied with a boundless regard 
for Jean Paul, not shared by Wagner in a like degree. At this 
time, when the far more active spirit of his junior (by two years) 
had ahready produced a grand symphony and a complete threeact 
opera, Schumann had merely turned out a few pianoforte baga- 
telles ; but in these his individuality was plainly enough revealed. 
On the other hand, his standpoint toward the public was far more 
favourable : whereas Wagner's gifts had to lie buried for several 
years to come, his own had an unimpeded course before them ; the 
straits of the dramatic composer were none of his. To become 
known, he needed no stage and company of singers, solely a 



* As late as January 12, 1879, Wagner remarked to Hans von Wolzogen, 
in course of conversation: '*The long-drawn melodic form of the Italian 
operatic composers, such as Chembini and Spontini, could not issue from the 
German Singspiel ; it needs must have its rise in Italy. . . . From it have 
Auber, Boieldieu, and myself, learnt much. My closing chorus in the first 
act of Lohengrin^ for instance, derives far rather from Spontini than from 
Weber. From Bellini, too, one may learn what Melody is. The modems 
are distinguished by a poverty-stricken melody, because they hold by certain 
prominent weaknesses in Italian Opera, but neglect the composers' great 
merits." Wolzogen, Erinntrtmgen an Richard IVagmr, 2nd ed. (Redam) 
pp. 26-27. 

M 



178 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

publisher; and for that his position as editor of a much-read 
journal was sufficient guarantee. " You may believe me," he writes 
to Dom, "if the publishers had no fear of the editor, the world 
would have heard nothing of me either." It still would happen 
that benighted people had never heard of him — as on a subse- 
quent concert-tour of his wife's (Clara Wieck) when he was pre- 
sented to the King of Holland as her husband, and the king 
inquired if he too were musical, — but on Wagner's part, even so 
early as this, no such ignorance was possible. Wagner always 
valued Schumann, not only as " the most gifted and thoughtful 
musician of his period" {P, W. HI., 117), but also as the "stout 
of heart " who " so warmly and so amiably held out his German 
hand, when editor of the Neue Zdtschrift fiir Musik^ to the very 
people on whom he looked askance in his second period " {ibid)* 
And it was just this Neue Zeitschrift^ for which Schumann was so 
anxious to obtain congenial workers, that seems to have offered 
the groimd for closer relations. Three years before, upon 
Chopin's first appearance in the musical world, Schumann had 
made his d^but in musical literature ; in April 1834, supported by 
Friedrich Wieck, Ludwig Schunke and Julius Knorr, he founded 
bis special organ, and thus began his actual and tmdoubtedly 
considerable literary career. For this he sought Wagner's co- 
operation also. Although at a stage in his evolution when he was 
far more intent upon plying his art than criticising it, Wagner in 
fact sent a contribution to the Neue Zeitschrift of Nov. 6 and 10, 
1834 (" Pasticcio," see Prose Works^ VIII., 59-66), and allowed his 
name to appear in the printed list of collaborators for several 
years to come. 

In May our artist made an excursion to the Bohemian baths. 
At Teplitz when the morning was fine he would steal away from 

* " Wagner has been sedulously represented as an adversary of Schumann's. 
This is a wellnigh ridiculous reversal of the situation. An enmity of the 
dramatist against the lyrist is out of the question ; but what remains deplorable, 
is the experience that it is just the ' Schumannites ' who from the very beginning 
have been the bitterest and blindest adversaries of Wagner. Whoever clove to 
him, had to find himself regarded in that quarter as a moral delinquent ; 
whereas Wagner gladly rendered to the artist Schumann the full justice due 
to every genuine thing " (H. v. Wolzogen, Erinturungtn an Richard fVagner, 
p. 33). — Nevertheless, Wagner did not admire the Schumann of that " second 
period," as may be seen upon referring to the page cited in the text above, 
written in 1869.— W. A. E. 



"DAS LIEBESVERBOT." 1 79 

his companions, to climb the steps to the Schlackenburg and eat 
his breakfast in solitude. There, with the little town and smiling 
valley spread before him in bright sunshine, the countless hamlets 
snuggling in folds of the land or perched on dwarf hills, while the 
horizon stretched from the Schlossberg to the wood-crowned 
heights of the Mileschauer, he jotted down in his notebook the 
sketch for a new opera-poem, to vent the bubbling "Young 
European " joy-of-life within him. It was the text of Das Lkbes- 
verboty otherwise known as "The Novice of Palermo," its argu- 
ment as follows : — 

An unnamed King of Sicily leaves his pountry on a journey to 
Naples, and appoints as his Stateholder a strait-laced puritanic 
German, named Friedrich, with full authority to reform the 
manners of his capital. At the commencement of the piece his 
agents are closing or demolishing certain houses of amusement 
in the suburbs ; the mob interferes ; in the midst of the riot a 
comic Chief Constable reads out the edict, proscribing " Love, 
wine and carnival." It is greeted with a chorus of derision : 

Der deutsche Narr, anf, lacht ihnans ! Come langh him down, the Gemun 

das soil die ganse Antwort sein I fool I 

Schickt ihn in seinen Schnee nach No other answer on him waste ! 

Haas, Send htm amid his snow to cool ; 

dort lasst ihn keusch und nttchtem There let him sober be and chaste ! 

sein ! 

during which a yotmg rakish noble, Luzio by name, constitutes 
himself the people's leader. He soon enough finds matter for 
agitation, as his friend Claudio is led along to prison, arrested 
for an indiscretion with the lady to whom he is secretly betrothed. 
The penalty under a mouldering old law unearthed by Friedrich 
being decapitation, Claudio's only hope is that his sister Isabella, 
who has just entered the cloister as a novice, may succeed in 
softening the tyrant's heart; Luzio promises to go at once to 
her. — The next scene introduces Isabella in conversation with 
Marianne, another novice ; Marianne unfolds a tale of treachery, 
her betrayer proving to be none other than Friedrich himself. 
Luzio arrives at the moment of Isabella's greatest indignation, 
and adds fuel to the fire by his tidings of her brother's fate; 
her spirited defiance moves him to a declaration of love; she 
quickly brings him to his senses, but accepts his escort to the 
hall of justice. — The third scene commences with a burlesque 



l8o LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

trial of various moral offenders by Brighella, the Chief Constable. 
Friedrich next appears, enjoining silence on the uproarious mob 
that has forced the doors, and begins the serious hearing of 
Claudio ; he is on the point of passing sentence, when Isabella 
arrives, and demands a private audience. The court is cleared, 
and Isabella pleads, at first with eloquent moderation, for pardon 
of her brother's very human fault : 

Du schmfihest jene and're Liebe, die Gott gesenkt in uns're Brust I 

O wie so ode das Leben bliebe, gilb' es nicht lieb' und Liebeslust ! 

Dem Weib gab Schonheit die Natur, dem Manne Kraft sie m geniessen, 

und nur ein Thor, ein Heuchler nur sucht sich der Uebe zu verschliessen. 

O offne der Erdenliebe dein Hers, — lose durch Gnade meinen Schmerz I 

Perceiving the effect of her pleading, she proceeds with ever 
greater fire to probe the hidden secrets of the judge's heart 
The ice of that heart is thawed: "How warm her breath — 
how eloquent her tongue! Am I a man? Woe's me, I yield 
already." The stem guardian of morals is seized with passion 
for the splendid woman ; no longer master of himself, he promises 
her whatever she may ask, at price of her own body. In utmost 
fury at such hideous villainy she calls in the people, to unmask 
the hypocrite ; he threatens her with a trumped-up story ; suddenly 
conceiving a stratagem to save her brother's life, beneath her 
breath she promises fulfilment of his fondest wishes on the 
following night 

At the beginning of the second act we learn the nature of her 
hasty plaa She gains admission to her brother's gaol, to prove 
if he be worth the saving. Claudio is shocked at first by the 
suggested sacrifice, but when it comes to bidding his sister fiare- 
well, and entrusting her with tender messages for his beloved, 
his manliness breaks down, and shamefacedly he asks if the price 
of his deliverance is quite beyond her. Thrusting the craven 
from her in contempt, she returns him to his gaoler; but she 
merely means to punish him by prolonging his uncertainty, and 
still abides by her decision to rid the world of his shameful 
judge. She has arranged for Marianne to take her place in the 
rendezvous with Friedrich, to whom she now despatches her 
invitation, appointing a masked encounter at one of the dis- 
reputable houses which he has closed. Meantime she teaches 
Luzio a lesson, by leading him to believe that she seriously 
intends meeting Friedrich that night Luzio, in an agony of 



"DAS LIEBESVERBOT." l8l 

deapftir, summons all his friends to the Corso at nightfiBill, and 
just as revehy is waxing wild there he goads the crowd to fieaixf 
with a daring Camival-song : 

Ihr jiinges Volk, macht eoch hemo, die Alltagskleider ab^tban, 

die LarTen vor, die Farben an» die bimten Wiimser angethan I 

Heat* ist Bcginn des Cameval, da wird man seiner sich bewosst I 

Hcrbet, berbd, ihr Leute all, nun gicbt es Spaas, jetzt giebt es Lost 1 

Im Jnbehausch and Hochgennss ertiilnkt die gold'ne Freudenzeit, 

Zum Teofel &bre dcr Veidruss and bin zor Holle Traurigkeit. 

Wer sich nicbt frent am Cameval, dem stosst das Messer in die Brust I 

Herbei, herbei, ihr Leute all, es war zam Spass, es war sur Lost f 

The maskers throng towards the background, while Luzio lies 
in wait. Presently he recognises one of the maskers as Friedrich, 
and is about to follow him with drawn rapier, when Isabella 
causes him to be led on a wrong scent Isabella comes forth 
from the bushes in which she has stood concealed, rejoicing in 
the thought c^ having restored Marianne to her faithless mate 
at this very moment, and believing herself to be in possession 
of the stipulated patent of her brother's pardon. Breaking its 
seal, she discovers an aggravation of the order for execution. 
(Alter a hard battle with the flames of lust, Friedrich has resolved 
that, however criminal his fall, it yet shall be as a man of honour : 
one hour on Isabella's bosom, and then his death in obedience 
to the selfsame law to which the head of Claudio stands irre- 
vocably forfeit, — " Claudio, thou diest ; I follow after.") Isabella, 
considering this but an additional villainy of the hypocrite, onct 
more bursts out in frenzy of despair ; at her call to instant revolt 
against the tyrant, the whole populace assembles in wild con- 
fusion. Luzio, arriving on the scene at this juncture, sardonically 
adjures the mob to pay no heed to the ravings of a woman who 
will dupe them as assuredly as she has deceived him ; for he still 
believes in her dishonour. Suddenly Brighella's comical cry for 
help is heard; jealous about his own inamorata, he has seized 
the disguised Stateholder by mistake, thus leading to his dis- 
covery. Friedrich is unmasked ; Marianne, clinging to his side, 
is recognised ; general indignation, jeers and laughter. Friedrich 
moodily demands to be led before the returning King, to receive 
the capital sentence; Claudio, freed from prison by the mob, 
instructs him that death b no penalty for a love-offence. The 



1 82 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

King's arrival is announced ; all the maskers go in procession to 
meet him : " Gay festivals delight him more than all your gloomy 
edicts." Friedrich and Marianne are made to lead off the pro- 
cession ; the Novice, lost to the cloister for ever, forms the second 
pair with Luzio. 

As will be seen at once, the groundwork of Dcls Ldtbesverbot is 
borrowed from Measure for Measure; yet, despite the retention 
of so many of Shakespeare's incidents, an entirely different 
complexion is given to the tale. That Wagner should have 
drawn on Shakespeare for a plot, is by no means extraordinary, 
if we bear in mind that personation of Romeo by Frau Schr5der- 
Devrient which had so shortly gone before : what is remarkable, 
is the instinct which guided him to the only one of Shakespeare's 
undisputed plays that all the better critics now admit to be 
susceptible of radical imi^rovement. In his Study of Shakespeare 
C. A. Swinburne remarks : "The strong and radical objection dis- 
tinctly brought forward against this play, and strenuously supported 
by the wisest and the warmest devotees among all the worshippers 
of Shakespeare, is not exactly this, that the Puritan Angdo is 
exposed : it is that the Puritan Angelo is unpunished. . . . We 
are left hungry and thirsty after having been made to thirst and 
hunger for some wholesome single grain at least of righteous and 
too long retarded retribution. . . . That this play is in its very 
inmost essence a tragedy ... the mere tone of style prevalent 
throughout all its better parts, to the absolute exclusion of any 
other, would of itself most amply suffice to show. . . . The 
evasion of a tragic end by the invention and intromission of 
Marianne has deserved and received high praise for its ingenuity : 
but ingenious evasion of a natural and proper end is usually the 
distinctive quality which denotes a workman of a very much lower 
school than the school of Shakespeare." So much in imin- 
tentional justification of Wagner's boldness in laying hands on 
this particular play : there was a flaw in it, which would naturaiiy 
tempt the intrepid youngster. 

Now, there would be two ways of rectifying Measure for 
Measure^ both of them suggested in the above extract ixoxa 
Swinburne. One way would be, to exact from Angelo-Friedrich 
himself the full penalty he had adjudged to Claudio, and thus 
supply a " tragic end." The other might be to alter the " prevalent 



1 83 

tone of style," and turn the work into a tragi-comedy. The first 
course would in nowise have accorded with young Wagner's 
instant frame of mind ; for his purposes, he did well to choose 
the second. He shifts the centre of gravity from Angelo and 
the Duke to Isabella, at the same time transforming the mere 
ribald Ludo— Shakespeare's "whipping-boy," so to speak — into 
an important and highly sympathetic character. Again, while 
Friedrich's original villainy is retained, it is to a large extent 
redeemed by his spontaneous resolve to submit to the same 
decree of death he means to execute on Claudio, — a point 
perhaps suggested by Shakespeare's lines, " When I that censure 
him, do so offend. Let mine own judgment pattern out my 
death " ; but in Measure for Measure this is said by Angelo 
when there appears no possibility of his " so offending," in fact 
before he has ever clapped eyes on Isabella ; whereas he brazens 
out denial to the Duke, on his return, till all escape is blocked—- 
after which he says, ** Immediate sentence then and sequent 
death is all the grace I beg." Thirdly, and most significant of 
all, the " people " are here made active interveners in a manner 
that would never have occurred to the politically conservative 
Shakespeare ; on them and their lightheartedness, instead of on 
the somewhat tricky Duke, devolves the office of punishing the 
offender ; and they punish him right heartily with ridicule. 

To lend colour to these changes, nothing could have been 
happier than Wagner's transference of the /Scene of action from 
Vienna to Palermo ; as he himself says, ** the Sicilian Vespers 
may have had something to do with it " ; whilst the German name 
of "Friedrich," with which he has re-christened Shakespeare's 
Angelo, would point to the same conclusions as his lashing of 
German pedantry in that article just dealt with. In the powerful 
part of Isabella we certainly have a first suggestion of the 
Tannhduser problem, the redemption of an erring man by a 
spotless virgin ; but it presents itself differently to the youth of 
one-and-twenty, and the whole drama is distinguished by its 
glowing championship of the rights of the senses. 

The form of this piece shews the characteristic influence exerted 
on the dramatist, in Wagner's twofold nature, by the musician. 
It is his only work in two acts. The various movements of the 
animated plot whirl by in swift succession : we are hurried from 
die riotous mob in the first scene to the silence of the cloister, 



1 84 



LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



and thence to the hall of justice ; from the gloomy solitade of 
prison to the turbulence of Corso and of Carnival. Just as 
Weber and Marschner, with their ampler musical expression, quite 
obviously lent its breadth to the dramatic structure of Die Feen^ 
so the influence of Auber^s and Bellini's music here bore upon the 
method of the plot's arrangement. Wagner himself speaks of 
''the reflex of modem French and — ^as concerns the melody- 
Italian Opera upon my violently excited senses," and goes on to 
say : " Whoever should take the pains to compare this composition 
with that of Die Feen^ would scarcely be able to understand how 
so surprising a change of front should have been brought about 
in so short a time" {P. W, I., 296). 

The chief distinctive mark of the Liebesverbot music is con- 
sidered by Gasperini to be a preponderance of the melodic, over 
the harmonic or idealistic, element * : " From the first note of the 
overture, one breathes another atmosphere; everything is alive^ 
clear, entrainant ; no bizarre harmonies, no daring combinations ;. 
through the whole score there circulates a mklodie abandante et 
lumineuse'^ It reaches white heat in the fiery Carnival song, 
with its provocative introductory trills for triangle, castanets and 
tambourines, when the Allegro vivace 




w^^ m Pm ^ ^ ^m 







boils up to the double fermata portending the dagger-thrust 



* The score b not accessible now, being in the possession of the King of 
Bavaria. 



DAS LIEBESVERBOT. 



185 



pf f i r' r i f ff fi Rt 



ttottt dus Met - Mr in dw Bnut 







and passes over to the feroce of the rousing "Tralala." On the 
other hand the subject's latent kinship to Tannhauser comes out 
in the most remarkable fashion in the definite anticipation of a 
musical theme»—- compare the following with that of the '' hymn of 
Promise " as first announced by trumpets, trombones and tuba, 
in the prelude to the third act of Tannhauser : 



A A 



^^ 



u^ 



A A 



m 



rtp-iprtT; 



^^ 



J^ A A A A I , I 



AAA 



teOKin i P fi": ^ 






s 



Here we have an instance of that inner cohesion in the music of 
all Wagner's works, which makes it impossible not to r^ard them as 
members of one great organic whole, but gradually revealing itself. 
Thus certain harmonic likenesseswill often transfer us,for amoment, 
from the sphere of one work to that of another ; and thus, as in the 
present case, a theme expressive of some definite mood or plastic 
thought will pass almost integrally from this to that creation. 

Two whole years, however, were to elapse between the drafting 
of this poem, in the summer of 1834, and its musical completion. 
For, immediately after Wagner's return to Leipzig firom his little 
outing, he entered negotiations destined to put an end to his state 
of happy irresponsibility and fetter him to a practical career. 
He was offered the vacant post of musical conductor to Bethmann's 
Magdeburg stage-company, and delayed no longer in makii^ the 
apparently inevitable sacrifice of his artistic freedom to his outward 
independence. 



III. 
MAGDEBURG. 

Lauchstddt and Rudolstadt.—Symphony in E.—Mc^deburg,— 
Apatk^ of the Fublic— Last fortunes of ''Die Feen:'^New Yearns 
music. — Columbus-overture. — Betrothal to Minna Planer, — The 
'' Sckweizerfamilit^' at Nuremberg, — Death of uncle Adolf — 
Auber^s '' Lestocq^ — Performance of ''Das Liebesverbot.^^ 

I erredofold^ and tuw would fain repe^ it; 
from youth* s offence how shall I set nufru f 
The worh, at feet of thine I humbly lay it^ 
that thy abounding grace my ransom be, 
(Dedication oiDas Liebesverbot to King Ludwig II.) 

Towards the end of July 1834, just past his one-and-twentieth 
birthday, Richard Wagner took up his first position as Conductor. 
The Bethmann stage-company was then engaged at Magdeburg 
for tlie vrinter, at Lauchstadt and Rudolstadt in summer. A few 
years previously its director, Heinrich Bethmann, had brought 
his company to Leipzig during the Easter fair, as a stopgap in 
the interregnum prior to the opening of the Court theatre. 
Among other eminent qualifications for his post, he possessed 
that of maintaining his theatre in a perennial state of bankruptcy 
— in spite of a Royal subvention and the assistance of a Theatre 
Committee, — and consequently had a rooted antipathy to pay- 
day. The utter chaos in the finances of the first theatre at which 
he was regularly engaged had a disastrous and far-reaching effect 
on Wagner's economic relations. 

The company remained at Lauchstadt till the middle of August, 
when it migrated to the charming little capital of Schwarzburg- 
Rudolstadt in the leafy valley of the Saale, with its towering 
Heidecksburg — the prince's residence — its romantic park, and 
shooting-box on the Anger. In the midst of all the young 
conductor's duties at rehearsals and performances his tireless 
mind was busied with the drafting of a new grand symphony^ this 
time in K The sketch for the first movement, an All^ro^ is 
186 



MAGDEBURG. 



187 



closely written on a large double-sheet of stout yellowish note- 
paper,* dated at the top "Lauchstadt, the 4th August, 34," 
and at the bottom, "29 August, Rudolstadt." To the efforts 
and research of W. Tappert we owe its discovery after half a 
century of oblivion, as also that of the orchestral parts of the 
earlier Symphony in C. According to his report the Symphony 
in £ is conceived in quite the Beethovenian spirit, structure and 
distribution shew no material departure from the principles of 
classical tradition, the whole is powerful and clear. Several of 
its salient points have been reproduced by the discoverer, includ- 
ing the " fresh and flowing " introductory theme of the Allegro : 







p^ jf??r i ?tf ^cT^ 



ft«»'i / I J ^^ 



p-i rfl^ Sg Caa r^Hp^ ^gr i 



^^ 



£ 



8^ 






m*! f, I jp=^Mg%^^^ i 



* " The lines are drawn with the music-pen unaided by a ruler ; on the 
first three pages there are fifteen double-staves apiece, on the last page sixteen " 



i88 



LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



with some interesting indications of its fiuther progress ; also the 
tender second theme : 



u^ rnP - n ^^^.iP \^H 



dfiee 



n% ^Mf-f^' \^ Of ^ 



(Mn — f f ^ 'T- 


1 


#= 


#= 




g^i? 1 r [ q- — 


P 


1 ^. — 


1 


'-t--8 — t-l 

r\r 1 




zb 



^.jJ | ^:gj^ l f. Cj^ ^ 



with its contrapuntal development : 




M^tim/ram ik* ^md Thnm. 




-TH- 



:it± 



^1 



T 



1 



i 



[ h W,J. N-^f-^ ^ 



(W. Tappert's article on " Richard Wagner's zweite Symphonic " in the Mus, 
WocJUmblait i886» Nos. 40 and 41). 



MAGDEBURG. 



189 



and the characteristic canon for the wind in the working-out 
section : 




^^^^^m 



W'^^W^W^ 



Towards the close, as Tappert tells us, there are daring 
harmonies foreign to the stricter school, "but what a wealth 
of talent in the youthful sketch, what sureness of expression ! " 

The All^o is followed by an Adagio cantcMk : 




i-^' — ih j ^l^ iT^.r \t 






d4lU 



^ 



> ^ I' I 



4—^ 



rSj'i 



^ 



€tC. 



r r I f f 



m 



in the course of which Tappert draws attention to an energetic 
eight-bar period strongly reminiscent of Beethoven. But the 
Adagio breaks off at the 29th bar. Why? Why, in fact, did 
the whole work proceed no farther than this its interrupted sketch ? 
The answer may be found in the preceding chapter: after the 
conception of Das LUbesverbot^ our wonder should rather be 
directed to the yoimg master's having taken up for the moment 
with a purely symphonic creation. We can only attribute it to 
a sort of survival from a stage of development already overpassed \ 
for his whole present impulse was urging him in the direction 
struck by the sketch of his new opera. *' I gave up my model, 
Beethoven; his Last Symphony I deemed the keystone of a 
whole great epoch of art, beyond which none could hope to 
press, and witiiin whose limits none could reach to independ- 
ence" (i'. »^. L, 9-10). 



I90 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER* 

It was autumn, the beginning of October, when the Bethxnann 
troupe made its entry into the prosperous city of merchants and 
manufacturers, with its fortress, barracks and redoubts. Upon 
its only broad, but scarcely straight street, the Breiter Weg or 
*' Broadway,^ stood the Magdeburg Town-theatre, in friendly 
vicinity to Richter's wine-shades, the company's favourite resort 
before and after each rehearsal Immediately opposite the 
theatre there embouches one of the numerous minor side-streets, 
the Margarethengasse : here Wagner made his first abode. It 
was in the comer-house No. 2, close beside the Korte brewery, 
the windows of his apartments looking on the Broadway. After- 
wards he removed to the fourth floor of J. G. Knevel's house. No. 
34 Breiter Weg, where he dwelt from 1835 to 1836. 

He soon became at home in his new post of conductor : the 
quality of life behind the wings and before the footlights exactly 
suited his present mood. " My path led first to absolute frivolity 
in my views of art The rehearsing and conducting of those 
loose-limbed French operas which then were the mode, the 
piquant prurience of their orchestral effects, gave me many a 
childish thrill of joy as I set the stew a-frothing right and left 
from my desk. In life, which henceforth definitely meant for 
me the life of the stage, I sought distraction; which took the 
form, as regards the things within my daily grasp, of a chase of 
pleasure — ^as regards music, of a prickling, sputtering unrest" 

However, he took his present duties seriously enough, and, 
notwithstanding his youth, soon succeeded in inspiring both 
singers and bandsmen with respect He knew exactly what he 
wanted, and had the knack of conveying it to the executants. 
With a mere mechanical beating of time he would have nothing 
to do, either now or at any time ; upon every detail he bestowed 
the greatest pains, and constantly would sing a passage to the 
orchestra to shew how he wished it rendered. The same with 
the performers : possessed of natural histrionic talent, he would 
demonstrate by tone and gesture precisely his idea of any 
situation. Moreover by his lively temperament and ready wit, 
his thought for others and astounding memory, he soon endeared 
himself to all the company, down to the scene-shifters. The 
dislike he had cherished in earlier years for "the rouge-and- 
powdered ways of the comedian" had passed away : his irrepres- 



MAGDEBURG. I9I 

sible humour would often set the green-room ringing with peals 
of laughter ; but even in the freest and most familiar intercourse 
his fine tact prevented any of his associates from forgetting his 
position, and he remained the monarch of them all. 

The public of Magdeburg was a more difficult nut to crack. 
Phlegmatic by nature, it had made it a question of etiquette to 
copy the coldness and indifference of one of its leading contin- 
gents. The place was a gairison-town ; the military considered 
outbursts of enthusiasm the worst of * form ' ; a like impassiveness 
had spread to the remainder of the audience. Among the civic 
population, on the other hand — at least at the time we are speak- 
ing of, — there prevailed a decided love of purely physical pleasures, 
most detrimental to the interests of the theatre: besides the 
countless dinners, soirees, balls, th^-dansants etc., with which 
society regaled itself throughout the winter, there was a whole 
network of similar reunions behind closed doors, at the Harmonic, 
Casino, Friendship Club, and whatever else they styled themselves ; 
to say nothing of two Freemasons' lodges, a smaller called '* Har- 
pocrates," and a larger, perhaps the largest in all Germany, by the 
singular name of " Ferdinand to Felicity." The concerts given in 
the halls of these lodges enjoyed a certain reputation ; but the 
chief point whereby they gained the favour of the public, was 
the splendid supper with which they always terminated. Wagner 
writes a most amusing letter hereanent to Schumann,* affording 
a characteristic glimpse of social life at Magdeburg in those 
days : — 

"I assure you, they give us quite good music sometimes at 
these concerts; that the Magdeburgers don't even perceive it, 
is the curse that seems hurled at every bow-stroke or vocal note 
condemned to here. The indi£ferentism of the natives is alto- 
gether criminal, and in my opinion should be seen to by the 
police, for it is becoming an actual danger to the State. I wager, 
dreadful political machinations lurk behind this callousness, and 
it would be a real service to draw the attention of the supreme 



* In the first month of his Magdeburg stay he had sent to the Netie 
Zeitschrift fiir Musik, at Schumann's request, that article "Pasticcio" 
referred to on page 178. It will be found in volume eight of the Prose 
Works. In the Bayrouther Blatter for Nov. 1884 and February 1885 Herr 
Glasenapp deals with the relation between this article and Wagner's treatise 
of sixteen years later on " Opera and Drama. "^W. A. E. 



192 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

authorities to all the close societies, Casinos and so on ; for what 
good thing can they be hatching? — But these people hide the true 
nefarious objects of their meetings from the eye of the uninitiafee 
with marvellous success. Think of it ! they open each of these 
seditious assemblies with a concert. Isn't that the refinement of 
deceit? They lure good citizens, like myself, to their concert 
I enter a lighted room ; everything is arranged in the ordinary 
fashion; folk play symphonies, concertos, overtures, sing arias 
and duets, and thus confirm one in the innocent belief it really 
is an honest concert. But the indifference, boredom, unrest of 
the audience can't escape a political instinct; one plainly sees 
the whole is but a mask to cheat the eye of the inquisitive ; — ^the 
nearer the concert approaches its end, the more mstfuliy are 
the looks of the conspirators directed toward a big locked door. 
What does it mean ? During the symphony's Adagio one catches 
the rattle of plates close by. The unrest increases ; — ^fortunately 
the orchestra now creates a terrible uproar ; it seems devised to 
drown the conspirators' shuffling of feet, their coughs and sneezes, 
and thus divert our notice from those secret signals. The concert 
is over, — ^all rise ; honest people, like myself, pick up their hats, 
— then that suspicious door is opened, tell-tale odours stream 
forth, — the confederates close up their ranks, — they pour into 
the inner room, — I am politely waved off, — the hypocrisy is 
dear to me. — Let anyone deny that there is something very 
wrong concealed here. For my part, I am surprised at the 
remissness of the police." 

At one of these Lodge-concerts he had his overture to Die 
Feen performed; it was received with much applause. But 
things were not going so well with the fate of the work itself 
at Leipzig; merely deferred at first, the production was put 
off from time to time under every nugatory pretext. Objection 
was taken to the opera's being "composed throughout"; a 
portion of the dialogue must be transposed into spoken prose. 
After that, Ringelhardt declared the book ruined by the prose. 
Hauser revealed himself to brother-in-law Friedrich Brockhaus 
as an open and most obstinate antagonist : it would be better, 
according to him, if the composer decided to withdraw the 
work entirely for the present, but at least it was an imperative 
necessity to get up Auber's Philtre first, for Michaelmas. In 
October the solo parts were copied out at last ; Wagner was to 



MAGDEBURG. 



193 



come over from Magdeburg for the trial of several extracts in 
presence of the dh'ector. Then again, this project was declared 
infeasible: it would be injurious to a first impression, if the 
singers were to read their parts like that at sight; they must 
be given time to study them, and perhaps the opera might yet 
come out this side of Christmas. As late as the end of the 
year, Schumann printed an encouraging note in the Neue Zeit- 
schrift: "At Leipzig we are about to have Bellini's Norma and 
a new opera, Die Feen^ by Richard Wagner." The announce- 
ment was all that it came to; Norma indeed got performed, 
but not Richard Wagner's new opera. It had clearly been 
shelved. Meantime the composition of Das Liebesverbot was 
begun, and its totally different character weaned the musician 
himself more and more from his earlier work. He lost all 
interest in its fate, and as he no longer was able to push his 
affair at Leipzig in person, he determined to trouble no further 
about it. That meant as much as abandoning it completely, 
for only by dint of continual dunning could he have hoped to 
gain his end. 

About Christmas he hastily threw off some music for a festival 
text by Regisseur Wilhelm Schmale It was a New Year's 
cantata for the opening of 1835, adapted to local means and 
conditions, and consisting of an overture and two choruses. 
The overture in C minor, triple time, is a fairly long and power- 
ful piece ; beginning Andante sostenuto^ 




it passes into Allegro and a boisterous Presto, In an Allegretto 
with chorus, following on the overture, use is made of that 
Andante theme from the Symphony in C as a melodramatic 
accompaniment to the mournful leave-taking of the expiring year. 
The whole thing was very well received by the public. — Easy 
successes like this confirmed him in the opinion that, to please, 
one must not be over-scrupulous in one's choice of means : '' So 

N 



194 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

I went on with the composition of my Uebesverbot^ and took no 
care whatever to shut off echoes from the French and Italian stage." 

Such were the outward stimuli and general artistic influences 
at work on him just now. In any town of 40,000 inhabitants, in 
which he might have wielded the conductor's baton at the theatre, 
they would have been pretty much the same ; and it was less on 
his artistic, than his personal career, that his Magdeburg surround- 
ings had a permanent effect Since his entry on his new vocation 
he had been charmed by one acquaintance in particular, that 
of the leading juvenile actress in the Magdeburg company, 
Wilhelmine Planer, bom in Dresden and "as pretty as a 
picture." Till now his closer knowledge of the female sex — 
apart from his purely artistic adoration of the Schr6der-Devrient 
— had been confined to the immediate circle of his famOy, his 
mother and sisters; anything else was but a fleeting pastime. 
Even his art-creations reveal it : Arindal loves a fairy^ a super- 
natural being, an ideal that lifts him up above himself, as his art 
the yearning artist; the first really human female in his works, 
the Isabella of Das Ziebesverbot^ is not so much his own as 
Shakespeare's, and sister, not beloved, of the nominal hero. With 
the opening of this new chapter in his life we are reminded of his 
words in Opera and Drama; "In the family the natural ties 
become ties of wont ; and from wont, again, is evolved a natural 
inclination of the children toward each other. But the earliest 
breath of conjugal love is brought the stripling by an imaccustomed 
object, confronting him entire from life outside. This attraction 
is so overpowering, that it draws him from the wonted family- 
surroundings, where exactly this had never presented itself, and 
drives him forth to fare with the unwonted" {F.W. II., 18 1-2). 
The " unwonted object," in this case, was in undoubted possession 
of many winning qualities ; all contemporary accounts extol her 
beauty, histrionic talent, and unassuming amiability. Her attrac- 
tiveness would be enhanced by the contrast of her quiet, unim- 
passioned nature with the motley theatrical crew in which their 
first encounter happened, and amid which they were thrown into 
almost daily contact by professional duties. The liking once 
conceived, advanced with the same rapidity as every other feeling 
in Wagner's strenuous breast : in less than half a year from their 
first meeting, the pair were openly avowed betrothed. 

Without going farther into this personal relation, for the 



MAGDEBURG. 1 95 

present, we will return to Wagner's artistic activity during his 
Magdeburg period. The composition of the Liebesverbot was 
going on, subject to temporary interruption by occasional efforts 
such as that New Year's music. Chief among these was the 
overture to a play of his friend Theodor Apel's, performed at 
Magdeburg and called Columbus ; subsequently played in Leipzig, 
Riga and Paris, this overture may be regarded in some sort as 
the forerunner of that to the Flying Dutchman. " At the close 
of the Middle Ages a new impulse led the nations forth to 
voyage of discovery. The sea in turn became the soil of life ; no 
longer the narrow land-locked sea of the Hellenic world, but the 
ocean that engirdles all the earth. Goodbye to the old world; 
the longing of Ulysses, back to home and hearth and wedded 
wife, had mounted to the longing for a new, an unknown country, 
invisible as yet, but dimly boded " {P, W. I., 307). These words 
will convey the idea of the piece ; its realisation is thus described 
by Dom, after a hearing at Riga: "The conception and con- 
struction of this overture one can only call true Beethovenian : 
grand thoughts, bold cut of rhythm, the melody less predominant, 
the working-out broad and intentionally massive, — on the other 
hand, the externals modem of the modem, wellnigh Bellinian ; I 
simply tell the naked truth, when I state that in the Columbus 
two valved trumpets are kept in constant motion, their united 
parts covering fourteen and a half close-written pages." 

Among these occasional pieces we even hear of the music for a 
fairy-farce ; though none of it has come down to us. No less an 
authority than Edward Dannreuther makes mention of it in the 
"Orchestral and Choral" section of the "Chronological Lists" 
appended to his admirable essay on Richard Wagner, in Grove's 
Dictionary of Music and Musicians^ as follows : " Incidental music 
— songs — to a * Zauberposse ' by Gleich, *Der Berggeist, oder 
Die drei Wiinsche.' Magdeburg, 1836. (Unpublished, MS. 
probably lost.)" A tradition, revived in the Oberfrdnkische 
Zeitung, goes still farther, mixing up the names of Wagner, his 
fiancee and others, in what is evidently intended to be a humorous 
story — concerning the irritation of the company at Bethmann's 
getting up this silly farce, their purloining its original music from 
the lodgings of the tenor to whose keeping it had been entrusted, 
and Wagner's coming to the rescue of both parties with a hasty 
composition of his own. But on the first of January 1877 the 



196 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

master sends a letter to the editor of that journal, in which he 
protests in most emphatic terms against the " mendacious intro- 
duction " of his name and that of Minna Planer. He does not, 
however, contradict in detail ; so that it is possible that he really 
wrote some incidental music for this Berggeist — though the date 
assigned by Mr Dannreuther would have to be altered from 
*' 1836" to 1835, ^^ tenor in question having left Magdeburg in 
the summer of the year last-named. 

One of the most faithful and devoted friends of the Magdeburg 
conductor was his " companion and consoler in all the troubles of 
his cabined life there," his good dog Riipel. At first it insisted on 
following him into the orchestra ; after its banishment thence, for 
too acutely critical remarks, it would take a jaunt round the town 
and wait in patience for its master at the stage-door. F. Avenarius 
tells us that Riipel was always to be seen at Wagner's heels when 
he went courting in blue swallow-tails and spotless ducks, and 
once made an unexpected appearance in public. Wagner had been 
conducting the entr'acte music of a play, and sat drinking a glass 
of beer at the buffet : at this moment an evil-doer makes his exit, 
leaving a highly moral character upon the stage; on the ^'boards 
that represent the world " there suddenly arrives no less a personage 
than Riipel, in search of its master; despairing calls are heard 
from the wings — "Rrrr" the only answer. The actor pauses — 
shall he proceed? He decides to ignore the intruder; pointing 
to the exit by which the stage-villain has just gone out, he resumes, 
" He's just as shifty as his master." Unfortunately, Riipel now 
stands on the very spot, to the hysterical delight of the audience. 
At last the conductor himself arrives behind the scenes, coaxes 
his dog off, and peace is restored. — '' Perhaps it was this selfsame 
animal that accompanied him on a trip to Saxon Switzerland, and 
wanted to follow the adventurous climber up the precipitous 
heights of the Bastei: fearing lest it should come by a fall, 
Wagner throws his handkerchief down for the hound to guard ; 
after a brief conflict between divided duties, the sagacious creature 
buries the handkerchief at the foot of the crag, and swarms the 
summit to his master. This was a favourite anecdote from the 
'History of my Dogs'" (Wolzogen, Richard Werner und die 
Thierwelt^ p. 17). 

The season was over ; attended by his faithful hound, Wagner 



lilAGDEBURG. 1 97 

returned to Leipzig until it should reopen. An accountable 
pride withheld him from any fresh attempt to save his immolated 
Feerk Not that it would have been at all likely to succeed ; for 
even in the concert afifairs of his birthplace a great change had 
supervened. At the Gewandhaus "the days of homeliness had 
come to end," since Felix Mendelssohn had stepped into the 
shoes of kindly Fohlenz. At the beginning of October 1834, 
just as Wagner was leaving Rudolstadt to take up his new 
position at Magdeburg, Mendelssohn had made a few days' 
halt in Leipzig on his road from Berlin to Diisseldorf, putting 
up at Regisseur Mauser's, the manuscript-collector and enemy 
of £>ie Feen^ and taking stock of the Gewandhaus orchestra at 
a rehearsal under Conzertmeister Matthai. Though he had 
merely been a listener, it was enough to draw attention to 
him; n^otiations were commenced, to fix his rising star to 
Leipzig. Half a year later, on the i6th April 1835, Pohlenz — 
whose merits and personality commanded universal sympathy 
— received his dismissal 'Mn consequence of differences with 
the committee, the origin of which cannot be stated in a 
manner equally exonerative of both parties." * 

Shortly before his dismissal, Fohlenz gave a performance of 
Wagner's Columbus overture at one of the last Gewandhaus 
concerts he ever conducted; in the previous season (1834) he 
had been obliging enough to introduce the Feen overture to the 
Leipzig public. With Mendelssohn's advent b^an the era of 
these concerts* "lustre"; after a few months the general 
adoration of the new conductor amounted to a veritable cult. 
"Astounded at the ability of this still young master," says 
Wagner of him, "I approached and handed him, or rather 
pressed on him, the manuscript score of my Symphony in C, 
with the request — not even to look at it, but just to keep it 

* This is how Dr E. Kneschke expresses it in his Geschichte der Gewand- 
hausctmMerte, He infonns us, however, that Mendelssohn had previously 
insisted on a definite assurance that no one would be set aside or injured 
through his assuming the post. On the 9th of March 1843 a festival-concert 
was given in celebration of the centenary of these concerts, conducted by 
Mendelssohn and followed by a banquet, to which Pohlenz came by invita- 
tion. '* He returned home in apparent health ; but perhaps the recollections 
and excitement of that evening had a direct connection with the stroke of 
apoplexy from which Pohlenz expired on the morning of the loth " (Kneschke, 
p. 63). 



198 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

by him. Of course I hoped he would peep into it nevertheless, 
and some day say a word to me about it But that some-day 
never came. In course of years our several paths brought us 
often in contact ; we met, ate, and even music-ed together once 
in Leipzig . . . only about my symphony and its manuscript 
never a word fell from his lips : reason enough for me never 
to ask about its fate " {P, W. VI., 317). 

From Leipzig Wagner made an excursion to Bad-Kdsen near 
Naumburg, for the purpose of meeting friend Laube. In this 
little hamlet, with its fresh air and country life as yet unspoilt, 
the author of "Young Europe" was recovering from many a 
heavy blow incurred since their last companionship. His literary 
activity had been a thorn in the side of Prussia, which stretched 
its tentacles as far as Saxony ; and when he repaired to Berlin 
to defend himself, the notorious sleuth-hound Herr von Tzschoppe 
had just come by the happy thought that his quarry was a former 
member of the Halle " Burschenschaft" Nine months of deten- 
tion had told on the nerves of the once saucy champion of the 
Dawning Century, and robbed him of all strength of mind and 
body, till at last he was deported to K6sen under oath to come 
up for judgment when called upon. Here Wagner visited him 
on the Heerweg at pastrycook Hammerling's, where Laube had 
taken lodgings and was writing novelettes to earn the keep of the 
mare on whose back he took his daily constitutional. Their 
past experiences and future plans were discussed at length, and 
the diction of the LUbesverbot found unstinted favour in the eyes 
of Laube. 

The same summer our dramatist undertook a journey of 
inspection, to secure fresh singers for the Magdeburg manage- 
ment, touching at Nuremberg about the middle of August. Here 
he unexpectedly lit on Frau SchrSder-Devrient, doing a brief 
" Gastspiel " on her way from Bad-Kissingen. The company at 
the little Nuremberg theatre allowed of no great choice of pieces ; 
beyond JFidelio there was nothing feasible save J. Weigl's 
Schwdterfamilie, The artist complained that " Emmeline " was 
one of her earliest juvenile roles, and she had played it till she was 
sick to death of it ; Wagner also had fears of the performance, 
for he naturally imagined that this washy opera with its antiquated 
sentimentalism would weaken the impression hitherto made by 
Frau Devrient on the public alike with himself. To his intense 



MAGDEBURG. 1 99 

surprise, it was this evening that first revealed to him the over- 
whelming grandeur of the woman: "That a thing like the 
impersonation of this Switzer maid cannot be turned into a 
monument for all futurity ! " he exclaims nearly forty years later 
(P. W. v., 223). Through the charm of her embodiment the 
great artist not only raised the insignificant character of Emmeline 
to the level of her noblest art, but taught the youthful master 
that " that art cannot be held too high and holy." He had not 
anticipated this new light on his fleeting visit to the old Master- 
singers' city, and harder than ever did he estimate the task of the 
dramatic tone-poet who would maintain his work on a level with 
this marvellous impersonatrix. 

Passing through Leipzig on his return-journey, he learnt the 
news of the decease of his uncle Adolf, who had breathed his 
last at the country-seat of his friend Count Hohenthal, the 
generous patron of Seume. Here on the ist of August 1835 a 
gentle death sealed those eyes which not so long ago had rested 
on the lad of fifteen whose thirst for knowledge drew him to the 
recluse in the midst of his books, to learn about Shakespeare and 
Dante, Sophocles and Calderon. Did their glance search through 
him then ? Again it rested on him when the lad had grown into 
a youth, and, weathering the first wild turbulence of student life, 
began to shew himself a staid composer of overtures and sym- 
phonies, as if in pursuance of the uncle's counsel to his elder 
brother Albert : " Think not that freedom is a wanton snatching at 
the lures outspread by the outer world ! Nay, 'tis the abiding and 
continuance in, or at least the speedy return in childlike obedience 
to the Father-house from which we had played truant, the lively 
memory of that Love which conceived and cherished us from 
aye. Lay this to your heart ; for it well may prove the music to 
be studied first, that will set exhaustless harmonies sounding in us. 
Then, and not till then, should you apply yourself with diligence 
to that other music, which is but an echo of this." But the 
symphonist, in whom lay hid the future dramatist, went over to 
the " opera " ; and to the uncle it was but the common " theatre," 
that " stall of Thalia " in which he had seen the children of his 
brother's house "penned" one by one. So those eyes which had 
dwelt with wellnigh marvel on the questioning boy, and thereafter 
on the passionate youth, the rising young musician, had been 
turned more seldom toward the Wurzburg chorus-master. And 



200 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

now they were closed forever, at the very time the Magdeburg 
conductor was devoting heart and soul to that "theatre" — not 
without inner doubts of its moral and artistic qualities, but 
momentarily stifling all such doubts. 

When Richard got back to Magdeburg, he found a good opera- 
company assembled, chiefly through his own exertions. If the 
season ended in disaster, it certainly was no fault of the conductor 
or performers, but of the public's rooted callousness. Thus in the 
Dresden Abendzeitung of Feb. 24 and 26, 1836, we have a report 
from Magdeburg: ''Hitherto but little had been heard of our 
theatre, and that little not particularly edifying ; for, despite all 
efibrts of the management, it was impossible to get a good 
ensemble together on the stage. It is all the more refreshing to 
be able to report that this winter has presented our theatregoers 
with an admirable combination, especially in opera. We have 
three sopranos, all good of their kind : Dlle. Schindler, an old 
friend of ours; Dlle. Limbach from Frankfort-on-Main, with a 
fresh and agreeable little voice; and Mme. Pollert, a native of 
S. Petersburg, never heard before, so far as we are aware, on 
any German stage. The lady last-named is possessed of high 
volubility, purity of intonation, and great dramatic power; as 
Rosina in the Barbiere^ Julia in Montechi e CapuUHy Jessonda, 
the Dame blanche, and above all Elise in Lestocq^ she has earned 
vociferous applause. . . . Our only fear is lest we should lose 
her; for, notwithstanding the aflluence of our city, the theatre 
is poorly patronised, preference being unfortunately given to 
more material pleasures such as suppers, balls, card-parties etc., 
etc. The opera is also well served by our two tenors, Herr 
FreimiiUer, the owner of a rich and pleasing voice, and Herr 
Schreiber, still quite young, but of the fairest promise. Then 
we have the barytone Krug, very good, and the bass Grafe, who, 
if not too amply endowed by nature, yet displays great musical 
knowledge and dramatic insight. The recited Play is not at all bad ; 
its ranks are distinguished by the pair of Grabowski's, Dlle. Planer 
["Minna"], a very pretty young lady who is not above taking 
pains to improve, and Herr Pollert, husband of the singer afore- 
said." 

We have also a brief unsigned account sent by Wagner to 
Schumann's Zeitschrift at the close of the season, in which he 
does not scruple to speak of himself in the third person. He 



MAGDEBURG. 20I 

begins with a remark about those lodge-concerts, "at which a 
well-balanced orchestra under a conductor full of fire and nuptial 
bliss " makes excellent music from time to time, unheeded by the 
public. Then he turns to the theatre: "What more could you 
want, when I assure you that we had such an Opera this winter 
as never before ? What do you say to everybody here acknowledg- 
ing it— and staying away? What do you say to this Opera being 
unable to support itself, and having to be disbanded before the 
end of the winter half-year? What do you say to it, dear Sir? 
Joking apart, it's enough to anger anyone ££fort, chance and 
fortune, had collected such an admirable operatic ensemble here 
as could not possibly be bettered. I should like to see, for 
instance, a theatre that could cast the soprano parts in Lestocq so 
easUy as we were able to, with the Pollert, the Limbach and the 
Schindler — Elisabeth, Katharina and Eudoxia. We had a capital 
first tenor, Freimiiller, a second with a charming youthful chest- 
voice, Schreiber, and a good basso Elrug, who likewise schooled 
our choristers quite splendidly. When I add that a young but 
dexterous artist, like the musical director Richard Wagner, put 
all his skill and spirit into the obtaining of a good effect, you 
may imagine that we could not fail of getting true artistic treats. 
Among these I may instance the representations of new operas 
such zs/essonday Narma^ and Lestocq'* . . . 

The work last named, the latest-born of Auber's muse, had 
first seen the footlights at the Paris Op^ra Comique only the year 
before. Owing to its points of kinship with MasanUllOy Wagner 
had bestowed peculiar care on its Magdeburg production, and 
done his best to emphasise whatever in it might recall the spirit 
of that opera ; by a draft of soldier singers from the garrison he 
had reinforced the Russian battalion, which appears on the scene 
in support of a revolution, to an extent that much alarmed the 
manager, but had a quite imposing effect. And yet the public's 
lethargy, with the consequent disorder in the theatre's finances, 
put a damper upon everything. So the reporter to Schumann's 
paper, almost discarding his mask, continues as follows: "By 
Herr Wagner, and the likes of him and myself, I see what a 
torture it is to feel life tingling in every vein, and be condemned 
to dwell in this city of trade and war. Here is nothing but a 
highly decent dalliance, not even amounting to deliberate retro- 
gression ; for that at least would be a movement, and one might 



202 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

thus have the prospect of returning to the state of nature, which 
would be passably agreeable as a change ! — But no, things 
stand." 

Under these conditions there could be nothing more timely for 
the young artist than to resume the composition of his Liebesverbot^ 
laid aside for some time, and finish it as rapidly as feasible in the 
t^iiick of his winter duties. Premature dissolution was an instant 
peril; and there could be no thought of carrying on the enterprise 
of worthy Bethmann under a diflFerent form. On the other hand, 
Wagner confidently anticipated that the production of his opera 
by the excellent company still at his disposal would prove a turn- 
ing-point in his fortunes — much needed, as the payment of salaries 
had long been a thing^f^h^past 

To refund the expenses of Efe-l?usiness trip last summer he bad 
been promised a benefit-performjte^e. Naturally he chose his 
own last work for it, and did his best fe> make the cost as light as 
possible. But as the management was^bliged to make certain 
disbursements for the mounting, it was agnfi^d that the receipts of 
the first performance should go to //, of thksecond to himself. 
Indeed, he might rely upon a substantial prom ; for here was a 
brand-new opera, instinct with life and fire, yet well within the 
ordinary means. That its rehearsal and production were post- 
poned to quite the end Of the season, did not Strike him as a 
disadvantage; for all the public's apathy, the singerSvhad frequently 
roused it to some show of interest ; and what with wis own popu- 
larity, and this being their last appearance, he mighty^ckon on a 
bumper house. 

Unfortunately the legitimate close of the season, fix^ for the 
end of April 1836, never came at alL Owing to arrears df 
the principal members of the opera-company announced 
departure in March, to take more lucrative engagements ; Y^enor j 
Freimiiller had booked for Leipzig, Frau PoUert for the 
stadter theatre in Berlin; the directorate had no remedy, 
things looked black ; the chance of producing his opera seemd 
more than doubtful. It was solely through the great esteem % ^^ 
enjoyed with all the company that the singers were induced, nt ot 
only to stay on till the end of March, but also to go through tlVj^ 
drudgery of getting up at brief notice a work on whose score the 
composer had scarcely set the finishing touch. If time was to be^ 
allowed for two performances, there were but ten days for the 



MAGDEBURG. 203 

rehearsals ; and that for no simple singspiel, but a grand opera 
with many lengthy ensemble-numbers. 

However, vocal and orchestral parts were copied out, and 
studied night and morning. The rooms on the ground-floor 
of the theatre giving on to the Breiter Weg, then used for 
soloist and chorus practice, were occupied each day, and the 
young composer was up to his ears in rehearsing. Neverthe- 
less it was inevitable that the obliging singers hardly knew half 
of their parts by heart, and he had to reckon on a miracle 
to be worked by his conductor's-wand. At the one or two 
full rehearsals he managed to keep the thing afloat by continual 
prompting, singing aloud, and pantomimic interjections ; so that 
it really seemed it would not turn out much amiss. " Alas ! we 
had forgotten that on the night itself, in presence of the public, 
all these drastic means of oiling the wheels would have to shrink 
to the beat of my baton and the dumb motion of my face" 
(P. W, VII., 10). 

And there were other obstacles to overcome. The police took 
fright at the suggestive title, "Love Forbidden," which, if the 
author had not agreed to change it, would in itself have shattered 
all his hopes. It was Passion Week, when merry, not to say 
" improper" pieces were tabooed from the theatre. Luckily the 
magistrate with whom he had to deal was a gentleman who had 
not duly qualified for the post of Reader of Plays, and when 
Wagner assured him that his plot was founded on a highly 
serious play of Shakespeare's, he contented himself with accept- 
ing the proposed alteration to " The Novice of Palermo," which 
really sounded quite ecclesiastic. The case was worse for the 
spectators : a book would have very much helped them to follow 
the story ; but the management couldn't aflbrd any more printing. 

So the day of production arrived, Tuesday the 29th of March 
1836. A night-rehearsal of the orchestra had preceded it, to 
which the bandsmen had been inveigled by the prospect of a 
solid supper, — good Magdeburgers ! The house filled remark- 
ably well, but the singers, especially the males, were so uncertain 
of their parts that a general mystification prevailed from beginning 
to end. The first tenor, blest with the flimsiest memory in the 
world, endeavoured to trick out the r&le of Luzio with reminis- 
cences of Fra Diavolo and ZMmpa^ and more by token with 
a nodding plume of many-coloured feathers. With exception 



204 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

of a few applauded numbers for the lady singers, the whole 
brisk and energetic action "remained a musical shadow-play 
on the stage, which the orchestra did its best to drown in 
inexplicable torrents." The performance was a nightmare to 
all concerned; the dialogue being sung throughout, not a soul 
could catch a word of it ; yet whatever went the least bit well, 
was valiantly cheered. 

Perfectly aware that his work had made no real impression, 
and that nobody had the remotest idea what it all was about, 
Wagner nevertheless counted on good, nay, grand receipts from 
the second performance — his Benefit and the positively last 
appearance of the company ; so that nothing could dissuade him 
from standing out for so-called "full prices." But an evil star 
seemed to reign over the work. A quarter of an hour before 
curtain-rise a quarrel broke out between the husband of the 
prima donna, "Isabella," and the second tenor, "Claudio," a 
regular Adonis. The jealous husband thought the hour had 
come for squaring accounts with the gallant of his wife: poor 
Claudio was so knocked about that he had to retire to the 
vestiary with a bleeding face. Isabella got wind of it, rushed 
upon her raging husband, and herself received such blows that 
she straightway went into hysterics. Sides were taken for and 
against; in a few minutes the whole company was engaged in 
generally paying off old debts. Whatever the upshot may have 
been, thus much was certain : the pair of sufferers from Isabella's 
husband's love-forbiddal were rendered quite incapable of coming 
on that night. The stage-manager was sent before the curtain, 
to inform the singularly select company in front that " on account 
of unexpected obstacles " there would be no performance. 

A battle royal between the singers who were to have repeated 
his first-presented opera— that was the last impression Wagner 
bore away from his earliest conductorship at a German theatre. 
From a material point of view, moreover, nothing could have 
been more unfortunate than the collapse of his benefit-perform- 
ance. If at this his entry on a self-supporting career it were 
a question of gaining experience, not merely of his art, but of 
life in general, he might apply to himself with terrible conviction 
that line of Goethe's, " Experience consists in one's experiencing 
what one has no wish to." 



IV. 
ROSALIE WAGNER. 

External straits. — Lnp%ig: attempts to get ^^ Das Liebesverbot^' 
accepted. — Solicitude of sister Rosalie. — Her temporary eclipse as 
actress. — Rosalias marriage with Oswald Marbach: birth of a 
daughter^ and the mothet^s death. 

If the Artisfs temperament is a peculiarly inflammable 
one, he has to pay fir it through being the only real 
sufferer thereby; whereas the cold-blooded can always find 
the wool to warm him. 

Richard Wagnek. 

A SPELL of care and privations now lay before the youthful master. 
Immediately after the brawl at the theatre the exponents of his 
Liebesverbot^ already straining at the leash, dispersed in all 
directions. Director Bethmann renewed his infelicitous experi- 
ments at Stralsund, next at Rostock ; *' Luzio " Freimiiller went 
to Leipzig, Frau PoUert and Frl. Limbacb to the K6nigstadt theatre 
in Berlin, and so forth. Behind stayed none but Wagner's local 
creditors, and none too few of them. His earliest taste of manly 
independence had led him into many a folly ; ^' the seriousness 
of life announced itself," short commons and debts on every hand. 
On the I ith of April, exactly ten days after the frustration of his 
last hopes of Magdeburg, a marriage took place at the church of 
S. Nicholas in Dresden— ^ that of his sister Ottilie to the brilliant 
Sanscrit scholar Dp Hermann Brockhaus, younger brother of the 
publisher, who had settled down in comfortable private circum- 
stances after a long absence in Copenhagen, Paris, London and 
Oxford. Wagner was not at the wedding, but in solitude at 
distant Magdeburg, passing through a bitter time of fruitless 
struggle, too proud to ask the help of more prosperous connec- 
tions, yet with no immediate prospect either of employment else- 
where or of a repetition of his new opera. 

905 



206 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Looking back in after life (1851), he says that the solitary per- 
fonnance oi Das Liebesverbot^ " pursued with headstrong obstinacy 
under the most adverse conditions," caused him much momentary 
vexation, yet the e3cperience was quite unequal to cure him of the 
levUy with which he then regarded everything. No other person 
is entitled to endorse so harsh a verdict Without the dash of 
''levity," with which he may have had to reproach himself down 
to that date, he would not have been precisely Wagner. On the 
other hand, if we consider the various factors in his outward 
situation, — ^the extraordinary haphazardness of the Magdeburg 
management, the non-payment of salaries, and final bankruptcy 
of the theatre, — it is difficult to say what other, better thing he 
could have done in the circumstances, than what he actually did. 
For the present there was nothing for it, but to set his teeth, and 
prepare in seclusion for a turn of the tide. To these endeavours 
belongs the report to Schumann's journal already cited, written 
April 19, 1836. At its close he speaks of the "hmried and 
scamped" performance of his opera, though he naturally refers 
to the work itself with great reserve : " I cannot conceive what 
could have moved the composer to bring out a work like this at 
Magdeburg. For that matter, I regret my inability to express myself 
at length about it, — what is a single performance, and that not even 
a clear and intelligible one? Of this much I am sure, however: 
the work will succeed, if the composer has the luck to get it given 
at good places. There's a good deal in it ; and what pleased me, 
was the ring of the thing ; it is all music and melody, which we 
have to make some search for in our German Opera nowadays." 

In the interest of this work he next returned to Leipzig for 
awhile : where else than in the city of his birth, where his first- 
fruits had been welcomed with encouraging applause, might he 
count on a production of this opera ? The work itself displayed 
so little prudery towards the prevailing Franco-Italian craze, that 
he well might hope to edge it in, instead of the abandoned 
Feen, Once more he opened negotiations with Ringelhardt Un- 
fortunately that wily speculator had just reaped a very bad 
experience with the mounting of a new romantic opera by 
Marschner, Die Feuerbraut, oder: das Schloss am ^tna (text by 
Kiingemann) : too visible use had been made in it of every known 
expedient to create effect; applause had been half-hearted, and 
the opera vanished from the repertory after a very few per- 



ROSALIE WAGNER. 20^ 

formances. To coax the director's interest in his latest work, 
Wagner suggested his daughter, a debutante at the Leipzig Opera, 
for the part of Marianne. It did not help him, for the " heavy 
father'' of Iffland and Kotzebue pieces took refuge in the colourable 
plea that, quite apart from other difficulties in the way of any 
operatic novelty for the moment, he had a strong objection to 
the young-European tendence of the subject, and ''even if the 
Leipzig magistrates were to permit the representation — ^which 
his respect for those authorities made him very much doubt — 
as a conscientious parent he could not possibly allow his daughter 
to appear in it" This categorical display of an acutely moral 
sense cut off the only hope that could have buoyed the author in 
his desperate situation. With artistic comrades such as Schumann 
and Carl Banck — the latter of whom had been introduced to him 
at Magdeburg, and expressed himself very favourably about the 
music of Das Zdebtsverbot — he came into but passing contact in 
the present call at Leipzig; access to the Gewandhaus concerts 
was, and remained, denied him : there was little to detain him in 
a natal town that seemed so changed. 

In his family circle, after his mother, none took so keen an 
interest in his fate as his darling sister Rosalie: If in a sense we 
may compare the Wagner of this period with his Tannhauser, 
impetuous and all aglow, Rosalie's unwavering faith in him, when 
all had given him up, may be likened to that of his Elisabeth. 
Features of her character have been transferred by him to the 
pure and lofty figure of Isabella ; in after years the mother would 
speak of her as " angel Rosalie," '' my sainted Rosalie " ; and when 
the outer and inner distance between him and his increased, it 
was her responsive heart that felt true sorrows of Elisabeth. It 
was she who had lately put forth all her strength to move the 
Director and Kapellmeister to produce Die Feen^ and taken on 
herself in Richard's name to foil their every subterfuge. That 
opera's varying prospects stand recorded in the shower of letters 
with which she kept him posted at Magdeburg, several of which, 
on natty gilt-edged green paper, were treasured piously by Richard, 
and form a precious hoard at Wahnfried ; letters in which she in- 
forms her brother how " in spite of rain and storm she had just 
come from Stegmayer," or what new excuses that sly fox Ringelhardt 
had manufactured for his broken promise. But she would not have 
been the refined and noble creature that she was, had she 



208 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

possessed an atom of that wheedling talent for intrigue which 
alone could have secured a victory. On the contrary, it must 
have been a great grief to her that, at the very time when her 
personal influence might have aided her brother's cause, her own 
renown as actress was temporarily eclipsed by pushing rivals. 

The period of three years, to which we allude, begins precisely 
with the advent of the Ringelhardt dictatorship, and is sufficiently 
reflected in public references to her acting. Even in an earlier 
report on her interpretation of the dumb rdle in Auber's Masantello 
we find intrusion of the unctuous wish : " We are a little curious 
to see Fenella played for once by a passionate brunette, more in 
keeping with the fiery south-Italian character " {AbendzeUungy Feb. 
1830). With the beginning of the actual Ringelhardt regime, in 
August 1832, the "brunette" principle obeyed the invocation in 
shape of a truly oriental beauty, a Dem. Reimann, who particularly 
bewitched the Leipzigers as Juliet. At first it was merely : "We 
cannot gainsay her talent and a certain routine, but she still stands 
very much in need of art and finish" {ibid. Aug. 1832). Then 
barely six months later the balance turns distinctly in her favour : 
" Among the ladies of the company we must give first place to 
Dem. Reimann, a young, intelligent and delightful actress, who 
several times already has worked incomparably as heading 
juvenile.* The third rank is taken by Dem. Rosalie Wagner : in 
tragedy this lady has but one rdle in which she merits unstinted 
praise and cordial admiration of her powers of conception and 
portrayal — the rdle of Gretchen in Faust Her rivalry with Dem. 
R. — we are thinking, among other things, of the Stumme von 
Portia — has not had the happiest result for herself" {Ufid. April 
1833). And again a year after, August 1834: "Dem. Wagner, 
in frequent conflict with Dem. R., is often in a disagreeable plight ; 
and it appears as if the nimbus wrested by her fortunate rival not 
seldom puts her in the shade in the eyes of the public. Never- 
theless she has her due share of approval, and will continue to 
enjoy it so long as the rendering of Gretchen in Goethe's Faust 
finds just recognition." Not until after the departure of the 
dangerous " brunette " — now Mme. Dessoir (? Dessauer), engaged 
in 1835 at Breslau — do we find our Rosalie described once more 
as the undisputed "first and only prop of comedy" {ibid, Feb. 
183s). — ^These extracts not only will shew the machinations with 
which the earnest artist had then to contend, but also form a 



ROSALIE WAGNER. 209 

characteristic page in the history of the German Theatre: the 
opening paragraph of that chapter with the grandiloquent motto 
**Ad oriente lux^^ whose peroration is not yet, — the commence- 
ment of the Judaic dynasty. 

After what has been said of Rosalie Wagner on previous 
occasions, it will be readily believed that so finely-tempered a 
nature would suffer under unmerited slights, but never could be 
moved to bitterness or anger. Her mother writes : '' She had no 
wish to seem to be more than she was." She was the last person 
in the world to be blind to her own shortcomings; conscious, 
often grievously so, of the bounds to her artistic powers, she 
always strove most sedulously for improvement. The grace of 
her pliant figure and her maiden tenderness of touch, without a 
tinge of coquetry or affectation, won the hearts of all spectators ; 
her voice had many an affecting accent, and she succeeded the 
most surely where she put it to the smallest strain. Traces of 
mannerism would creep in, according to the evidence before 
us, when too pronounced an effort had been made ; in passionate 
parts she would let herself be betrayed into a certain restless- 
ness: but, more than any study, it was her truly feminine 
personality that lent its unity and roundness to each of her 
embodiments ; and that personality shed no less a charm on the 
creations of her art, than on her actual relationships as daughter, 
sister — ^and wife. 

When Richard quitted Leipzig again in the summer of 1836, 
to seek relief in any distant comer from the utter hopelessness 
at home, she bade him a solicitous goodbye. Never again was 
he to see his sister, and it was amid fresh hardships in that 
distance that he learnt the harrowing tidings of her death. Soon 
after that goodbye she became the bride of a young and talented 
writer, Dr Gotthard Oswald Marbach, who had been practising 
for the last three years as tutor of philosophy and physics at the 
University of Leipzig, and won universal esteem through his 
thorough-going energy and many-sided culture. On the 24th 
October, 1836, Rosalie Wagner gave him her hand in the selfsame 
parish-church at Schdnefeld where her grandfather had been 
married years ago. 

It was a wrench to the mother, to be deprived of this daughter 
who had dwelt the longest with her, and to whom she clove with 
an almost reverential love ; but she had the consolation of know- 

O 



2IO LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

ing her appreciated by her husband, and herself always welcome 
in her children's house. "They were quite wrapped up in one 
another and their quiet home; its ordering was pretty, clean 
and neat, but unpretentious ; so that all who went to visit them 
were gratified and glad," she herself says in a letter preserved at 
Wahnfried, " and so I had this daughter yet, saw her, and saw her 
in the arms of a respected husband." In a story written shortly 
after Rosalie's death ("Der 'Pietist," yaAreszet^n, Leipzig 1839) 
Marbach depicts the course and sudden termination of their 
wedded happiness, under the fictitious names of " Bettina and 
S." An abridgement of that narrative may serve better than 
any description of our own : — 

"Bettina was the most delightful hostess; her husband, 
familiar with the literature of every cultured nation, supplied her 
quick intuitive brain with ample food. Even the excitability 
common to both their natures appeared to heighten the charm 
of their companionship. Experience of life had given her a 
gentleness that promptly quelled each momentary wave of annoy- 
ance. It was wonderful, how swiftly she would reconsider any 
view of hers if S. gainsaid it : in such cases she would mollify 
him with a tender word, and then proceed to think the whole 
thing out in silence, until she burst forth with a joyful * See, I 
have it now. Now I understand it ! ' And then she would back 
up his own opinion, but recently at variance with hers, with 
reasons often better than he could have advanced for it himself. 
Is it a matter for surprise, that S. should have almost deified a 
wife like that ? — * All the pleasures of my childhood have come 
back to me,* he often cried, * but we're living, too, like children. 
Can you imagine it? I cannot fall asleep, if I don't feel her 
hand in mine. No earthly joy, no transport of passion, could 
surpass the blessed peace that takes me when I gaze in this pure 
being's eye.' — 

" Winter slips by, without the happy couple ever finding it too 
long. In spring Bettina feels the presage of a mother's hope. 
One balmy evening they are strolling arm-in-arm beneath die 
cherry-blossoms of their garden : ' She seemed engaged in gloomy 
thought, and when I asked her anxiously the reason, she gave a 
blushing answer.' She is tortured with the fear that the life of 
her child will be her death ; she listens mutely to his words of 
cheer, but cannot force the tears back. * Ah 1 ' she sighs, * were 



ROSALIE WAGNER. 211 

I but granted one year more, to taste my happiness!' Her 
husband almost harshly checks the thought implied ; she smiles, 
but speaks not, then turns towards the house. When he comes 
into the parlour she runs to meet him with an eerie laugh: 
'Look! I've been working out a problem, whether 'twere best 
for you that I remain alive, or not ; and as it turns out that you 
need me very much, I believe God's justice won't allow us to be 
severed yet.' Sobbing she sank on his breast, but from the 
beatific smile upon her face one could see that her tears were of 
joy." — So far Marbach, in whose Buck der Liebe we find a whole 
series of sonnets devoted to the memory of his wife. 

At Wahnfried there exists a letter in which the mother relates 
a conversation held with Rosalie about the absent brother, when 
her daughter had bewailed that sister Louise placed too little 
confidence in his gifts and future. In fact there was then a little 
rift between Wagner and his brother-in-law Friedrich Brockhaus, 
cutting off the last hope of supplies from home to the struggling 
artist. How to lend a helping hand, how to reconcile the two, 
assuredly preoccupied full many of her leisure hours. Meanwhile 
the autumn of 1837 approached, setting an ever greater outward 
space between her and her brother (who had just gone off to 
Riga), and drawing fine the thread of her own life. On the 7th 
of October she gave birth to a daughter, Margarethe Johanna 
Rosalie; five days later — Thursday the 12th — that thread of life 
was snapped. 

No other source being open to us, we will draw our account of 
her end from Marbach's tale, so obviously based on reality. " She 
had left her bed a few days after her confinement ; S. himself and 
the doctor had persuaded her to do so, as she appeared to be quite 
well. There were many little things to alter in the arrangement 
of the rooms, owing to the arrival of the tiny stranger; these 
changes she herself conducted, with an activity wellnigh preter- 
natural in view of her condition : she suddenly fell ill, and — died 
that day." 



V. 
KONIGSBERG. 

Berlin disappointments. — Konigsberg, — Letter to Dom, — Draft 
of ^^ Die hohe Braut^^ despatched to Scribe for Paris, — Marriage 
with Minna Planer. — ^^ Rule Britannia^* overture. — Concerts in 
the crush-room. — Incidental music to a play. — Relations with A. 
Lewald. — Dresden: Bulwer's ^^ Rienzir 

The modem requital of modem levity soon rapped at my 
door. I fell in love; married in headstrong haste; tor- 
tured myself ana other with the discomforts of a poverty- 
stricken heme ; and thus fell into that misery whose nature 
it is to bring thousands upon thousands to the ground. 

Richard Wagner. 

Wagner had gone to Berlin in the middle of May 1836 without 
the smallest certain prospect. He had nothing to expect from 
the Court-opera, under Spontini's control; but he knew that 
several members of the disbanded Magdeburg company were 
now employed at the smaller K6nigstadter theatre. He therefore 
placed himself in communication with the director of the latter, 
Cerf by name, and offered him the Liebesverbot, Fortune, indeed, 
at last seemed smiling on him ; he was received with open arms, 
and felt in clover for the present. His three-and-twentieth birth- 
day, passed in solitude, was gilded with the glitter of false hopes. 
A few days later he writes to Schumann (May 28), " I shall remain 
here for a month or two, and, by arrangement with Cerf, as soon 
as Glaser takes his holiday I am to undertake his duties [of 
conductor] at the Kdnigstadter house. During my locum-tenens- 
ship I shall produce my opera." He apologises for having left 
Leipzig without saying adieu: ^'I was in a trivial state, and 
wished to spare you a trivial farewell" * 

* While in Berlin he also sent Schumann a contrihntion for the Neue 
Zeitschrift'—in which it did not appear, howeyer— signed with the pseudonym 



K0NIGS6ERG. 213 

His sojourn in the Prussian capital, with its ''philosophic 
pietism,"* its scribbling diplomats k la Vamhagen, and its 
babbling art-critics k la Ludwig Rellstab— about whom he 
remarks to Schumann, ''You would scarcely believe the harm 
this man is doing here "-—could offer him but little of attractive. 
His sole reward was the hearing of a performance of Ferdinand 
Cortez under Spontini's own baton, when he was specially im- 
pressed by the almost military precision of the supers' evolutions : 
the wand of the exacting maestro had here become a marshal's 
staff, a ruler's sceptre. In i860 he refers to this particular 
performance as one of those that had given him an insight 
into "the quite unparalleled effect of certain dramatico-musical 
combinations; an effect of such depth, such inwardness, and 
yet so direct a vividness, as no other art is able to produce" 
(/>»^. HI., 304). 

As for his personal condition, he was penniless and simply 
ticking off the days to entry on the function promised him. 
After two months' waiting in vain, he had to repeat the sour 
experience that not one promise had been squarely meant 
In the worst of circumstances, he put an end to his stay in 
Berlin. 

It was no use going back to Leipzig; so he betook himself 
to Kdnigsberg in Prussia, where the prospect of a musical 
conductorship had opened at the very moment of his grossest 
undeception in Berlin. His fiancee, Minna Planer, was engaged 
at K6nigsberg as actress; this was the magnet that drew him 
to the ultimate North-East of Germany. In that Magdeburg 
New Year's festival, for which he had employed the Andante 
theme of his Symphony in expression alike of the old year's 
leave-taking and his own farewell to his young ideals, it was 
her prepossessing figure that clad the new year on the stage; 
to him she seemed marked out by fate to form the "new 

'* Wilhelm Drach," an anagram of " -chard." This psendonym is of interest, 
since the master used it again, three-and-thirty years later, for his article on 
Eduard Devrient and his Style (1S69). Other of his pseudonyms, "Canto 
Spianato," *' W. Freadenfeuer " and '* H. Valentino," we meet in course of 
the present volume ; whilst Judaism in Music originally appeared above the 
signature " Karl Freigedank " (1850). 

* "What time the whole of Germany lays bare its heart to the musical 
gospel according to Felix Mendelssohn, this ardour has been catered for in 
Berlin by philosophic pietism" {P, W, VII., 143— written in 1841). 



214 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

year" of his private calendar. As there were no enterprising 
theatrical agencies in those days, it was she who had acquainted 
him with the approaching vacancy at K6nigsberg, — ^what more 
natural, than that he should obey her call? The inhospitable 
aspect of his birthplace had forced him from the circle of his 
family ; in any case he saw himself consigned to a foreign port : 
in this East-Prussian Residenz he might hope not only for an 
appointment, but also for the satisfaction of a pressing need. 

At the beginning of August he arrived in the natal city of 
E. T. A. Hoffmann, where Friedrich I. had crowned himself first 
King of Prussia, but still more famous as the whilom residence 
of Kant Unfortunately he soon discovered that the hoped-for 
vacancy would not come off just yet. Hiibsch, himself a capital 
young actor, was then director of the Kdnigsberg theatre; its 
musical conductor was Louis Schuberth, engaged in a similar 
capacity before at Riga, whither he was to have returned this 
autumn. It was upon this that Minna had counted, when she in- 
duced her fianci to leave Berlin. But, as Wagner writes to Dom 
on August 7, " Schuberth no longer seems to have the slightest 
inclination to depart; God knows what chains him— but here 
he stops." In a footnote to this letter Dorn tells us what the 
''chain" was: an interesting affair with a no less interesting 
first-singer at the K5nigsberg theatre, Henriette Grosser, — "a 
star of the first magnitude, invaluable to Opera," as the Allg, 
mus. Ztg. of that year expresses it, but unluckily too prone to 
twinkling with her feet, for "it is said that this very young 
lady is fonder of dancing than of scales and exercises, with 
frequent hoarseness as a consequence." It was all very pleasant 
for Schuberth ; but this sudden change in his intentions had a 
dire effect on the prospects which had tempted Wagner to the 
remotest nook of Germany. Having drawn so near to the 
Russian frontier, it therefore struck him that, as his colleague 
could not possibly lay claim to both appointments, he might 
as well apply for that which Schuberth seemed to have abandoned, 
and aim at Riga if only he could get his bride engaged there 
too. From "Prussian Siberia" he bent his glance still farther 
toward the Northern East, knowing that his old Leipzig fiiend 
and " patron " Heinrich Dom had been a resident in the Lithuanian 
capital for several years. 

After the disestablishment of the Leipzig Court-theatre, Dom 



KdNIGSBERG. 2 1 5 

had made his way through Hamburg to Riga, where he at first 
found occupation at the Opera ; since then, as Town Cantor and 
Conductor, he had been sending Schumann's Zeitschrift roseate 
accounts from time to time of musical festivities — among others, 
of the first general Music-Festival of the Russian Baltic Provinces, 
got up by himself in June. Recalling Dom*s previous courtesy, 
Wagner resolved to beg his friendly offices, in the first place to supply 
him with more intimate particulars of the state of things at Riga. 
"For the last two years," his letter says, ^^l^ ci-devant dreamer 
and Beethovenite — have entered a practical career, and you'd 
be fairly astounded at the radical transformation of my extremist 
views on music. Now fate and love have bundled me to Konigs- 
berg, where I fancied I had solid hopes of an engagement ; and 
the only reason for their probable destruction is that I had 
deceived myself when I believed Herr Sch. would return to Riga 
this autumn." He accordingly inquires if there is a passable 
theatre, including opera, even at this time of year in Riga, and 
whether it would be advisable and to one's credit to take a post 
there. " My betrothed, Fraulein Planer, at present engaged here 
as first juvenile lady, in that case would follow me, as she has 
already had offers from that quarter, which she naturally would 
not accept unless I were engaged there too. How delighted I 
should be, to be able to present her to yourself and your estim- 
able wife, and commend us as a youthful couple to your kind- 
ness." Toward the end of the letter he says, " There are certain 
relations in life which always remain the same. So I certainly 
shall never arrive at another position towards yourself, than that 
of ward and protegd to you my guardian and protector. That 
is obvious enough to me from this first resumption since so 
long." And so it might have continued, at least for awhile, 
as Dorn had the advantage of seniority ; but unhappily events 
soon proved that Wagner was willing enough to maintain the 
relationship, but Dorn was not the man for it. 

He had asked for an answer to be sent poste-restante to the 
little town of Memel on the Kurisches Hafif. Before the opening 
of their regular " season," the Kdnigsberg company had a series 
of comedy and opera performances to give at this out-of-the-way 
extremity of Eastern Prussia; they went there the second week 
of August, Wagner with them, and returned the middle of 
September. Dorn's answer duly arrived ; its report on Riga was 



2l6 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

not encouraging: stage matters there were rather in a fix just 
then ; the Riga theatre was on the point of complete suspension, 
until it could be placed on a firmer basis by a substantial sum to 
be subscribed by local tradesmen. So our hero had to fall back 
on his dubious prospects at K5nigsberg. It was a time of want 
and deprivation, without one break in the clouds. 

However, no matter what the outer pressure, nothing could rob 
him of his ingrained elasticity : if the screw was relaxed but an 
instant, he came up smiling once again. Only, his creative 
impulse suffered sorely; this enforced leisure was not of that 
agreeable kind which allows a man to muster all his forces for a 
major task. Yet his restless brain was full of projects, and he set 
about attempting to start connections far and wide. With his 
sense of strength and faculty, what binding reason was there for 
his dooming himself to moulder away in small provincial German 
theatres? Was there not a larger, freer world outside? "One 
strong desire arose in me, and grew into an all-K:onsuming 
passion: to force my way out from the paltry squalor of my 
situation. This desire, however, was busied only in the second 
line with Life ; its front rank made towards a brilliant course as 
Artist. To vault the petty circuit of the German stage, and 
straightway try my luck in Paris, — this, in the end, was the goal I 
set before me" {P, W, L, 297). The glamour of Paris, the only 
actual sovereign of dramatic music and literature, the pattern 
which the largest German theatres all toiled to copy with the 
utmost cost and slavish exactitude in every possible detail of 
scenery, machinery and costume, — ^at the present stage of his 
development it exercised on him the greatest power of attraction. 
The tempting thought sprang up in him, to throw off the incubus 
at one thrust, break through the fetters of this cramping German 
hole-and-comerism, and make a dash for the arena of bold artistic 
triumphs. 

Always abreast of contemporary literature, about this time he 
fell in with Heinrich Kdnig's recent novel Die hoht Braut " All 
that I read had but one interest for me, namely its adaptability 
for an opera : in the mood I then was in, that reading conjured 
up before my eyes the vision of a grand five-act opera for Paris " 
(idid.). He drafted a full sketch at once, complete in every point 
save versification ; and off it went " in passable French transla- 
tion " to Scribe the world-renowned librettbt of the Huguenots — 



KONIGSBERG. 2 1 7 

which had taken Paris by stoim that selfsame year,* and already 
run through forty representations to the comforting tune of three- 
hundred thousand francs. In a letter of enclosure he proposed 
that Scribe, if the subject pleased him, should undergo the trifling 
pains of versifying it, or otherwise, as he deemed best : " In that 
case " — as he writes to August Lewald two years later — " I would 
have composed the opera, and left him to bring it out in Paris 
under his authority and with his name as poet The profits to 
accrue from the affair, so far as he wished to avail himself of 
them, I naturally should have placed at his disposal ; the least a 
nameless German composer could do in the circumstances." To 
make sure of the sketch and letter reaching their destination, he 
sent both to his brother-in-law Friedrich Brockhaus, who had 
continual business relations with Paris, for further expedition. 

Meanwhile the wretched state of his finances could not prevent 
his taking the fatal plunge into matrimony. On the 24th of 
November 1836, in the Tragheimer Church at Kfinigsberg, 
Wilhelm Richard Wagner married Christine Wilhdmine Planer, 
one year his junior, third daughter of a Dresden *'mechanicus" 
Gotthilf Planer. According to the present incumbent. Minister 
von Behr, the entry in the register was made by Minister Johann 
Friedrich Hapsel (?), who thus would appear to have officiated at 
the ceremony. This entry states that the sponsus was bom on 
the 22nd of May 1813, and has a mother still living in Dresden ; 
the sponsa has the sanction of her parents, under date the 27th 
October, Dresden, witnessed by Orphanage-n^inister Meinert; 
whilst the banns published at Magdeburg Nov. 6 are also laid ad 
acta. 

It is easy to understand the motives that influenced Richard 
Wagner not to postpone this critical event to at least a more 
propitious season. In the desolation of Kdnigsberg, with his out- 
look on the world so dreary, he determined to compel, as it were, 
the domestic ease he needed for artistic productivity. But the 
link was now forged that bound his future to a helpmate with 
whom he had the smallest possible community of inner feeling. 
Beyond doubt, he brought her that genuine affection which sur- 
vived the hardest trials it ever was put to; beyond doubt the 
pretty, young and popular actress meant well by the ardent young 
conductor when she joined her hand with his at a time of so little 
* With Nourrit, Levasseur and DUe. Falcon in the principal rdles. 



2l8 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

outward prospect; beyond doubt, she expected much from his 
abilities. Merely, due in part to the great confusion of his cir- 
cumstances, the picture she formed of his future had bo higher 
light in it than an honourable appointment with good pay. What 
was stirring in Richard's breast, and in the sequel often caused 
him recklessly to break with outward profit in pursuit of higher 
ends, in hers met nothing but an irremediable and inconciliable 
misunderstanding. Any profounder sense of the enormous artistic 
significance of her husband never dawned upon her, either in this 
cloudy period or at a later date ; and though she made him loving 
sacrifices, she neither had the blissful satisfaction of knowing to 
whom they were offered, nor of affording the stru^ling artist a 
sympathetic ear in which to pour his deeper woe^. Wagner never 
forgot how she bore the trials of the next few changeful years 
without a murmur ; nevertheless this precipitate marriage of two 
natures so immiscible dragged after it an almost endless chain of 
sorrows and internal conflicts. 

The immediate result of settling down into a '' poverty-stricken 
home" ¥ras a fight for bare existence; all higher aims were 
silenced for awhile. " The year I passed at K6nigsberg was com- 
pletely lost to my art through the pettiest cares. I wrote one 
solitary overture : Rule BritanniaJ^ This does not represent the 
whole of Wagner's energy, however, for he appears to have taken 
refuge in various literary and poetic drafts. Of the latter we have 
already mentioned Die hohe Braut\ there was another, a comic 
pendant, reminding us of the twin birth of Lohengrin and Die 
Meisiersinger^ — namely the sketch for a Bdrenfamiliey which we 
shall meet again at Riga. Of the minor literary works, several 
occasional notes have come down to us, among them a longish 
essay on Dramatic Song^ which stands in close relationship to the 
article on German Opera and the Pasticcio of 1834. This essay, 
whose autograph is at present in the possession of an unknown 
collector, has been reproduced in the Allg. Mus, Ztg. of 1888 
(page 98), b^inning as under : — 

'< So much nonsense is cackled by us Germans about singing, 
as in itself to prove how little the divine true gift of Song has 
been conferred on us in general People always speak most of 
what they have not got ; and, instead of learning to recognise our 
deficiency, we trot out our prattling philosophy to cheat us into 
passing off our ignorance for the only saving grace. But thaf s a 



K0NIGS6ERG. 219 

misfortune for us. Why will we Germans not realise that we 
haven't everything ? Why don't we acknowledge freely and openly 
that the Italian in his song, the Frenchman in his lighter and 
livelier treatment of operatic music, have an advantage over the 
German ? Can he not set against all this his deeper science, his 
more thorough cultivation, and especially his happy faculty of 
easily appropriating both advantages of the French and Italian, 
whereas' they never will attain our own ? — A fortunate constitution 
makes the Italian a born singer, and that not only in respect of a 
beautiful voice, — which ts bestowed upon us Germans now and 
then, — ^but also of that natural flexibility and power of moderating 
into loud or low, which to us are total strangers. Now these are 
advantages we must first acquire, and, as so many examples incul- 
cate, we also can acquire. That demands study, and in view of 
our national virtue of diligence and perseverance, it is astonishing 
and annoying to hear that such a study is unnecessary, that we 
ought to be able to do everything by sheer stress of emotion.*^ 
Here we have the theme to be worked out In its elaboration 
Schrdder-Devrient is taken as example of the consequences of 
giving way to emotion in excess of the physical strength. In the 
days of her youth this great singer had come near to losing her 
voice entirely, through allowing emotion free rein. She was on 
the point of forsaking Opera, when she turned over a new leaf: 
at the Italian Opera in Paris she learnt the benefit of proper 
singing, made it her own, and in virtue thereof now stood at the 
height of her power. "Go witness her Fidelio, her Euryanthe, 
her Norma, her Romeo ; you would think she must be tired to 
death after such a display, — and honestly, she herself declares 
that in earlier years exhaustion seized her every time, whereas she 
now could easily go through a part like these twice over in one 
evening," etc., etc. 

Another Konigsbetg article is devoted to the first local perform- 
ance of Norma. It covers three folio pages, embracing 169 long 
lines, and begins with the words : " Wednesday the 8th of March. 
For the first time : Norma by Bellini. In this opera Bellini has 
decidedly soared to the full height of his talent," etc. It is not 
clear on the face of it, why Wagner wrote at all about this incident ; 
quite certainly it had nothing to do with a performance for his own 
benefit, as afterwards at Riga. Perhaps it was simply out of polite- 
ness, or in the general interest of the Kanigsberg theatre, which 



220 



LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



was so much affected by the indifference of the public that the 
very latest novelties of French and Italian Opera, Halevy's Juive^ 
Bellini's Puritanic and this same Norma^ passed across its stage 
unheeded. 

To return to the practical side : to provide himself with means 
of sustenance, also to win the good-will of the Kdnigsberg public, 
Wagner conducted orchestral concerts in the theatre's crush-room, 
at one of which his new overture Rule Britannia was played. 
"The simple decorations of the room," writes J. Feski — pseudonym 
for Sobolewski — " together with the dim half-light, lend the strains 
of these concerts quite a mysterious charm, which the uninitiated 
take for irregular progressions. Further, it is the only place where 
young composers can bring their new-fledged works at once to 
hearing without risk. Thus we have heard this year an overture 
by Servais, and one by Musikdirektor Wagner." The reporter 
says nothing of the work itself, but remarks on the rendering : 
" Herr Musikdirektor Wagner directed the whole with imposing 
dignity, and guarded against the fault with which Herr Theater- 
musikdirektor Schuberth is taxed, that of conducting with both 
arms, by keeping one perpetually Orkimbo^^ (Neue Zeitschrift^ March 

1837). 

On the spare pages of a fragmentary sketch of this Rule 
Britannia overture there is a remarkable jotting of a wild scene 
of sacrificial incantation, evidently for some play performed at 
the time in Kdnigsberg. Such a destination is proved by the 
< cues' strewn here and there, and the names of old Prusso- 
Lithuanian deities invoked. It bears the superscription ^^Marcia 
moderator and b^ns with a strongly rhythmic and trenchantly- 
instrumented Introduction of 24 bars : 

TmmpeU 



jj ^ ^ i U Til Tr ^ 

Trombonts r 



^^iFt=--=t= '{ l lJif-14414^ 



=5 

The instrumental prelude closes with three mighty thuds on the 
big drum, followed by a like number of long-held notes for the 
trombones. Then the priests begin their chant : 



kOnigsberg. 



221 



- Hort der Gotter Spruch I Filhlet ihren Fluch ! 
Auf blut'gem Throne herrscht Pikullos, 
die Feuerkrone tiifgt Perkunos, 
doch GlUck zttm Lohne schenkt Potrimpos. 

The unison of the Priests is pointed by occasional chords Yor 
the brass : 



^^ 



^ 



-h^ 



^ 




£fi 



3^3 



Auf blot' - gem Thro - ne hemcht Pi • kallos. 



m 



-€° M t 



die etc 



Then comes a " Chorus of Youths " : 

Perkunos I Perkunos ! Nimm auf blutigem Altar unser Opfer gnlidig wahr 1 
Leih' uns Deiner Schrecken Macht, sUlrke uns in wilder Schlacht t 

The incantation-melody distinctly forebodes the sombre Ring- 
motive of the later world-tragedy, also the Question-forbiddal in 
Lohengrin : 



L^ f ^ \ i^m=^ ^m 



s 



blu - li-i 



Nimm auf blu - ti-gemAl - tar nn • ser Op • fergnfi*dig wahrt 

A "Chorus of Virgins" takes up the same melodic phrase 
in F: 

Potrimpos ! Potrimpos I Nimm auf deinem Weihaltar unsers Opfers gnftdig 

wahr ! 
Sende Deines Segens Macht, strahle Licht in unsre Nacht ! 

whereupon all the voices combine, in canon, for the sacrificial 
hymn: 

Fttr die Opfer, die wir bringen, steht mit eurer Macht uns bei, 
dass im Kampfe wir bezwingen Feindes Macht und Tyrannei ! 
TutH 



FOr die Op • fer, die wir brin - gen 



m 



«: 



f i rrr^i^ Trt^ ^ 



V 



FOr die Op • let, die wir brin • gen, steht mit 



222 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

and after a dialogue, merely indicated by the *cue,' we have a 
Chorus of Priests : 

Die Flamme spriiht, der Holzstoss gltlht 1 
Perkunos, Blutgott, gieb ein Zeichen, 
Wer dir als Opfer soil erbldchen ! 

Manifestly it is the sketch of a musical inset for a play 
representing the first struggles of Christianity with old-Prussian 
paganism and the bloody ritual of its human sacrifices, and the 
Druidic rites of Norma may have inspired Wagner with it. We 
are reminded of Werner's Kreuz an der Ostsee^ with its three huge 
idols beneath the hoary oak of King Waidemuthis ; but no further 
light has as yet been elicited from the imperfect records of 
theatrical doings at Kdnigsberg * The only thing certain, is 
that when Schuberth at last went away, in March or April 1837, 
Wagner stepped into his empty shoes, and had experience of 
another theatre threatened with bankruptcy through insufficient 
interest of the public. We have ah-eady seen that the Juive^ 
Puritani and Norma^ were impotent to rouse attention: the 
spoken Play " fared worse than ever, this winter . . . only Dem. 
Planer and Mme. Schmidt succeeding at times in fanning the 
chilly audience to a little fiame " (A. Woltersdorf, " Geschichte 
des Kdnigsberger Theaters v. 1744-1855," TheatralischeSy Berlin 
1856). 

Considering the shaky condition of the K6nigsberg stage, it 
was all the more urgent for Wagner to pick up the strands already 
spun. Scribe, to whom he had sent the sketch of his Hohe 
Braut^ had so far made no answer; but that did not deter the 
youthful author — it needed more than that, to cause him to 
abandon hope. With the idea of a Paris success firmly fixed 
in his brain, for awhile he entertained the notion of sending 
the score of his Liebcsvtrbot direct to the entrepreneur of the 
Op^ra Comique: the man was to get the music and text 
examined by "Auber and God knows whom"; if both were 
to his liking, would he kindly have French words fitted to the 
music by some Parisian playwright or other? However, he gave 
up that idea for Scribe. Having waited in vain through half a 

♦ The melodic fragments reproduced above were first made public by W. 
Tappert in his article " Perkunos- Lohengrin '* in the Musikalisches Wbchenblatt 
of 18871 pp. 414- 1 5* As to the three old divinities, see Henri WissendorfF's 
Notes sur la MythohgU dts Lataviem, Paris 1893. 



KONIGSBERG. 223 

year for a reply, he wrote again to that potentate soon after 
entering on his conductorship at K6nigsberg. Taking on him- 
self the blame for the other's silence, he said he could well 
imagine Scribe's perplexity in the absence of any clue to his 
correspondent's ability as composer. To repair that oversight, 
he accompanied his letter this time by the score of Das JJebes- 
verbot^ begging the Parisian to obtain the opinion of Auber and 
Meyerbeer upon it. In case that were favourable, he now offered 
him this opera also, on the same terms as the draft of the Ho?u 
Braut before: he could easily have a rough translation made 
from the present text, and turn it into a Scribian operatic subject 
at his own good pleasure, then offer it to the Op^ra Comique. — 
There also exists the draft of a letter to Meyerbeer of this same 
K6nigsberg period. Very possibly, Wagner addressed himself 
likewise to this man of influence, to woo that influence for his 
affair; possibly, on the other hand, it got no farther than the 
draft. In either case, it is folly to compare this letter to a 
perfect stranger with the writer's published utterances of later 
years ; at that time he knew still less of the Prince of Opera, 
his ways and aims, or even his music, than of his own consuming 
fire. 

But he did not confine himself to foreign schemes : from the 
solitude of his East-Prussian retreat he cast fond eyes on native 
central Germany. At that time August Lewald was editing that 
popular and widely-circulated quarterly, Europa, and its outward 
get-up was really something superior, with frequent art-supple- 
ments and so forth. Wagner introduced himself to him from 
K6nigsberg, and offered him the Carnival-song from his Liebes- 
verbot as a musical garnish. He had the delight, not only of 
seeing his composition accepted and used according to desire, 
but also of finding his interests advocated in a kindlier manner 
than had happened to him for many a day. Lewald accompanied 
the publication with a remark that the " Carnevalslied by Herr 
Wagner, Musikdirektor in K6nigsberg i. Pr." was from an opera 
which the author had sent to Paris, to have it translated by 
Scribe into French and produced on the stage there. " He has 
made over to Herr Scribe," so Lewald continues, "all the author's- 
rights in the text j which is the main consideration, as otherwise 
intrigues of all kinds are to be expected from French authors 
who see their perquisites endangered by the inroad of foreigners. 



224 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

As soon as I hear the result of the steps commenced by my 
young friend, I will communicate the same to the public.'' 
That was promising enough, for a mere statement of facts; 
but better was to come, a word of warm encouragement to the 
young dramatic musician at grips with the German stage-system : 
" If the state of things in Germany does not alter ; if it is to 
continue to be almost harder for the talented composer to 
manoeuvre his work on to the smallest local theatre in Germany, 
than into Paris itself; if the German stage-authorities are to go 
on frowning down the good and deserving that still crops up 
from here and there, whilst theatric criticism is left to the 
ignorant as a shameful trade, — the only way for young aspirants 
is to appeal to Abroad. I make this observation quite apart 
from the case in point, the result of which I cannot venture 
to forecast" {Euro/a^ Chronik der gebildeten Welt^ 1837, XL p. 
240). 

Meantime the inevitable collapse of the K5nigsberg theatre 
was fast approaching, on the one hand; on the other, "my 
household troubles increased," as Wagner remarks in his only 
hint of a doubly trying situation. As before at Magdeburg, the 
declared bankruptcy of the management put a sudden end to 
his brief term of conducting. 

Among his K6nigsberg "art-colleagues " he had scarcely formed 
one friendship. In one of his letters he does make mention of 
the eventual composer of Comalay £. Sobolewski, as an accom- 
plished pianist who was about to play him Schumann's Sonata 
in F sharp minor (op. 11), which had only just appeared. But that 
gentleman came neither then nor later to any serious understand- 
ing of the artistic personality and aims of Wagner, as is proved 
pretty plainly by some of his brochures published in the fifties.* 

Presently we find Schumann's K6nigsberg correspondent, M. 
Hahnbiichn, reporting with regret that "Herr Musikdirektor 

* Oper^ nicht Drania^ Bremen 1857 ; Das Gekeimniss der neuesten Schule 
der Musik^ Leipzig 1859, — the latter containing but little "mysterious." 
Eduaid Sobolewski was an able conductor, composer, and pianoforte-teacher, 
but totally incapable of entering into that secret of all art which Wagner deals 
with in his Letter on Liszfs Sympkanu Poems : " This secret is the essence of 
the Individuality and its way of looking at things, which would forever remain 
a mystery to us, did it not reveal itself in the gifted individual's artworks . . . 
and whoso would expatiate thereon, must have taken very little of it up, as 
one certainly can blab no secrets save those one has not understood." The 



KONIGSBERG. 225 

Wagner, who came in place of L. Schuberth, has already left us ; 
for domestic reasons, it is said. He remained too short a time 
here, to be able to display his talent on many sides. His com- 
positions, of which I have heard one overture and seen another, 
shew originality of productive power. . . . Many men are clear 
at once, alike in character and in their works ; others have first 
to work their way through a chaos of passions. To be sure, the 
latter reach higher results." 

In the early summer of 1837 Wagner set out, vii Berlin, for 
Dresden.* There a reading of Barmann's translation of Bulwer's 
"Rienzi" revived an idea he long had cherished, that of making 
the Last of the Tribunes the hero of a grand tragic opera. " My 
impatience of a degrading plight now mounted to a passionate 
craving to begin something grand and elevating, no matter if it 
involved the temporary abandonment of any practical goal. This 
mood was fed and strengthened by a reading of Bulwer's ' Rienzi.' 
From the misery of modem private life, whence I could no-how 
glean the scantiest material for artistic treatment, I was wafted 
by the image of a great historico-political event, in the enjoyment 
whereof I needs must find a distraction lifting me above cares 
and conditions that to me appeared nothing less than absolutely 
fatal to art" (P.fV. I. 298). Those who can read between the 
lines, will recognise the value of thus being wafted from his 
private worries to a broader field ; but something must also be 
allowed, as the master himself says, for the lyric element in his 
new hero's atmosphere, the Messengers of Peace, the Church's 
Call, the Battle-hymns, considering that his evolution had not yet 
passed the standpoint of purely musical Opera. " Objectionable 
outward relations," it is true, interfered with his engaging in any 
creative work for the moment; but the effect of the stimulus 
remained, though latent 

London Musical World of 1855 printed with malidous purpose a series of 
<* Reactionary Letters," directed against Wagner and the supposed "new 
school," translated from Sobolewski's contemporary contributions to the 
Ostprmssische Zeitung of Konigsberg. 

* From a recently published letter (dated Dresden, June 12, 1837) to 
Louis Schindelmeisser — whom we may remember from the old Leipzig days, 
— ^it appears that Wagner was not accompanied by hi^ newly-wedded wife, 
but stayed en gar^on for a few weeks at Dresden with his sister Ottilie and 
her husband Hermann Brockhaus. Minna rejoined him at Riga in October. — 
W. A.E. 

P 



226 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Among the contemporary performances at the Dresden Court- 
theatre there was one in particular that impressed him, that of 
Hal^v/s Jutve^ in German styled Die Judin. "A certain dread 
sublimity, transfigured by a breath of elegy, is a characteristic 
trait in Hal^vy's better, his heart-derived productions," he writes 
a few years later, and assigns the tragic power of the book as the 
reason why the composer's music here attains a height unsealed 
by him again.* The excellent manner in which Choir-director 
Wilhelm Fischer had trained the chorus evoked his highest 
admiration, and we find him referring to it in 1841, after he had 
heard the opera again in Paris, giving the Dresden chorus his 
preference over the Parisian.! He also saw a Warriors' dance in 
/essonda performed in capital style by soldiers from the Dresden 
garrison, and cited it thereafter as model for the military dances 
in Menzt.X It is a strange coincidence that this wellnigh accidental 
visit to his childhood's home should have had so much to do with 
the birth of an opera that was not to see the footlights until its 
author had returned there after five years spent beyond the 
frontiers of his native land. 

In June, during this visit to Dresden, he received a circum- 
stantial letter from Scribe, which would appear to have exonerated 
the famous librettist from any charge of former incivility : he had 
never received Wagner's first letter with the draft of Die hake 
Brauty thanked him most politely for the score despatched, begged 
for preciser information as to his desires, and promised to do 
whatever lay in his power. That was something worth hearing, 
and the young master hastened to write him anew from Dresden, 
accompanying this third letter with a spare copy of the lost 
operatic draft. He committed both to the Dresden post, "for 
security's sake unfranked," — and looked forward with no little 
elation to further developments. 



* I remember how, in the summer of 1878, the master suddenly stopped in 
the middle of a lively harangue on the peculiar merits of Hal^vy's music, to 
take the pianoforte-score of La Juive from his library-shelf and play a few 
extracts from it on the piano by way of illustration. — C. F. G. 

t See Letters i and 3 to Fischer in the LeHers to UkHg etc, : "I keep 
coming back to Die Judin, for that is the only opera which I distinctly 
remember at Dresden. I saw it in the summer of 1837, ^^'^ confess that I 
found the by no means inconsiderable ballet anything but bad, whether as 
regards arrangement or execution." 

X Ihidem^ p. 323. 



VI. 

RIGA. 

First impressions. — Dom^ Lobmann^ Karl von Holtei. — 
Wagner's endeavours to obtain good performances, — Amalie 
Planer.— National hymn '' Nikolai:'— Bellini's ''Norma,'' and 
reflections thereon. — Removal to the suburbs. — Concert in the 
Schwartzhdupter Haus. — " Comedians' ways.'^ — Longing to escape 
from narrow bounds. 

Before I proceeded to carry out my plan of ^^Riatti:* 
much occurred in my outer life to distract me from my 
inner purpose. 

Richard Wagner. 

Wagner's wish, expressed to Dorn a year ago, was now to be 
fulfilled in somewhat altered circumstances. Through Louis 
Schindelmeisser in Berlin, he entered into correspondence with 
Karl von Holtei, who was just forming a new stage-company for 
Riga. Holtei offered him the post of chief musical conductor, 
on terms to which we shall shortly return, and he made no delay 
in accepting it. 

About the middle of August 1837, after a sea-voyage lasting 
several days, he sailed into the estuary of the Diina, or Dwina, 
along whose shore loomed high the towers of that ancient 
Hanseatic town to whose keen public spirit Herder once had owed 
the origin of his own peculiar views on Citizen and State.* Forty 
years afterwards Wagner still retained a vivid recollection of the 
aspect of the town as then he saw it, especially recalling the old 
floating-bridge across the Dwina. On one side of the bridge lay 

* On a journey to Moscow in 1654 Paul Fleming had confessed to the 
Gennan muses, in a sonnet dedicated to a ** Hen Dr Hovel in Riga," his 
injustice in having theretofore confined their kingdom to the limits of the 
Rhine, the Danube and the Elbe, and not embraced the Dwina with its lovely 
dty. 

•«7 



228 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

towering English merchantmen, a forest of gay pennants, with an 
undergrowth contributed by every Baltic port ; on the other the 
Russian so-called Strusen, broad nondescript rafts of rough logs 
with primitive tents on them, laden with flax, com and wood, 
slowly navigated to this Baltic mart from all parts of Lithuania, 
Poland and Russia: between the two the "factor." Nowhere 
had the soul of Commerce been set so vividly before him, as in 
this jostling of the opposites of East and West 

The first thing to which he had to accustom himself upon 
arrival in his new surroundings, was the dating of his life twelve 
whole days back; a doubtful loan, which liie borrower had 
infallibly to refund on re-crossing the Russian frontier. In his 
Parisian Amusements he alludes to the bewilderment he had 
suffered from this Old-style calendar. By the Julian computation 
— in force in Russia to this day — he was only at the beginning of 
August, with nearly a month before the opening of the theatre on 
the first of September. 

One portion of the Riga company had taken the journey with 
him ; another he found already there ; still other members trickled 
in during the next few days or weeks. His first calls were made on 
Director Holtei and his old acquaintance Dorn ; his next on the 
worthy assistant-conductor, Franz L5bmann, who welcomed him 
with effusion and remained his faithful friend till death removed 
him in 1878. When signing the contract in Berlin, Holtei had 
prepared Wagner for the engagement of a deputy : upon L6bmann 
would devolve the rehearsing and conducting of minor operas 
and vaudevilles, which had hitherto fallen to the first violin ; the 
salary paid this new creation was assigned by Holtei as reason for 
his inability to give Wagner any more than eighi-hundred roubles 
a year instead of the regulation thousand of a Riga Kapellmeister. 
Of course it was all " in the higher interest of art," and the young 
master's scarcely swelling purse had to make the best of this 
reduction in so high a cause. He was used to it ; those selfsame 
'* interests of art " which to other servants of the Theatre become a 
pleasant source of private comfort, somehow always took the form 
with him of a deduction from wages, or similar sacrifice devised 
for him alone. 

Never mind : in this instance he was secured not only a reliable 
assistant in the control of the orchestra for the whole duration of 
his stay in Riga, but also an amiable, sincerely attached, and un- 



RIGA* 229 

assuming friend. As in the sequel it supported him with every 
kind of practical service, L5bmann's ingrained obligingness came 
at once to the newcomer's rescue to discover him a decent lodging. 
The old Riga theatre, its interior just reconstructed and sumptu- 
ously adorned by the Society of Recreation, stood in what was 
formerly the VietinghofT House in the KOnigsstrasse, and so 
continued until 1863; the theatre-bureau and box-office was at 
apothecary Kirchhoff's house. No. 139 in the narrow Schmiede- 
strasse. Between the two, only a few minutes' walk from the 
theatre, lay Wagner's first Riga abode, the Thau House — likewise 
in the Schmiedestrasse, but since pulled down— opposite the 
mouth of the Johanniskirchengasse. Gloomy and uninviting it 
was, looking on a courtyard long memorable to the master for its 
constant reek of schnaps and other ardent spirits. 

His new Director is thus characterised by Wagner in after years : 
" Karl von Holtei sought the mimetic spirit in its native wilds, 
and shewed in that a spark of genius. He made no bones about 
confessing that he could do nothing with a 'solid' company, 
saying that since the theatre had been run in the grooves of social 
respectability it had lost its own true tendency, which he should 
soonest hope to restore, even yet, with a troop of strolling players. 
To this opinion the anything but witless man adhered." He 
never had one of the larger theatres to control, nor did he exercise 
any decisive influence on German dramatic art ; a love of wander- 
ing drove him forth from town to town, from nook to nook, for 
the most part as reciter, and his brief tenure of the Riga theatre 
was itself the most important of his spells ot management. Prior 
to this he had been secretary, playwright and regisseur to the 
K6nigsstadter theatre in Berlin, where he composed the most 
popular of his Liederspiele (a kind of Vaudeville), in which he 
played his own creations with undoubted originality, — since then, 
in fact, he played no others. He had been thinking of starting a 
theatre of his own in Berlin, expressly for the genre he practised, 
when he received the invitation to come to Riga and control the 
burghers' renovated house. At Easter of 1837 he had settled his 
contract with the theatre-committee on the spot, local magnates 
having voluntarily guaranteed the sum of fifkeen-thousand roubles 
to insure the venture. The next few months were spent by Holtei 
in Berlin, as a centre for making the necessary engagements. 
Returning to Riga in the second half of July, he paved the way 



230 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

for his season by ingratiating himself with the well-to-do in* 
habitants, who gathered every summer evening in W6hrmann's 
Park, a fashionable public garden outside the ramparts. ^'Oh 1 
IVe brought some ladies of quite criminal beauty with me," be 
would whisper in allusion to the sisters Reithmeier ; for the sly 
dog knew his hearers' weakness, and fancied that a better bait 
than high-faluting. For all that, he had not n^lected weightier 
matters, and shewed such a striking talent for organisation that 
everything bade fair to start and go on well. 

After Wagner's mournful experiences at Magdeburg and K6nigs- 
berg, it was consoling to find his new employer intent on good 
performances at least. This was markedly the case with the 
spoken Play, which came out on the third evening with a repre- 
sentation of King Lear that set the whole town talking.* A 
similar success with the opening of the Opera was balked by the 
prima donna's breach of contract, which caused a grievous gap 
for some time to come. Holtei made public declaration: "Our 
operatic company is of full strength, and composed of individuals 
who would do credit to the largest stage ; orchestra and chorus, 
under the best command, are equal to the very hardest tasks. Our 
fifth performance was to have been a grand opera \ everything had 
been carefully prepared, and nothing but the unpardonable delay 
of Mme. Ernst, who puts me off from week to week with flattering 
promises, is accountable for our having to throw it over and 
suddenly take up with something else." Under these circum- 
stances the operatic season was opened on Wednesday the first 
(13th) of September, at 6 o'clock, with K. Blum's one-act singspiel 
Mary^ Max und Michel^ conducted *for this occasion only' by 
Richard Wagner. A report on this first performance says : " An 
eager throng filled the theatre betimes. The slender pillars of 
cast-iron gave the house an air of grace and lightness, while the 
bright-hued walb and balconies, the lavish gilding, ample illumina- 
tion — in a word, the harmony of the whole, set the spectator at 
once in a good humour that even the Bengal heat could not dis- 
turb. . . ." For ''Sergeant Max," the basso Giinther, Wagner had 



* The title-rdle was safe in the hands of that talented actor and stage- 
manager Alois Bosaid, who on one occasion (Nov. 18, 1837), owing to 
indisposition of the actor cast for Karl Moor, played the parts of both the 
brothers Karl and Franz in Schiller's RMers at a moment's notice, to the 
general satisfaction. 



RIGA. 231 

expressly composed a Romance in G, to words of Holtei's, ''Sanfte 
Wehmuth will sich regen in des Mannes fester Brust " ; alike at 
this performance, and at a repetition on Sunday the fifth, it was 
received with great applause.* 

Touching this contretemps with the prima donna, there is a 
letter of Sept 17, 1837, to Louis Schindelmeisser in which 
Wagner says: "What chance had I of writing you about our 
Opera before? We have only just got one: Norma had been 
prepared, and Madame Norma-Emst never came. — ^What was to 
be done? Everything had to be turned topsy-turvy— all the stock 
operas presented difficulties— here parts were missing, there a 
couple hadn't yet been got up. — At last we opened Opera with 
the Weisse Dame [Dame Blanche]. Na ! it went well — folk seem 
to have been even enraptured. Everyone was called." It was 
not till the middle of October, by which time the bravura lady 
had definitely renounced, that a temporary substitute was found 
in the person of Minna Wagner's younger sister, Liddy Amalie 
Planer, who arrived from Hanover. Her beautiful voice, el^ant 
stage-presence and general utility, soon won her universal popu- 
larity; she remained in the Riga company for two whole years, — 
in fact until her marriage with Adjutant and Lieutenant of the 
Guards Carl Johann Gustav von Meck.t She undertook the prima 
donna parts awhile, making a very successful first appearance on 
October the 25th as "Romeo" in Bellini's Montechi e CapuUH\ 
the tempi in which work, especially of the overture, are said to 
have been taken pretty fast by Wagner : " Brisk there ; liven up ; 
just a wee bit brisker ! " were his pet apostrophes to the orchestra, 
and never failed of their effect. 

Down to Amalie's arrival the repertory had been restricted to 
the Dame Blanche^ Frdsckutz and Zampa. Now the conductor 



* Embracmg three closely-written folio pages, the manuscript of this 
Romance bears the date ''Riga, 19 Angust" (t.e. August 31, 1837), con- 
sequently was composed a fortnight before the representation. For a time it 
remained in the master's possession, being mentioned as late as March 1855 "^ 
a letter to W. Fischer (Letters to Vklig^ ^r.), where Wagner asks for it and 
other papers to be sent him to London ; afterwards it fell into the maw of the 
autograph-hunter, where, so far as we can ascertain, it now is hopelessly 
submerged. 

t See M. Rudolph's Rigaer Theater- und Tenkiinstlerlexikan, s.v. "Amalie 
Planer." As to her first appearance here, see the " Dramaturgic Supplement " 
of the Riga ZuscJUuter, Nov. 1837. 



232 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

<could embark on something more ambitious, though struggling 
at first with many a drawback, particularly in the orchestra. In 
that letter of September last-quoted he says : ''The gentlemen of 
the chorus were somewhat spoilt by too much acting comedy — 
for the rest, good voices. The orchestra will get on by-and-by 
— most of the new engagements are good, the old hands far 
less so. Horn-players splendid — ^wood ditto. Ensemble rather 
faulty; but will improve, I hope." The Riga orchestra then 
consisted of 22 to 24 bandsmen: two first and two second 
violins, who were willingly joined by Assistant-conductor (also 
Konzertmeister) L6bmann whenever Wagner thought needful, 
and could be increased to six in all if fortune favoured; two 
violas, one violoncello (v. Lutzau), one double bass; flutes, 
oboes, clarinets and bassoons, two apiece; two horns, two 
trumpets, and a trombone whose attention was also paid to 
the bassoon. For grander operas, such as the Siumme van 
Fartici^ Si^ert's military band was drawn upon; but only after 
a dispute with Holtei every time, and then the area was too 
small to hold it. 

Holtei's horizon, to tell the truth, was bounded by easy Vau- 
deville and spoken Play, and almost jealously shut out the 
interests of Grand Opera; there accordingly arose full many 
a conflict, of which the public had no notion, but that often 
made the conductor's feeling of responsibility a bitter one. This 
may be traced in Holtei's own remarks about his association with 
Wagner : '' He plagued my people with interminable rehearsals ; 
nothing was right in his eyes, nothing good enough, nothing finely 
enough shaded. There was complaint after complaint ; bandsmen 
and singers kept coming to me, to pour out their grievances. In 
my heart I could but side with Wagner, but I really was in no 
position to let him act just how he pleased, — he'd have positively 
killed my singers." Apart from obvious exaggeration, these utter- 
ances of the year 1858 most certainly take a different standpoint 
from that whence Holtei formerly opposed the just requirements 
of his Kapellmeister; the contumacy of fatuous heroes of the 
wings only too often found support in him against the lawful 
orders of their immediate chief. With one of these, the black- 
smith tenor K6hler, owner of a fine voice but atrocious manners, 
the young master had gone through the part of Tybalt at the 
pianoforte and on the boards any number of times, only to find 



RIGA. 233 

him again ruining the performance of Bellini's opera on October 29 
by false notes and shameful bawling. Immediately the act-drop 
had fisdlen, Wagner ascended the stage to read the incorrigible 
wretch a lecture, but was simply heaped with coarse abuse. He 
at once handed the baton to Ldbmann, and conducted no more 
that night. Even that might have had no effect upon Director 
Holtei; but this time the company to a man took the part of 
their Kapellmeister, and after the next performance (Nov. 3) 
the Press itself seized the opportunity of recommending to the 
singer of Tybalt "better observance of the instructions of a 
mentor at once so versed in his art, so patient and kindly, as 
Mnsikdirektor Wagner."* 

As regards his official work this autumn and winter of 1837, 
we may further note a most carefully rehearsed performance of 
Don Giovanni on November the fifth, with a special prologue 
by Holtei, to celebrate the jubilee of that masterpiece's first 
production at Prague. Don Juan was sung by barytone Albert 
Wrede, of handsome exterior and strong young voice, but scant 
musical ability and training; Leporello, by Karl Giinther, a 
general favourite for his mellow bass, and especially admired 
in this buffo rdle and that of Figaro ; t Donna Anna by Dem. 
Julie Reithmeier, and Donna Elvira by Amalie Planer. For the 
coronation-festival of Tsar Nicholas our musician composed a 
National Hymn to words by Harald v. Brackel, which was 
successfully repeated on ceremonial occasions such as the Im- 
perial birth- or name-day, but vanished into limbo after Wagner's 
departurcf November 30 the Stumme von Portici was given for 
the benefit of Herr and Frau K6hler; whilst on Sunday the nth 
of December fell "Herr Kapelhneister Wagner's benefit," for which 
he had chosen a first performance of Bellini's Norma. 

On such occasions it was the custom to issue a captatio benevo- 
kntia emphasising, as will be understood, rather the merits than 

* *' Dramaturgische Blatter" by H. v. Brackel, a supplement to the Riga 
ZuschoMier, Nov. 1837. 

+ Struck by hb histrionic talent, Immermann had tried to persuade him, at 
Dttsseldorf, to abandon Opera for the Play. In 1844 he met the master again, 
when starring at Dresden ; once more in 1854, at Zurich ; but died in Leipzig 
five years later. 

X The text consists of four strophes, not without a certain Hit ; it was 
reprinted, if we remember aright, in a Collection of von Brackel's poems 
(Riga, N. Kymmel, 1890). As to the score and parts of this <' Volkslied," 



234 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the defects of the work to be produced. On the playbill, or 
Theater-Anzeigey signed by Wagner we read: "Of all Bellini's 
creations Norma is that which unites the richest flow of melody 
with the deepest glow of truths and even the most determined 
opponents of the new Italian school of music do this composition 
the justice of admitting that, speaking to the heart, it shews an 
inner earnestness of aim." In an unsigned article in the Riga 
Zuschauer of December the 7 th (19th) he goes into the subject 
more thoroughly, under the heading Bellini : a word in season. 
Here, as in his every utterance of this period, he champions 
with all his own vivacity the broad melodic basis of Italian Opera : 
'' Song, Song, and a third time Song, ye Germans ! For Song is 
man's musical Speech; and if this language be not made and 
kept as self-dependent as every other cultured tongue, then 
nobody will understand you. The rest of the matter, what is 
bad in Bellini, any of your village school-masters could better ; 
we admit it To make merry over these defects, is quite beside 
the question : had Bellini taken lessons from a German school- 
master, he would probably have learnt to do better ; but that he 
would have unlearnt his Song into the bargain, is much' to be 
feared " {P. W. VIII., 68). In this sense he contrasts the pro- 
verbial " ear-tickling " of modem Italian music with the " eye- 
ache " engendered by so many a score of the later Germans : 
''As a matter of fact, the instantaneous apprehension of a whole 
dramatic passion is made far easier, when with all its subsidiary 
feelings and emotions that passion is brought by one firm stroke 
into one clear and telling melody, than when it is patched with 
a hundred tiny commentaries, with this and that harmonic 
nuance, the apostrophe of first one instrument and then the 
other, till at last it is doctored clean out of sight" {iHd,).* 

How prophetic, to find the Riga Kapellmeister already dipping 
into problems which he afterwards set forth at length in Opera 

every inquiry has proved in vain ; thoagh its musical sketch — plainly recog- 
nisable through the opening line, "Singt ein Lied dem edlen Kaiser, singt 
aus frohbewegter Brust " — appears on the fourth page of that addition to 
Blum's Maryt Max und Michel already mentioned. This fact we gather 
from an advertisement of the year 1886 : since that momentary resurrection, 
however, nothing has been heard of the manuscript, not to say its restoration 
to the master's heirs. 

* For a parallel, see the work of 1850, Opera and Drama (P. W. II.) pp. 
84 and 313. 



RIGA. 235 

and Drama : the concentration of dramatic motives, and melody 
as the crucible for converting the poet's thought into a definite 
expression of feeling. We seem to have a foretaste of one of 
those mighty themes in his later works that sums up all *' sub- 
sidiary feelings and emotions "as it wells from the very heart of 
the dramatic action \ whilst the young man of four-and-twenty 
seems hovering on the brink of the discovery that the object of 
his search is the genuine voccU melody, unknown as yet, not that 
usurper fathered by the instrument or orchestra — and further, that 
this Melody must be no ready-made embellishment, but a vital 
growth from the artwork's organism, ere it can be a " clear and 
telling" one {P. W. II., 233). That certainty he had first to reap 
from his own experience, and experience of his own creations. 

As to the dramatic treatment of a subject which is really a 
modification of Medea^ Wagner here expresses an opinion — '' the 
poem itself soars up to the height of the ancient Greeks" — ^in 
striking but unconscious harmony with that of Schopenhauer, 
who remarks about this Norma in his Welt als Wille und 
Vorstellungi ^'Seldom does the truly tragic effect of a catas- 
trophe, i.e. the resignation and spiritual elevation it produces in 
the heroes, attain so pure and lucid an expression as in the duet 
Qual car tradistiy qual cor perdesti ; where the reversal of the will 
is plainly pictured by the music's sudden calm. Taken all in 
all, quite apart from its music, and simply judged by its motives 
and inner economy, this piece is a most perfect tragedy^ a 
veritable model of tragic type of motives, tragic progress of the 
plot, and tragical denouement; with the consequent effect that 
the minds of the heroes, and through them those of the spectators, 
are lifted high above the world." 

In any circumstances, whether for his own benefit or not, 
Wagner would have done his utmost to bring out the good points 
of a work. As to the opposite course he .expresses himself more 
than thirty years later : '' One has only to examine an orchestral 
part, of * Norma' for instance, to discover what a curious change- 
ling can come of such a harmless sheet of notes. The mere 
chain of transpositions, where an aria's adagio is played in F 
sharp, its allegro in F natural, and the bridge between them in 
£ flat (for sake of the military brass), affords a truly horrifying 
picture of the music to which so many a respected Kapellmeister 
beats his time. . . . They think it too much trouble, to render 



236 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

justice to so innocent a score; never dreaming that the least 
considerable opera, if unimpeachably presented, can make a 
relatively satisfying impression on the cultured mind" {P, W. IV., 
352). To be sure, it was impossible to avoid same transpositions 
in this instance, as in the continued absence of a ' prima donna 
assoluta,' Amalie Planer had to personate the heroine of the 
piece, and much had to be lowered to the compass of her mezzo- 
soprano voice ; moreover the advent of raw and wintry weather 
had brought on an attack of hoarseness, for which she was 
obliged to beg the public's indulgence. Nevertheless the work 
went well on this nth (23rd) of December, not only owing to 
the precision of the ensemble, but also to the care with which the 
exponent of the title-r61e had been taken step by step along the 
footprints of great Schr6der-Devrient. Next day was Christmas 
Eve according to the German calendar, and we may imagine 
how the little party of three in the young master's rooms was 
cheered by the welcome Christmas-box that arrived in the shape 
of yesterday's receipts, made over by the treasurer of the theatre. 
Unfortunately the Kapellmeister's finances were sadly in need 
of such material aid, for they were suffering from the backwash 
of the terrible straits in which he had been forced to pass the 
last few years. Magdeburg and K5nigsberg creditors had soon 
got wind of this new 'northern latitude, and sufficient as the 
pittance of eight-hundred roubles dictated by the "interests of 
art " at Riga might prove to meet his current needs, it would go 
but a very little way toward paying off old debts. In this con- 
nection it is necessary to raise an emphatic protest against Dom's 
slanderous assertion that "Wagner's load of debts grew to an 
avalanche in Riga, in part through his wifis lave of pleasure.^ 
On the contrary, her talent for household economy, her art of 
converting the most unpromising material into a comfortable and 
decent home, of making something out of nothing, and a little go 
a good long way, are the most universally allowed and undisputed 
of her domestic virtues.* 



* In the sequel we shall see what interest Dom had in representing Wagner's 
position at Riga as fundamentally ufUmabie, and therefore not sparing even 
Minna. His statement in these "reminiscences," that Wagner received a 
salary of icxx> roubles, is also incorrect ; it was Dom himself who obtained 
that emolument immediately after Wagner's departure — when he had stepped 
into the other's shoes at Riga, without any extra duties. 



RIGA. 237 

Apropos of himself and Wagner at Riga, with a marked accent 
on self, Dom has the following : " Our relations soon developed 
into intimacy. The disproportion between us at Leipzig — I a 
married man of office and standing, Ae sl young student nine 
years my junior — naturally vanished now he himself had entered 
the state of matrimony and taken up a position at the theatre as 
recognised as my own in the church and school; whilst the 
disparity between the ages of 18 and 27, among men, is essentially 
different from that between 25 and 34. Add to this, that our 
wives consorted well together, and thus an old acquaintance 
ripened into a new friendship." In the Leipzig days Wagner 
had " introduced him to his mother's house," and in this renewed 
companionship he, Dom, again had found him a " lively, merry 
fellow, up to every kind of fun, and always to the fore with a 
humorous story or bit of mimicry of all sorts of persons." In 
that letter to Schindelmeisser of SepL 17/29, 1837, Wagner him- 
self says, " Dom is an agreeable, excellent creature, and behaves 
as trae friend to me on all occasions. He is my only companion 
and friend." And though Dorn's attitude soon dianged so utterly, 
in after years the master would tell of their old intimacy in their 
respective homes, as also at that much-frequented meeting-place, 
the "Ressource" on the Schwarzhaupter Platz — not the " Musse" 
(or Recreation Club), the exclusive preserve of the well-to-do classes. 
At the Ressource they '' played whist and ate Diina salmon " ; at 
Dom's lodgings in the Sodoffsky House, and at Holtei's own apart- 
ments, many a pleasant social afternoon or night was passed. 

Twenty years thereafter von Holtei avers that he already looked 
on Wagner as a man of mark, and in particular as a coming poet ; 
when the musician entertained him with long accounts of his 
dramatic drafts, he (Holtei) had advised him to " write tragedies, 
and give up composition." On another occasion he is reported 
to have said to J. lang, " I believe Wagner learnt harmony solely 
for the purpose of setting his own poems to music." Combining 
both remarks, we arrive at that jealousy of the professional scribe 
against the man whose inner impulse forced itself a vent in words 
and tones alike. It was always, "Write tragedies, and give up 
composition," or "Write music, and leave the text to us." If 
he would but stick to one or other path, his contemporaries 
would be content to acknowledge his talent ; but both at once 
— was a little too much for the mental equilibrium of either poets 



238 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

or musicians. Between Dora with his dubious patronage on the 
one hand, and Holtei with his preference for " dissolute strolling- 
players " on the other, such was Wagner's position just now at 
Riga. With Holtei as librettist there was every likelihood of a 
local success, as earlier at Leipzig with Laube's Kosziusko ; but 
what was a Riga success as vaudeville-composer to Aim ? 

In the new year 1838 Holtei took the whole burden of the Riga 
theatre on his own shoulders, the hitherto-responsible Committee 
having dissolved. This promised to set the establishment on a 
firmer basis than before, but the feelings of its Kapellmeister had 
already undergone a change. It was just about this time that 
there began that inner process which was inevitably to end by 
removing him from the primrose path of the modern stage. In- 
clined as he had been to look indulgently on the lack of depth in 
many a French and Italian score at the commencement of his 
career as conductor, ere long their intrinsic emptiness annoyed 
him. " The daily rehearsing of Auber's, Adam's and Bellini's 
music contributed its share to the swift extinction of my frivolous 
delight" {P. IV. I. 12). At the same time the life of the 
'^ comedian " stood nakeder before him every day, with its tittle- 
tattle and claptrap, its rivalry for the public's favour, and the 
absolutely threadbare culture of a genus for the most part trained 
to the development of one single faculty. The mere tofte it needed, 
but too frequently, to protect oneself against impertinences ! Wit 
and humour, persuasion and eloquence, were insufficient weapons 
for this business : a good strong dose of domineering was required. 
In the mood in which he took up his new engagement, he had 
early conceived the notion of writing a work of lighter order 
expressly for the forces under his command. With this end in 
view he set out the text of a two-act comic opera, JDie gHickliche 
Bdrenfamilie — "The happy Bears" — its subject borrowed from 
the TTumsand and one ^ights^ though completely modernised. 
Two numbers had actually been composed, when he was seized 
with disgust at the thought of trimming his work to fit that " crew" ; 
his inner sense was insulted by the discovery that he was on the 
high road to making music i la Adam himself; so he left the 
composition where it was.* 

* In his article already dted, Mr Dannreuther says : " L. Nohl fband the 
MS. at Riga in 1872, together with sketches for bits of the music — ' ^ la Adam.' 
These are quoted in the Netu Zeitschrift (1884, p. 244)." 



RIGA. 239 

At the beginning of Febniary 1838 the violinist Ole Bull gave 
four concerts in the theatre, and paid Wagner a visit in his apart- 
ments; an echo of which will be found in the latter's Paris 
Correspondence of 1841, in the form of a prayer that the Northern 
Paganini may not emulate H. Vieuxtemps by coming to his bed- 
side and playing that famous Polacca guerriera of his, — which had 
naturally been given at Riga, * by general desire.* Toward the end 
of the month the female contingent of the operatic company was 
completed by the filling of that awkward gap already more than 
once referred to. The pearl of price was found at last, in the 
person of none other than Wagner's Magdeburg " Isabella," Frau 
Karoline Pollert, whom we last beheld in a painful predicament 
On February 35 she appeared before the Riga audience as *' prima 
donna from the Royal and Imperial Court-theatre by the Kart- 
nerthor in Vienna," and in a few weeks' time became a universal 
favourite as Agathe, Pamina, Emmeline {SchweizerfamiHe\ Norma 
and Juliet. But Wagner's relations with the theatre were narrow- 
ing to the mere discharge of his duties as conductor, and he kept 
more and more entirely aloof from intercourse with its members 
off the stage, " withdrawing into that inner refuge where the yearn- 
ing to tear myself loose from everyday-life found alike its nurture 
and its goad" {P. W. I. 299). 

It was with this idea, perhaps, that as Spring came on he left 
his gloomy cabin in the inner town, and took new quarters in the 
S. Petersburg suburb, beyond the twofold girdle of the fortifica- 
tions. This new abode — ^which we may call the " Rienzi " house 
— formed the corner of the Miihlen and Alexander streets, and 
belonged to one Michael Ivan Bodrow, a Russian trader (after- 
wards to his heirs). It has since been altered very little : merely 
there was no shop-front then, the parterre being inhabited by the 
landlord and his family, the upper floor by Wagner. The entrance 
was in the Miihlenstrasse ; a flight of stairs led to an antechamber 
opening directly into the study; in the latter stood a divan, a 
grand piano (hired from Bergmann's, the best firm in Riga), and 
exactly between the two windows the desk at which the first two 
acts of Rienzi were composed. From this study one passed to 
the left into Amalie's suite of two chambers ; to the right into the 
salon, a comer room with two windows looking on to the one, 
and two on to the other of the above-named streets, — hung with 
red damask curtains. Through that, one worked back by the 



240 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

married couple's bedroom to the antechamber, issuing by a door 
opposite to the outer door of Amalie's bedroom ; so that there 
were two ways of getting into the flat without disturbing the 
composer at his work. With a like intention Amalie liad placed 
the pianino, needful for accompanying her vocal practice, in her 
bedroom ; thus interposing two doors in each direction between 
it and the central room. The house itself, now 9 Alexanderstrasse, 
is that where Wagner spent the major portion of his stay in Riga. 
Having had to pass it every day, the older inhabitants of this 
suburb still recollect him pipe in mouth at the open window in 
seasonable weather, clad in a dressing-gown with a kind of Turkish 
fez on his head ; and it is one of my own (C. F. G.'s) boyish 
memories, how the picture was generally completed by a remark 
on the refinement and energy of his features, and the look of wan* 
ness and sufiering they wore. 

A foolish statement was made not long ago^in absolute 
ignorance of the topography, — that this flat of Wagner's lay "in 
the genteel quarter of the suburbs, and was a selection quite 
beyond his means." It was nothing of the sort, and his choice 
was guided simply by the wish for quiet and seclusion. The 
apartments, as may be seen to this day, were so little pretentious 
that the salon and study had to take it in turns to serve the office 
of a dining-room. Merely they were bright and cheerful, easily 
heated in winter by two good solid Russian stoves, and all the 
space was made the most of. The same silly canard adds that 
Wagner had "an elegant carriage expressly hired" to take him to 
and from the theatre every day.* The journey into town, over 
two wooden bridges and through the military gate, was a matter 
of under a quarter of an hour — a mere nothing for a confirmed 
pedestrian like Wagner — and it never occurred to him to take it 
on wheels. 

Turning from " carriage " to sledge, we do know of an excursion 
to Bolderaa, which he took with his wife this first Spring. He 
had heard much of the imposing spectacle presented by the pack- 
ice at the estuary of the Dtina, and hopes had been raised of 
something truly majestic. Instead thereof the outlook on the 
dreary bosom of the Gulf of Riga, strewn with tumbled clods of 

* Both assertions, devoid of all foundation, are to be found in an article 
styled "Aus R. W.'s Sturm- und Drangzeit" in the feoilleton, edited by J. 
Pr51ss, of the FrtmJkfitrtir Z$ifun^, Jan. 1888. 



RIGA. 241 

mud-Stained ice, was one of utter desolation — to say nothing of 
the cutting blast that blew from the river. Freezing and dis- 
iUusioned, the pair began their endless journey home. To 
restore some warmth to their bodies, they took strong brandy at 
the only inn upon the road, and under its benumbing influence 
had little knowledge of the drive back in the growing dusk, till 
the sledge set them safely down by their home late at night. To 
the master the memory of this sleigh-ride was characteristic of his 
Riga experiences, and I (C. F. G.) have heard him relate it twice 
over in different years. 

On March 19, 1838, Wagner got up a "Vocal and Instrumental 
Concert " in the none too large, yet handsome concert-hall of the 
Schwarzhaupterhaus, with an orchestra considerably reinforced. 
The first part was opened by the Columbus overture ; the second 
commenced with the Rule Britannia^ composed at Kdnigsberg, 
and was brought to a highly patriotic close by the "national 
hymn" Nikolai (see p. 233), sung by the whole strength of the 
operatic company. Holtei recited Schiller's Lay of the Bell, 
Minna Wagner the monologue from the fourth act of the Maid 
of Orleans ; Frau PoUert sang an aria from /essonda, also with 
Amalie Planer and the opera-company in the first Finale from 
Weber's Oderon; instrumental solos were also supplied to the 
best of ability. 

In Schumann's Zeitschrift Dom discusses this musical event 
with all the airy condescension of a mightily superior person. 
With reference to the "spectacular and sensational effects" of 
the Columbus overture, Wagner is called "a Hegelianer in the 
style of Heine, whose feet are rooted in the works of Beethoven, 
but whose arms gyrate (from practice at the theatre) to the scores 
of all the world ; whilst his still too juvenile heart is bounding in 
impetuous throbs first here, then there, the head perpendiculates 
[well done, Dorn !] between the double Bs, Bach and Bellini." 
" But," so this polished critic continues, " one cannot serve both 
God and the Devil; and he who is not for me, is against me. 
From the bottom of my heart I despise those tedious creatures 
who, having once recognised this or that as the best, go on to 
persecute all else with the zeal of a fanatic ; if such a one is made 
a Elapellmeister into the bargain, he straightway becomes the 
ruin of a theatre, and so forth. But to try to unite every possible 
style and manner in one's compositions, in order to gain the 

Q 



242 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

votes of every party, is the surest way of doing for oneself with 
them all." Had we been unable to obtain from elsewhere an 
unvarnished picture of Wagner's evolution at the time, it would 
have been far to seek in this precious reflection. The qualities 
in this tone-poem underlined by the critic himself, those of 
" Beethovenian working-out — grand thoughts — highly modem 
externals" (presumably, "means of expression") are the very 
reverse of an impossible combination of irreconcilable opposites. 
Do not they sound more like the manifesto of a dauntless young 
reformer of his art? 

We have another echo of this Schwarzhaupter concert, in a 
letter almost miraculously preserved, affording a lurid glimpse of 
the trivialities with which the young master was plagued in his 
daily intercourse with Riga mummers. Dated March 30, it is 
addressed to a young chorus-singer, Louise Pogrell, who was 
also given some minor rdle from time to time: her fianc^, the 
singer Wrede, had chosen to consider either himself or his sweet- 
heart insulted by Wagner, and said as much in a boorish letter to 
his Kapellmeister. Thereon the latter writes: "I remember. 
Demoiselle Pogrell, that when I was told Herr W. had forbidden 
your singing at my concert, I remarked that Herr W.'s influence 
over you was quite surprising, and I only hoped, in your own 
interest, he would never relinquish it To me it is distinctly 
comical, to have to defend myself and my expression, when the 
whole thing might be settled by my simple assurance that I had 
no idea of offending you ; I do it, however, since it is a question 
of an untruth, which calls for refutation. I write to yau^ since it 
appears that something must be done in the matter, and I — 
refuse to reply to Herr W. himself; for there is only one 
appropriate answer to his letter, and that a quite peculiar one, 
which I most certainly could ^yt^ but will spare him, perhaps to 
our mutual advantage. So, when next you see him, please tell 
him simply for heaven's sake to keep his common hands from 
other people's business, but to apply his feeble intellect to proper 
learning of his parts, to sing in time if possible, and not to build 
too confidently on the Kapellmeister's lenience, which perchance 
might leave him in the lurch some day ; he will then do better 
for himself, in any case ; and you perhaps — ^let us hope, and as I 
wish — will find in him a husband who can earn himself and you 
a decent slice of bread. Tell him this just when the opportunity 



RIGA. 243 

occurs; there is no manner of hurry. As concerns yourself, 
however, believe me when I say that in any case my words have 
been falsely reported to you. — Richard Wagner, Kapellmeister." 

The original of this little note, which leaves nothing to be 
desired in the way of edge, has passed through many an up and 
down into the best of safe-keeping.* To the Anti-Wagnerite of 
to-day, as also to those who are so fond of pitting Wagner's '* art " 
against his ^' person," it may be humbly commended as an apt 
example of his tyranny, or of his mode of dealing with pretty 
young actresses,— only they must beware of its playing them a 
nasty trick, in the good-humour that peeps out even from beneath 
his just annoyance at impertinences. In any case, let this single 
instance serve as illustration of that " comedian set " in which a 
Holtei might feel at home, but whence the young master was 
longing to escape, if only to the temporary seclusion of his rooms 
in the Petersburg suburb. 

About this time he made his first acquaintance with the subject 
of the Flying Dutchman, He found it while dipping into the 
pages of Heine's Salon^ embedded in the cynically frivolous 
" Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski." It probably was not 
the absolute first he had heard of this popular legend of the sea ; 
but the deeper motive brought to light here with an instinct of 
which Heine himself seems ashamed, that redemption of the 
eternal wanderer through a woman's fidelity, supplied him with 
fresh food for thought f "This subject fascinated me, and made 



* Namely into the hands of one of the most excellent French " Wagnerians," 
M. Alfred Bovet of Valentigney, who has kindly consented to its appearance 
here. The note itself is on a double sheet of quarto paper, folded so that the 
address occupies one of the outer sides. In her first tantrum the addressee 
seems to have torn it into tiny fragments, but then— characteristically enough 
— to have collected the pieces and treasured them up. It has subsequently 
been restored with such art that its legibility has not suffered in the slightest ; 
in fact it is only upon holding it against the light, that one discovers its earlier 
mutilation. 

t As Heine sarcastically puts it: *'The Devil, blockhead that he is, does 
not believe in woman's faithfulness, and therefore has allowed the curse-beladen 
captain to land just once in every seven years, to marry and endeavour to use 
these opportunities for the necessary business of his redemption. Poor Dutch- 
man I he's often glad enough to be redeemed from the marriage-bond itself, 
to be free of his redemptriz, and get safe on board once more. . . . The moral 
of the piece, for ladies, is to take good care to wed no flying Dutchmen ; for 
men, that in the best event the women bring us to the ground." 



244 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

an indelible impression on my mind: still, it did not as yet 
acquire the needful force for its rebirth within me " (F, W, I. 299). 
For the present he was drawn to a work of far different order. 

The utter childishness of the German provincial public's taste 
had long been acutely felt by him : " Accustomed to nothing but 
works already judged and accredited by the greater world outside, 
it is quite incapable of forming an opinion about any art-pheno- 
menpn that may chance to make its first appearance at a local 
theatre." Convinced of this, he had determined at no price to 
produce a major work on a minor stage : " Therefore when I felt 
again the inner need of girding my powers for such a work, I 
renounced all idea of a speedy performance, or of one close at 
hand. I bent my thoughts on some theatre or other of first rank, 
and troubled little where and when that theatre would find itself'^ 
{P. W, I. 12). It is a coincidence that, at the very time when he 
returned to his cherished plan of Rienzi^ the foundation-stone of 
a new and sumptuous theatre was being laid at Dresden ; to him 
it was as yet no omen. He drew up his sketch of a "grand tragic 
opera in five acts, and planned it on so vast a scale that its first 
production at any lesser theatre would belong to the impossi- 
bilities" {Und.), The situation was of a piece with that of some 
fourteen years after, when he marked the mighty groundplan of 
his Ring des Nibelungen, Both now and then, with the very 
mapping out his subject he was shouldering the load of years of 
sacrifice ; neither now nor then, was a grain of its full onus spared 
him. In the present case, however, he "took no thought for 
anything but an effective opera-book. ' Grand Opera ' with all its 
scenic and musical pomp, its massive vehemence, loomed large 
before me ; and not merely to copy, but with reckless extravagance 
to outbid it in its every detail, became the object of my artistic 
ambition " {P, W. I. 299-300). He regarded his subject, to use 
his own words, through ^^a- glasses, with five grand finales, 
hymns, processions, and musical clash of arms ; nevertheless it is 
symptomatic, that throughout its execution he was fired by the 
dramatic aspect, to which his music was to give full value without 
any "flummery."* 

* As to the relation of Wagner's drama to the exhaustive epical treatment 
of the same subject in Bulwer's novel, see E. Reuss: ''Rienzi" {Bayr. BL 
1889) and Dr H. von der Pfbrdten's HcauUmtg und Dichtung der Buhnm- 
werke Richard Wagner's naeh ihren Grundlagtn in Sags und Geschichie (Berlin,. 



RIGA. 245 

The May of 1838, in which Wagner completed his twenty-fifth 
year, was a month of toil for the Kapellmeister with its ten 
operatic performances ; on the evening of his birthday (May 10 
in Russia) he had to conduct the BarHere. At the end of the 
month the whole company, Play and Opera, betook itself to 
Mitau, the little capital of Courland, where it gave a series of 
twenty-one representations from the 3rd to the 23rd of June, 
returning to Riga when they were over. There were no real 
summer holidays; yet, the audience being a very small one in 
July, that month demanded on the average but two perform- 
ances a-week. During this slack time the text of Rienzi^ already 
fashioned in the brain of its creator, was written down. 

Trowitzsch 1893). Neither author, however, has mentioned the significant 
fact that Bulwer himself, according to his pre£Bu:e, had been incited to treat 
the figure of the " Last of the Tribunes" by an earlier dramatic version, the 
"beautiful tragedy*' of Miss Maiy Russell Mitford (performed in London 
1828), from which he borrowed a few felicitous motives, and in particular the 
tragic love of Adriano for Irene. 



VII. 

"RIENZI, DER LETZTE DER 
TRIBUNEN." 

"J^iensi" as drama. — Impressions during the first spell qf 
composition : MihuTs ^^Joseph,^^ — Dom on the inception of the 
Rienzi-music, — Dort^s ^^ Schoffe von Paris,^^ — Letter to August 
Lewald, — Loneliness at Riga ; compassion for a young delinquent; 
the Newfoundland dog Robber. — Wagner replaced by Dorn. 

This Rienxi with great thmtghts in his head, great feel- 
ings in his hreasty set all my nerves a-quioering with 
sympathy and love. 

Richard Wagnbr. 

Whoever is not a willing victim of self-deception with regard to 
this work — ^which the young master so explicitly declared to be 
no "firstfruit" — must admit that he neither knows nor can know 
it, in the absence of two essentials for such knowledge : a correct 
performance, or at the least a perfect score.* Mere publication 
of the latter, indeed, would not preserve the work from further 
mutilation on the stage. For that one needs clear recognition of 
the fact that Rienzi^ even Rienzi^ was not conceived by its author 
as absolute ''grand opera," but rather as drama^ or as he himself 
calls it^ a ''stage-piece"; a standpoint at which we shall never 
arrive, as £. Reuss justiy says, "until our theatres shall take the 
trouble to treat the music of ' Rienzi ' as means to illustrate the 
play ' Rienzi,' and not stop short at getting up its musical notes." f 

* ^th the solitary exception of Dresden, such a score does not exist at any 
theatre ; the original (in the possession of the King of Bavaria) has not been 
printed yet, since the public has never evinced a desire for it. On the other 
hand the pianoforte edition by F. Brissler, professedly ''a new revision from 
the fidl score," according to £. Reuss has "no relation even to the standard 
pianoforte arrangement, to say nothing of an authoritative score." 

t See the essay by Edward Reuss already cited, which appeared in the 
Bayreuther Blatter (voL XII. pp. 150 «/ seq.) on the occasion of the admirable 
346 



"RIENZI, DER LETZTE DER TRIBUNEN." 247 

It is very cheap criticism, to judge this work exclusively from the 
dais of Wagner's later creations ; and whoever would appraise it 
rightly, should endeavour to place himself in the author's position 
at the time, when he had no full knowledge of the great ideal 
arising in his breast, but must grope his way unguided toward 
the unknown new. The poem itself foretells that new path, in 
the intrinsic distinction between its dramatic characterisation and 
development, and the purely theatrical element then prevailing in 
"Grand Opera" — where everything was dragged on to the stage 
by the ears, and little had its vindication in human nature. " The 
overlooking of this difference has led to the most senseless com- 
parisons, that which credits Rienzi to the school of Meyerbeer 
being the very worst"* 

That such is the only proper mode to judge jRiensi, is shewn 
by the words of the composer himself; however indisposed to 
. magnify any of his products at cost of the idea engrossing him, 
he was ever juster toward his early work than many of our 
glib Wagnerian and un-Wagnerian critics. Those words, penned 
just after the first performance at Dresden, run as follows : 
"When I began the composition of my 'Rienzi,' I held by 
nothing save the single aim to do justice to my street. I set 
myself no model, but surrendered myself to the feeling which 
consumed me : the feeling that I had already got so far that I 
might claim something significant from the development of my 
artistic powers, and expect some not insignificant result. The 
thought of being consciously weak or trivial — were it in a single 
bar — was appalling to me" {P, W. I. 13). 

It will be of interest to outline the circumstances in which the 
actual work at this Rienzi was commenced. In the first half of 
July, 1838, Wagner coached his Riga company with much 
en^usiasm in M^hul's Joseph^ — Germanic^ "Jakob und seine 
Sdhne." The preparations and eventual performance were scenes 
on which his memory ever lingered fondly. In i860 he says: 
" The peculiar sense of gnawing pain, that seized me when con- 



Carlsruhe performance in 1889 ; so far as we are aware, the only article that 
deals seriously with this slighted work of Wagner's according to its aesthetic 
aspect, its historic antecedents, sources, poetry and music. 

* Ed. Reuss, p. 157. See also the luminous remarks of H. S. Chamberlain 
on page 40 of his Das Drama Richard Wagner's — ^p. 71 of the French edition, 
Le Drame WagnirUn (unfortunately there as yet exists no English version). 



248 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

ducting the ordinary rut of operas, was relieved at times by an 
ineffable feeling of wellbeing. ... I felt uplifted and ennobled 
for the while, when rehearsing M^huFs glorious 'Joseph' with 
a minor operatic company. That such impressions, revealing 
undreamt possibilities, could now and then present themselves, — 
it was this that chained me to the theatre, intense tho' my disgust 
at the typical spirit of our opera-performances " (-P. IV. III. 304). 
The details of this representation were still sharp in the master's 
mind another two decads thereafter: he distinctly remembered 
the excellent Bohemian cornists whom he had procured from a 
military band ; they had strange great winding horns, which they 
carried coiled around their necks, — and thus he made them 
march upon the stage. The first performance was on Thursday, 
July 14 (26), with a repetition three days later.* About then 
began the composition of Rienzii the manuscript sketch for the 
music of the first scene is dated July 26 to August 7. 

In August the company returned to its regulation three operas 
per week, and on the 31st the first year of Holtei's management 
closed with the Postilion von Longjumeau.\ There was no 
respite for Wagner, however, as on September 2 he had to 
conduct the first opera of the new season. The only change 
worth mentioning in the company was the replacement of iU- 
mannered K5hler by Johann Hoffmann, who happened to be 
passing through Riga on his way from S. Petersburg into Germany, 
and was offered a few months' engagement as tenor. He made 
his first appearance this opening night, as Fra Diavolo, and with 
such pronounced success that he gladly consented to stay. The 
friendly relations upon which he now entered with the master 

* The cast as follows : Jacob, a shepherd from the land of Hebron, Hr 
Scheibler; Joseph, Governor of Egypt under the name of Cleophas, Hr 
Janson ; Reuben, Hr Petrick ; Simeon, Hr Wrede ; Naphthali, Hr Sammet ; 
Levi, Hr Kurt, etc. ; Benjamin, Amalie Planer. The opera was repeated 
July 17 and Dec. 23, 1838, and Feb. 20, 1839 ; a fourth repetition, already 
arranged for May 29, 1839, did not come off. 

t To sum it up, during this first twelvemonth at Riga (including the 
Mitau diversion) Wagner conducted 16 separate operas : Romeo (Bellini's 
Montechi) 10 times ; Freischiitz 9 times ; Norma and the Postilion 8 times 
each ; Dame Blanche^ 2Lampa and Fra Diavolo^ 6 times each ; the Zauberficte 
(Magic Flute) and Barbiere 5 times each ; Don Juan^ Figaro^ the Scktveiaer* 
familie and Stumme (Masaniello), 4 times each ; Jakob und seine Sd'Ane 
(Joseph), Maurer und Schlosser (Le Ma^on), and IVassertrager (Cherubini's 
Les Deux Joumte) twice apiece,— making 85 performances in all. 



"RIENZI, DER LETZTE DER TRIBUNEN." 249 

were maintained throughout his subsequent directorship of the 
Riga theatre, of that at Frankfurt a.M., and later of the Josef- 
stadter theatre in Vienna, down to his death in 1865. His wife 
also proved a useful acquisition, and soon gained popularity, 
ousting Amalie Planer from several of the Bellinian and Rossinian 
r61es she hitherto had filled with credit. 

Besides the official duties of conductor, impecuniosity and the 
stern compulsion to meet it by additional work demanded extra 
sacrifice of time and strength. One sign of this is given by 
a paper dated September 11, a circumstantial appeal to the 
members of his band to assist him in a series of six Orchestral 
Concerts.* These concerts actually came about; a noteworthy 
fact in view of the rather barren n^sical soil at Riga, and a strong 
proof of the young man's indomitable energy, — ^thereafter Dom 
and others made various attempts to repeat the experiment, but 
systematically failed. 

Amid such outward calls and interruptions, the composition 
of Rienzi made but halting progress. Apropos of the "very 
agreeable hours he passed in Wagner's household," Dom paints 
a somewhat bizarre picture of the gradual upbuilding of the work. 
" It was with great interest that I saw the first sketches of Rienzi 
spring up, and heard one scene after another at the pianoforte. 
Wagner had intended Adriano for his sister-in-law Frl. Planer [?], 
who had to undertake all the treble parts at these reunions. The 
gentlemen present, mostly including the 'cellist from the theatre 
band, humorous Carl von Lutzau, sang whatever they could pick 
from the hash — and outside the house in the S. Petersburg 
suburb bearded Russians stood aghast at the hullabaloo going on 
up aloft until late in the night. At these soirte the wires of 
the piano would fiy asunder like spray before the wind, so that 
the composer at last could bring out nothing but a flail-like rattle, 
accompanied by the pleasing jangle of metal snakes as they 
writhed on the sounding-board. Not that that disturbed us, in 
presence of such a score ; it was all in the day's work — with a 
pianist so stout of fist as Wagner." 

So much for Dom's imaginative account. He himself would 
appear to have scented the absurdity of his statement that the 

* This draft was put up to auction in Berlin, June 18S6, as <' 24 pages large 
folio, 104 long lines/' and knocked down at 96 marks to some private auto- 
graph-hunter or other. 



250 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

r61e of Adriano was "intended" for Amalie Planer (in fact, for 
any singer of the then-existing Riga company) ; at anyrate, when 
he repeats it elsewhere, he endeavours to make it a little more 
colourable by the following sentence : "As she was an excellent 
interpretress of Bellinian alto parts, it seems quite natural that 
he should have laid this role in a similar register, tho' it certainly 
stamps the opera with a hybrid style." For all that, we cannot 
detect in this shaky argument one glimmer of a truly Wagnerian 
reason, one trace of the impulsive young artist's utter heedless- 
ness of the means for a future presentation of his work : it is 
nothing save the "but and if," the flimsy combinations of the 
narrator's own peculiar logic* To him the oddness of Wagner's 
overweening plan, his apparent disregard of " practical success," 
were still inexplicable a quarter of a century (1869) after that 
success itself had become a fact indelibly recorded in the history 
of art. However, we may glean a tiny silhouette from this 
caricature; the twenty-five year old musician in his suburban 
flat, seated at his Bergmann grand with the nascent pages of 
his composition in front of him, his head in the score, siurounded 
by a strange assortment of Riga intimates, whom, so long as they 
remained within the magic circle, he electrified and roused to 
faith in him and his project; whilst the picture may be com- 
pleted by Lobmann's verbal recollection of the gentle Minna 
wiping the perspiration from her husband's forehead as he 
played. 

The Church-Conductor knew better how to pull the strings 
of Riga. On the best of terms with Holtei, popular with the 
inhabitants of the town through a residence of several years, 
and assured of the good offices of his younger friend at the 
conductor's desk, that autumn he had handed in the harmless 
score of a two-act comic opera, Der Schoffe von Farts ("The 
Sheriflf of Paris," text by W. A. Wohlbnick). In October came 
the rehearsals, on November i, 1838, the first performance. 
Wagner took infinite pains to render the fullest justice to this 
work of his colleague's, as some sort of " return " for his whilom 
introduction of the youth of eighteen summers to the Leipzig 

* This passage may be compared with the delicious account in Dom's 
Ergebnisse (pp. 45-52) of his canvass among princesses, prime donne, wives 
of councillors etc, for recommendations to his subsequent appointment in 
Berlin. 



"rienzi, der letzte der tribunen. 251 

public, — a. history Dom had rescued from oblivion in its every 
detail only a short while before, in course of that criticism of 
Wagner's Schwarzhaupter concert already cited. " He was most 
painstaking at rehearsals, as I had the best opportunity of judging 
in the case of my own opera ; and when he stood at the desk 
his fiery temperament carried even the oldest members of the 
band away with him," says Dom in after days, though he took 
the baton into his own hands on the first evening of perform- 
ance.* This first performance also served as Benefit for the 
wife of tenor Johann Hoffmann, and was distinguished by a 
quantity of new scenery, including a look-out from the top of 
the tower of Notre Dame over midnight Paris. The music was 
light and entertaining, in its way, but complaints were heard of 
long-windedness and tedious repetitions, especially in the "comic" 
numbers-t With the help of cuts the opera was kept alive for 
the rest of the season, and reached its seventh performance on 
February i ; after that, however, its mountings were annexed for 
Frau BirchpfeiflFer's sensational drama I?er GVddiner von Paris.X 
When Dorn himself assumed the reins, a " reprise " was tried, but 
got no further than a modest run. 

About the time of this easy local triumph of his colleague's, 
Wagner, in the full flush of his Rienzi music, was straining every 
nerve to pave the way for its acceptance at a leading centre. 
It still was Paris to which he clung, and whereby alone he could 



* The latter circumstance will probably account for Dom's having inspired 
his own biographer {Sammlung von Musikbiographiemy Cassel, Balde, 1856, 
p. 90) to assign this production to the period after Wagner's departure, thus 
ignoring his former friend's great share in the preliminary study. 

t The Riga Zuschauer of Nov. 3 has a report on it, remarking that the two 
acts played from 6 to 9.30 p.m., and the whole thing was too long ; the house 
was crowded, but it was not until the middle of the first act, with a grand aria 
for Herr Gttnther (as Sheriff), that applause became general ; '* at its close the 
composer was tumultuously called for." 

X This spectacular horror of the " Royal Prussian Upper-court-poetess" was 
also witnessed by Wagner at Riga (May 25, 1839). In 185 1 he cites it as 
a characteristic specimen of German play-concocting : '' Let anyone compare 
their sham original-pieces with the genuine Parisian articles from which they 
are derived ; let him set Ch. Birchpfeiffer's adaptation of Hugo's NiOre Dame 
beside the adaptation given at the Paris Th^tre de TAmbigu Comique [evi- 
dently between 1840 and 1842] : he then will feel the unexampled wretched- 
ness of our theatric art, in which one has come to be content with the vilest 
copies of copies vile themselves " (P. W. III. 33-34). 



252 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

hope for signal recognition in his fatherland. We have a letter 
to August Lewald dated Nov. 12, 1838, in which he resumes 
with his inimitable joviality a correspondence broken off long 
since. Rendering an account of his later adventures, he says : 
"In spite of my most ardent yearning southwards, my stupid 
destiny has driven me yet farther north. Vexations of every 
sort had made me forget all about my French expedition for 
ever so long ; nor have I had another answer from Scribe. But 
somehow I'm not so easy to smother down, with my hopes and 
plans." He considers that Paris and Scribe are now too far 
awc^i and he wants a middleman to work the business up for 
him. " What prompts me to pester just you, who must have 
quite enough Richard Wagners on your hands without me?" 
His excuse must be the kindness already shewn him by Lewald, 
and the fact that Schlesier is associated with the publisher of 
Eurapai his old Dresden and Leipzig schoolmate will surely 
warm L. up to interest in him.* In that case he would like 
Lewald to use his journalistic influence to get Scribe to make 
a declaration in the matter of that operatic draft twice sent 
him ; for which purpose he now encloses a further special copy 
of the sketch for the Bohe Braut "If the subject pleases 
neither Scribe nor you — why ! I've another about me. This 
very instant I am working at a grand opera, jRienzt; the text 
is quite finished, and I've composed one act already. Thb 
* Rienzi,' beyond a doubt, is far more grandiose than that sub- 
ject ; I mean to compose it in the German tongue, just to see 
if there is any possibility of getting it to the Berlin Opera in 
50 years time (should God spare my life). Perhaps it may 
please Scribe, and Rienzi could sing French in a jiffy; or it 
might be a means of prodding up the Berliners, if one told 
them that the Paris stage was ready to accept it, but they were 
welcome to precedence. ... As to matter and unflagging wiU, I 

* It will be remembered that a fragment of this letter appeared on page 93 ; 
after saying that Schlesier must tell him (L.) all about their discussions at the 
Krenzschule, and how they were tripped by Schelling's Transcendental Ideal- 
ism, "for which I still owe him 12 groschen," he recalls how they "were 
eating ices one Sunday with Laube, when I brought him his decree of banish- 
ment My God I he must remember Ortlepp and Lauchstttdt, and then 

say if tkat is not enough to make a man interest himself for me ; to say nothing 
of such an operatic chance, which is bound to make both him and everyone 
connected with it right immortal ! " 



"rienzi, der letzte der tribunen." 253 

shan't prove lacking; I feel very plainly that I should have 
produced God knows how much already, if only the door had 
stood open to me. Heaven witness that I say it in no arrogant 
spirit, but thus much is certain : if within 1 5 years I am not 
finally emancipated — I shall be audacious enough to write operas 
for Frankfurt an der Oder or Tilsit ! ... So, most worthy Sir, 
just experiment with me on this emancipation of an opera-com- 
poser. Shew what a German can do for a German whom he 
doesn't even know by sight, and for whom he is merely acting 
in the interest of a whole race of composers ! Naturally, you 
will then obtain a quite special extra statue in that Pantheon 
the Germans are sure to be building soon for their men of merit ; 
and, in his wonder at a German scholar's helping a poor German 
composer to Parisian honours, God will be at a loss to know what 
blessing to bestow upon you, . . ." 

It is not for any practical effect, any manner of material result, 
that this letter is of moment ; solely for the glimpse it affords of 
the high spirits and plastic energy of the young genius in whose 
breast surge schemes and fancies that, for all their explosive 
impromptu, still keep touch with the inner march of his develop- 
ment. His notion of a Paris success had nothing of a really 
practical plan about it as yet, but was rather a pleasing day- 
. dream by aid of which he might forget the bitterness and in- 
sufficiency of his actual surroundings. And yet what impassioned 
earnestness there lurks behind the airy vision ! Who could have 
read these lines without the liveliest sympathy, a strong desire to 
help ? And nowadays who would not envy its recipient the chance 
of yielding such assistance? — Indeed it seems that the worthy 
Stuttgart editor lacked less of will, than of ability to carry out the 
terms of this strange young man's request. What lay in Lewald's 
power, he gladly did ; for in a supplement to the fourth quarterly 
number of his magazine for 1839 we find fulfilment of the wish 
expressed in this letter's postscript : " I came across the following 
poem in the ' Muses' Almanack.' * Little partial as I am to this 
particular fir-tree melancholy, in Lithuania one can't avoid it 
altogether ; so I have set the poem in the Lithuanian key [E flat 
minor], and enclose it to you with a petition to insert it in 

* Deutscker Musenalmanack for the year 1838, edited by A. v. Chamisso and 
G. Schwab, Leipzig, Weidmann, pp. 129-35 ; "Poems by G. Scheuerlin," Der 
Tanntnbaum constitntiog number 5. 



254 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the Europa, Only, you mustn't take this as a sample of my 
manner of composing operas. That, I believe I may say, thank 
God, is not so Lithuanian." 

There was cause enough for " Lithuanian melancholy," in this 
city of well-to-do merchants. It stayed shy to him, and he to it, 
as we gather from a remark in an account of the first Riga per- 
formance of the Flying Dutchman : " Wagner had lived in much 
too unpretentious quiet here, to rouse great expectations" 
(iVI Z/ M., 1843). ^o one had any suspicion of his powers; 
he was just the musical conductor, whose efforts to provide an 
amusing and successful presentation of Adam's and Bellini's 
operas were taken as nothing more than he was paid for. Who 
troubled their heads as to whether that was strictly his afiair or 
not, and what other capabilities and glowing ideals he might 
harbour within him ? With all its countless trivialities, the mere 
discharge of his official duty would not in itself have proved a 
wearing task ; but the worst of it was, the constant dunning of his 
Prussian creditors gave him no chance of placidly browsing on his 
scanty wage, and forced him to additional exertions such as those 
orchestral concerts of the winter 1838-39. Throw into the scale 
a somewhat serious illness this selfsame winter, and his experiences 
of daily life within and without the theatre will be found of none 
too cheerful sort. 

To give an illustration: One day it transpired that a spare 
chest had been broken open, and rifled of the best part of 
its contents. The young servant-girl's tearful protestations of 
innocence supplied a clue to the real offender, who turned out to 
be none other than her sweetheart The Riga police suffering 
from a chronic attack of red-tape, the complainant was summoned 
to an outlying district of the Petersburg suburb, to identify the 
recovered articles. It was then explained to him that, if the 
value of what had been stolen exceeded a certain sum (presumably 
100 roubles), the thief must be packed off to Siberia without 
further ado. Heartily disposed to rate the things as low as 
possible, to save the poor wretch from such a fate, it was a relief 
to Wagner's conscience to be able to do it truthfully: they 
were chiefly 'properties' from Minna's old stage-wardrobe, and 
honestly below the fatal figure.* He next was told : That made 

* One regal mantle from this wardrobe plays a r61e in a domestic scene of 
these Riga times, accidentally resuscitated for us. Minna is cross with her 



•'RIENZI, DER LETZTE DER TRIBUNEN." 255 

no difference, as there were aggravating circumstances. Thereon 
he was confronted with the unfortunate young man, pale, his hair 
close-cropped, in prison garb, — " a heart-rending sight" It did 
not need the culprit's entreaties, to turn the prosecutor into fervid 
counsel for the defence. But again the word of Justice came : 
" Herr Wagner, your pleadings can avail nothing ; the man not 
only is a military deserter, but has robbed once before." 

Relating this incident some forty years later, the master made 
no further comment; but his voice vibrated from the shock he 
had felt at the coldness and indifference with which such men 
could dare decide a fellow-creature's fate. Indeed it was no 
political fad that made the warm-hearted artist explode at a certain 
epoch of his life into open rebellion against the modem State and 
its sheltering of the '' civic philistine," but that immediate feeling 
in the breast of every generous man of parts that our state-and- 
police civilisation has deviated many a league from right develop- 
ment of man's moral and social faculties, — as Goethe expresses it : 

husband : he had wounded her sense of order by abstracting this cloak from 
her keeping for ends which she cannot divine. She has locked herself up in 
her room, and Wagner — a past master in the arts of coaxing and conciliation 
(twenty years later, just before their final severance, he says, "I pet her as 
if on a honeymoon ") — sits down to write an explanation, but casts it aside 
upon finding that it would have to grow long-winded, to be complete. " Little 
simpleton that thou art !" — begins this attempt — "Just because a joke has 
quite missed fire, is that any reason for teasing one so? I had meant to 
make myself magnificent in thy mantle, then appear before thee, at my 
hand a doll with just such another mantle, underneath it a cradle with thy 
future little one inside ; and so we three — I, Natalie [Minna's youngest sister, 
then staying with them] and the future one — would have sunk to thy feet, and 
craved foigiveness for the loan. For this I filched a little from thee, things I 
thought thou least would miss, odds and ends for the doll and the cot ; but the 
whole plan was spoilt, yfrf/ by my not knowing ..." Here the draft note 
breaks off ; but years before the diteovery of the little document the narrator 
(C. F. G.) had heard from the inhabitants of the Bodrowsky house about 
this cradle with its big doll under a silken quilt. It was probably intended as 
a Christmas surprise, a humorous alleviation of that childlessness both he and 
Minna felt so sorely. This will be fully understood, if we remember that frt>m 
his childhood Wagner had been accustomed to seeing fomily-life made gay at 
every opportunity by such fantastic pleasantries. Long afterwards (July 3, 
1878) he cried : '* Ah ! then one stiU had household garlands I Then a poem 
was composed and enacted for every birthday ; no festival without its special 
ode. — ^That has all been altered now 1 " Do not we recollect how, in the 
trouble of his last illness, stepfather Geyer bewaib his inability to adorn the 
mother's birthday with the usual fiinciful surprise ? 



256 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

" Don't talk to me of State and statesmen ! They know only to 
forbid, to hinder and reject; but seldom to command, to help, 
reward. One lets everything go on till it becomes a nuisance; 
then one fires up and hits out hard ! " Not alone among man- 
kind's great teachers was Wagner ever of opinion that, the existing 
social system rendering crime a necessary consequence, Society 
itself is responsible for its commission, — the true meaning of that 
sudden cry of Parsifal's : " Und iVA, ich bitCs^ der all dies Elend 
schuf !" In 185 1 he says, " In this sense a criminal case had the 
same interest to me as a political action ; I could but take the 
side of the suffering party, and in exact degree of vehemence as it 
was engaged in resisting any kind of oppression " {P. W, I. 355). 
On the day when he returned to his apartments from the stufi^ 
court of Riga divisional Justice, we may be sure the young 
composer of Rienzi had not the heart to write a single 
note. 

Many another trait of Riga life remained stamped on his 
memory, down to the revolting sight of the barrow-loads of frozen 
swine, sawn in half from snout to buttock, wherewith Consul Sch. 
then provisioned the English mariners, and the like of which one 
still may see in the open streets of Riga. Over these we need 
not linger. A pleasanter recollection was that of a splendid 
Newfoundland dog that made his first acquaintance at the shop 
of a certain Armitstead, and soon attached itself to him with 
passionate devotion; the dog to whom Wagner has raised a 
lasting monument in his End of a German Musician in Paris, 
This noble beast would follow the lord of its choice like a 
shadow, and went the length of besieging his lodgings until he 
relented and let it in. In the year 1878, when a drawing of his 
Riga home was shewn him, Wagner at once put his finger on the 
spot where " Robber " used to lie and guard the street-door. If 
he went to town for a rehearsal. Robber formed his constant 
escort, — on the way it would take its bath in the moat, even in 
winter, if only a hole could be found in the ice. Once at a 
band-rehearsal in the Schwarzhaupter-hall it majestically en- 
camped by the conductor's desk, preserving an honourable 
silence, though it fixed the nearest contrabassist with its eye ; as 
the player's bow made straight for it at every stroke, it may have 
considered this a personal menace ; there comes an extra-vigorous 
stroke, Robber snaps at it, — ^a cry of alarm : " The dog, Herr 



"rienzi, der letzte der tribunen." 257 

Kapellmeister ! ** Recollections of this kind the Bayreuth master 
was never tired of reviving. 

The beginning of 1839 was marked by unexpected changes at 
the theatre. Director Holtei had suddenly lost his wife (a valued 
actress, Julie Holzbecher) on the 29th December; the public 
shewed wide-spread sympathy, and Wagner is said to have set 
music to a " Gesang am Grabe " by H. v. Brackel for her solemn 
interment in the Jacobi graveyard.* Four weeks later, after 
playing in Lorbeerbaum und Bettelsiab the previous night, Holtei 
left town with his daughter by a first marriage, ostensibly for a 
starring tour abroad ; the completeness of his preliminary arrange- 
ments, however, proves it to have been with the deliberate 
intention not to return. The reasons for this mysterious departure 
have never been quite cleared up ; nevertheless at a meeting of 
the Theatre-committee and other interested parties, presided over 
by Oberfiskal v. Cube, it was resolved to release the director from 
his contract "amicably and with all honour." He had appointed 
as his substitute, in other words successor, the tenor Johann 
Hoffmann, a well-informed and excellent fellow. The latter 
behaved in the friendliest manner to Wagner, but was powerless 
against the fact that, before his departure and without so much as 
a hint to his Kapellmeister, Holtei had already adopted every 
measure for his supersession by his nearest Riga friend — H. 
Dom \ It is of no use Dom's asseverating that the decisive step 
was taken by Hoffmann {Ergebnissey p. 164), for we have 
documentary evidence that the whole thing was signed and 
sealed by Dorn and Holtei behind Wagner's back, and the 
compact made binding upon the new director. No wonder Dorn 
has something to tell us, in his Recollections, of Wagner's flaming 
indignation upon discovering in the first week of March that this 
plot had been hatched fully a month before: "It was with 
difficulty that a friend of both parties, Committee-man Herr 
Schwederski, succeeded in somewhat appeasing his rage." A 
correspondence on the subject, continues Dorn, led to no sub- 
stantial understanding, — he considers its publication superfluous. 
Very like ! At anyrate in August of that very year he steps into 



* So the Diina-Zeiiuf^ of July 20^ XS93, would have it. But the painful 
mediocrity of the verses quoted is against such a supposition. 

R 



258 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

Wagner's shoes, and remains there until 1843 ^i^^ much delight 
and undocked pay.* 

Richard Wagner's position at Riga had of late been by no 
means so "untenable" as Dorn would make outf For over 
a year and a half he had been in the enjoyment of a regular, 
though unjustly stinted income, while his actual expenditure on 
outward comfort had been but small. How little he was above 
eking it out by any honest means, is apparent from a letter 
addressed to Hoffmann in which he offers to submit to whatever 
additional burden the director may choose to lay on his shoulders, 
for sake of earning a trifle extra during the fag end of his Riga 
sojourn : " I would even copy out notes," he jokingly adds, " if 
I did not fear the melancholy task would too much damp my 
spirits." Had the late director Holtei wished to render his first 
conductor's position more " tenable," nothing would have been 
easier than to grant him the same allowance made without excep- 
tion to his predecessors and successors. 

Such was the state of afiairs at the beginning of March 1839. 
The idea of Paris, which had been nothing but a flattering vision 
at the commencement of his composition of Rienziy assumed 
more and more concrete shape as the work wore on. The 
instrumentation of the first act had been completed February 6, 
the second shortly after put in hand. He must now ascertain 
if the turn in the lane would be marked by this opera, and 
decides to venture in person on the hazardous journey to the 
metropolis of modem art The idea becomes a project; the 
project presses to solution; all bitterness at the wrong just 
suffered is swallowed up. From now onwards we see the young 
artist, brimful of confidence in his good star, most sedulously 



* In place of Lobmann (dismissed by Holtei himself, to Wagner's sincere 
regret) a certain Edward Tauwitz of Warsaw became second conductor and 
chorus-master, the same "queer little chap" about whom Dorn records the 
Wagnerian bon-mot : *' Nobody sees him coming, nobody sees him go ; but 
of a sudden he's here, of a sudden he's off," — which bears traces of having 
been soaked in a muddy memory. 

t How much it had improved financially-speaking since his arrival, may be 
gathered from a letter of Feb. 9, 1844, to his old Magdeburg friend, tenor 
Friedrich Schmidt : " Within two years' stay at Riga, after refunding advances 
and paying off old judgment-debts, I had got so far as to be able to think of 
my debt to yourself, when I was suddenly deprived of my appointment there, 
and could think of nothing but saving myself firom extremities." 



"RIENZI, DER LETZTE DER TRIBUNEN." 259 

scraping together the means for his daring exploit. As he had 
aheady had his stipulated Benefit at the end of last year (Nov. 
30, 1838), with a representation of Meyerbeer's Robert^ no further 
favour could be asked of the theatre ; but the 14th of March had 
been fixed for the fifth of that series of six orchestral concerts 
referred to more than once : the members of the band at once 
consented to make it a Benefit for the conductor, especially as 
some such step had been originally contemplated. To ensure a 
good house, he issued a " concert-announcement," dated the 8th 
of March, containing the following sentence: "Within the past 
few days I have received distressing notice of my dismissal from 
the post I have hitherto held at this city's theatre, as that post 
had been accorded by Herr Holtei to another person for the 
coming year ; to myself it would therefore be most gratifying, to 
be assured by the interest displayed in this my concert that an 
honoured public is as satisfied as my present Director, Herr 
Hoffmann, with my diligence and unremitting attention to my 
duties." The concert opened with Beethoven's C minor Sym- 
phony, and closed with Mendelssohn's Calm Sea and Prosperous 
Voyage^ an overture unheard till then in Riga. 

Nor was Minna behindhand. She not only recited the mono- 
logue of Beatrice from Schiller's Bride of Messina at the concert, 
but appeared four times as " guest " at the theatre between April 
8 and 18, playing Preziosa, Maria Stuart, and the title-role in 
Th. Hell's Christinen*s Uebe und Entsagung, " A very pleasing 
exterior, grace of carriage and animated play of features, make 
her a most attractive figure on the stage," we read in the Riga 
ZKT^^f^^r of April 20 (May 2), 1839; "Merely her declamation, 
though highly expressive, sounds strange and at times a little 
indistinct j which may be partly due to Mme. Wagner's not having 
trod the boards for so long a time, and perhaps having fallen 
somewhat out of practice." Unfortunately these four evenings 
came too late in the season, and the last of them had to contend 
with the powerful competition of a concert given in the Schwarz- 
hauptersaal by a contrabassist from Milan ; the house accordingly 
consisted of little more than the regular subscribers, and the 
young Queen of Sweden had to hold her Court in the presence 
of very empty benches. 

Meanwhile Wagner was busy with the French teacher Henriot 
at a provisional translation of his Rienzi text; a labour that 



260 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

threatened to consume more time than could be spared on the 
eve of his departure. One drag upon the undertaking was the 
fact of his collaborator's not being so well up in German as in 
French. Hence an episode remembered by the master : In the 
first scene, when Adriano attacks the Orsini faction who are 
carrying off Irene, old Colonna airily assigns her to him as spoil ; 
the young noble, however, treats the incident more seriously, and 
surprises them all by crying out: "Hands off! My blood for 
hers ! " This excites the scorn of his opponents, and the head 
of the Orsinis contemptuously remarks : " Er spielt fiirwahr den 
Narren gut," i.e., "He can never be such a fool as to take a 
plebeian damsel seriously ! " Now, Wagner had translated this : 
^^Iljoue fort bieniefou^*] but the French-master would neither 
understand it, nor let it pass. Oddly enough, though the 
Dresden text-book of 1842 has the original German line, we find 
it weakened down in the pianoforte-score, as also in the standard 
edition of the poem, into " £r spielt fiirwahr den Helden gut." 

The month of May was drawing to its close: Wagner had 
completed his twenty-sixth year, and the composition of the 
second act of RienzL At the beginning of the month two concerts 
had been given by Lipinski in the theatre, when Wagner con- 
ducted overtures and orchestral accompaniments. The talented 
Polish fiddler had just relinquished an honourable position at 
S. Petersburg as first violinist to the Russian court, in obedience 
to a call to Dresden ; three years after this first encounter Wagner 
found him installed as Konzertmeister of the Dresden Court- 
opera, under Reissiger. For Amalie's farewell benefit her 
brother-in-law had yet to get up a performance of Figaro^ in 
which she sang the part of Cherubino with charm and grace 
His own last appearance at Riga was to have been as conductor 
of M^hul's Joseph (Monday, May 29, Russian style) ; but owing 
to a singer's illness that repetition never came off, and Fra 
Diavolo was given instead — quite of a piece with his whole 
Riga embroglio. 

Two days later Wagner and all the stage-company were under 
way for Mitau, for the usual summer engagement in June It 
can have been with no particular regret that he left Riga for 
good, though he retained a pleasant memory throughout his life 
of those who had dealt squarely by him, such as the excellent 
Hoffmann and, above all, his trusty subordinate L6bmann. 



"RIENZI, DER LETZTE DER TRIBUNEN." 261 

^'Certainly, dearest friend," he writes to the latter in Dec. 1843, 
^* I shall never forget how often toward the end of my sojourn 
jou proved yourself' my warmest solace and my truest friend. 
Whenever I think back to those days I am mostly filled with 
bitter humours, and I assure you that I left Riga as cold and 
indifferent as its populace had been to me: the only people I 
was sorry to part from, were yourself and the majority of the 
members of the orchestra ; who, I really believe, gave me their 
affection and regard." 



VIII. 

FROM RIGA TO PARIS. 

Difficulties of leaving Russia. — Last petfarmances at Mitau, — 
Crossing the Russian frontier, — Embarcation at Pillau, — Norway : 
the Sound and the " Champagne-mill" — London. — Arrival at 
Boulogne, — Meyerbeer, — Paris at the end of the thirties, 

DucurU voleniem fata, nolewtem trahunt, 

Seneca. 
Is there no star that rules the fate of each inspired soul ? 
May not his be a star of luck ? 

Richard Wagner {An End in Paris). 

** To get away from Russia unobserved, was no light matter in 
those days. Before the actual passport-worries, the chase from 
one official to another, could begin, the prospective traveller must 
be thrice proclaimed in the public papers for the benefit of all 
who might have claims against him." Thus Dom's contribution 
to the history of the times. 

Now, the Riga newspapers contain the legal "proclamation" 
of all artists and other individuals, native and foreign, about to 
cross the frontier outward-bound : the name of Richard Wagner 
would be sought in vain. To say nothing of judgment-summonses 
from his year of utter want at Kdnigsberg, a few Riga creditors 
had still to be settled with — ^some of them, in fact, had such 
good memories that they dug up their bills for the master's 
delectation in the seventies I Had he been continuing in the 
town, it would have been easy to compound for a more favour- 
able season; but any announcement of immediate departure 
could have been countered at once by the pettiest claim. Con- 
sequently, the Paris project must be kept as dark as possible. 
Among the few admitted to the secret were the kindly director 
and Heinrich Dom, the latter having joined the Mitau expedi- 
tion to reap the fruits of a personally-conducted representation 

s6a 



FROM RIGA TO PARIS. 263 

of his Schoffe von Farts at the modest little theatre on June 
the loth. For the two remaining months of the theatrical year, 
July and August, Hoffmann had requested Dorn to undertake 
the conductor's duties, willy-nilly, and relinquish the pay to the 
colleague he had ousted. Forty years later, in his Ergebnisse 
aus Erlebnissen (p. 164), Dom unctuously prides himself on this 
special act of friendship toward Wagner ! 

A souvenir of this month at Mitau has been preserved in the 
shape of a letter to French-teacher Henriot about that Rienzi 
translation. As time was pressing, Wagner had completed it 
himself at Riga, and left the manuscript in the hands of his 
collaborator for correction and improvement : hoping that these 
ameliorations of his "mauvaise traduction '* have been carried 
out meanwhile, he begs him to send it to his present address " si 
bientdt que possible." * This pending, the Mitau cycle pursued 
its appointed course. It had b^un with Das unterbrochene 
Opferfest (Amalie Planer as Elvira), and continued to warm up a 
portion of last winter's Riga menu, with Meyerbeer's Robert as 
bonne-bouche. The last of these performances was that of Weber's 
Oberon on June 25, in honour of Tsar Nicholas's birthday, 
introduced by Wagner and von Brackel's National Hymn, Next 
day the company returned to Riga, whilst their quondam musical 
conductor struck out south, t 

Through the woods and flowering meads of Courland he made 
by the main causeway. for the Prussian frontier. The dangers of 
its crossing then are graphically described by Dorn: "Every 
thousand yards stood a sentry-hut, where a Cossack kept watch 
when not on his beat ; in between patrolled the picket, keeping 
watch upon the sentries. This chain was difficult to break, but 



* This interesting document, comprising 32 written lines, reappeared at an 
autograph-sale in x886, and, in spite of its rather indifferent French, was 
purchased hy an unknown collector for a good stiff sum. 

t Having given a list of the 16 operas conducted by Wagner in his first 
Riga season, we may add a similar one for this second year, including the 
Mitau sttccursal (June 4 to 25). During the season 1838-39 we have 23 
separate works rehearsed and led by him : Robert Is Diahle 9 times ; Dai 
unterbrochene Opferfest 7 times; Freischutz and Postilion de Lonjumeau 6 
times each ; Norma^ Fra Diavolot FitQle Berger (Germ. — Zum treuen Sckafer), 
5 times each ; Romeo and Othello 4 times each ; Joseph^ FideliOy Jessonda^ 
Zauberfl&tey Barbtere^ Preziesa^ 3 times each ; Don Giovanni^ Figaro^ Dcane 
Blanche^ Oberon^ Schweiterfamilie^ Zampa^ twice apiece ; Stumme von Portici 



264 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

not impossible." He goes on to relate how a tenor Franz Mehlig 
in 1834 had taken a fortnight in accomplishing the feat, only to 
die of brain-fever brought on by the harass. Returning to 
Wagner, he continues : " A Kfinigsberg art-patron by the name of 
Abraham M6ller, well known in the northern theatrical world, 
had taken every precaution that the warm cabin of a border- 
Cossack should prove safe shelter for the fugitives while its 
l^itimate tenant was making his tour of inspection and 
manceuvring a pause in the game of picquet Four days later the 
rescued man was looking out from an upper window in the inn 
at Arnau upon Konigsberg, some five miles distant" 

An amusing episode in this Arnau halt was recollected by the 
master. M6ller had the distressing habit of snoring in his sleep, 
— an inconvenience in quarters so close as the tavern bedroom ; 
80 it was settled that if he grew too clamorous, his room-mate 
should whistle and stop him. While slumber still shunned the 
composer's eyelids, the solo began ; Wagner whistled with all his 
might ; but his companion slept soundly, and snored on. Robber, 
however, took the whistling for itself, came to the bed of its master, 
and began to lick his face ; the louder he whistled, the warmer 
became the attentions of his four-footed friend. Wherever Wagner 
went, whatever he went through, there was sure to be a dog-story 
attached to it. 

From Arnau the travellers proceeded to the little Prussian port 
of Pillau, to embark on a sailing-ship for England, on the way to 
Paris. "The impudence of artists!" — cries Laube three years 
after — " To have come with a wife, an opera and a half, a slender 
purse and a terribly large and terribly ravenous Newfoundland 
dog, through sea and storm, straight from the Dwina to the Seine^ 
to make his name in Paris ! In Paris, where half Europe competes 

and the first act of Mozart's Entfuhrung aus dent Serail once, — making 83 
performances in all. Besides these, he did aU the rehearsing for Dom's SckSffe 
voH Paris, conducted by the composer himself seven times at Riga and once 
at M itau ; on the other hand, Wagner's illness in the winter necessitated a 
temporary replacement by Lobmann. Attention may be drawn to the (act 
that, albeit he devoted so much trouble to that new opera of his shifty friend's, 
Wagner left his own Feen and Liehesverbot on the shelf. The cast of Fidelio, 
Feb. 24, 1839, may prove of interest : Florestan, Hr Hoffmann (beneficiary) ; 
Fidelio, Mme Hoffmann ; Rooco, Hr Gttnther ; Pizarro, Hr Wrede ; Marzel- 
line, Mme PoUert. Fidelio was repeated at Riga on March 8, and at Mitau 
June 24. 



FROM RIGA TO PARIS. 265 

for the jingle of fame; where all must pay toll, even the most 
meritorious, if it would come on the market, and thus to recogni- 
tion!" 

The voyage was rich in adventures never to be forgotten. 
There was no proper accommodation for passengers aboard ; the 
ship was badly provisioned and scantily manned. Terrible 
weather prevailed the whole time. Wagner, his wife and the big 
dog, were sea-sick almost all the way. Thrice was the ship over- 
taken by violent storms, and once her captain was compelled to 
put into a Norwegian haven. The passage through the Sound 
made a wonderful impression upon Wagner's fancy. The figure 
of the Flying Dutchman, whose closer acquaintance he had made 
at Riga» loomed up again amid the reefs and breakers. He heard 
more of the legend from the seamen's mouths, and it acquired 
an individual colour from his instant peril. Hereafter the magical 
skein of fable and reality was to weave itself into an artwork, in 
which we may even trace a name or two from local sources: 
^'Sandwike ist's! Genau kenn' ich die Bucht," says Daland in 
the opera's first scene ; and the fjord of Sandwike, by Arendal, 
was navigated in a storm this July 1839. Their obligatory landing 
on the coast of Norway formed a merry diversion, which the 
master was fond of relating as the story of the '* Champagne-mill " : 
— ^Together with a portion of the crew, the dripping passengers 
climb up the rocks, and arrive at an old windmill, where they are 
hospitably entertained There is only one bottle of rum in the 
house, but the hearty miller brings it out in triumph for his guests. 
Punch is brewed; the cockles of their hearts are warmed, the 
sailors sing songs, and general mirth holds sway. After a day or 
two the storm abates, and once more they put to sea ; but not 
before fresh storms have further checked their course, is the good 
ship steered into the Nore. 

Three weeks and a half had the terrible voyage to London 
endured, and the travellers were glad of a week of rest. Mr 
Edward Dannreuther (founder of the London Wagner Society in 
1872, and Wagner's host in 1877) tells us in his interesting essay 
in Gravis Dictionary that the master and Minna "lodged for a 
night at the Hoop and Horseshoe, 10 Queen Street, Tower Hill, 
still existing; then stayed at the King's Arms boarding-house. 
Old Compton Street, Soho, from which place the dog disappeared, 
and turned up again after a couple of days, to his master's frantic 



266 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

joy. Wagner's accurate memory for localities was puzzled when 
he wandered about Soho with the writer in 1877 and failed to 
find the old house. Mr J. Cyriax, who has zealously traced every 
step of Wagner's in London 1839, 55, and 77, states that the 
premises have been pulled down." * 

Referring in 1842 to this first visit to London, Wagner says : 
" Nothing interested me so much as the city itself and the Houses 
of Parliament, — not one of the theatres did I attend." It must 
have been a relief to watch the busy throngs in the streets, after 
confinement to a tiny craft, but the newcomer's eye was naturally 
attracted to the forest of masts below London Bridge, a magnifica- 
tion of the spectacle at Riga. A trip to Greenwich was made 
forthwith, according to Praeger (who, by the way, did not meet 
Wagner until 1855). Moored in the Thames, just above the 
palace, lay the Dreadnought, redolent of Nelson and Trafalgar 
Bay : boarding it, Wagner accidentally dropped his snuff'-box, " a 
present from Schr6der-Devrient"; in a vain attempt to rescue 
it he missed his footing, and narrowly escaped a ducking. 
Presently, however, while making the tour of Greenwich Hospital 
itself, he espied a pensioner taking snuff, and exclaimed to Minna : 
" If I could only speak English, I'd ask for a pinch." To his 
intense surprise the pensioner held out his box, saying that he 
was a Saxon and delighted to hear his native dialect once more. 
With his usual elaboration the same authority also tells us of a 
visit to Westminster Abbey, when Wagner stood plunged in thought 
before the monument to Shakespeare in Poets' Corner, and Minna 
roused him from his reverie by a pluck at the sleeve and a busi- 
ness-like *' Come, dear Richard, you have been standing here for 
twenty minutes like one of these statues, and not uttered a word." 
Beyond these trifling anecdotes, too harmless to be worth disput- 
ing, there is nothing more on record concerning the master's first 
sojourn in our huge metropolis. 

After this well-earned rest he took the packet for Boulogne-sur- 
mer, somewhat lightened in pocket by his London stay. In a 
humorous article styled ''Parisian Fatalities" (1841) he makes 
an imaginary German describe the disappointment of his hopes 
of finding France less costly. Of course we must not take this 

* Julius Cyrtax, long Hon. Treasurer and Secretary of the Wagner Society 
of London, and one of the master's most genial and enthusiastic friends. He 
died, alas I quite suddenly in 1892. 



FROM RIGA TO PARIS, 267 

as a piece of unadulterated autobiography, but the experience 
would in the main be Wagner's own. " My evil star would have 
it that I should tread the soil of France for the first time at 
Boulogne-sur-mer. I had come from England, indeed from 
London, and breathed again as I touched the land of francs, i.e. 
of twenty-sous pieces, leaving well behind the dreadful land of 
pounds and shillings; for I had calculated that I could live at 
least twice as cheaply in France, having regard to the relative 
numbers of sous and pence, of which latter there only went 
twelve to the handsomest shilling, whereas the least presentable 
of francs yet holds its twenty sous." He carries the fancy still 
farther, working it out into centimes, " during the passage on the 
steamboat, in fact," and building all kinds of castles in the air ; 
but "gruesome habits of the French, how have ye nullified my 
splendid plans! — Arrived at the hotel, I at once was asked: 
Pardon^ monsieur vaus ties Anglais 1 The voyage had so be- 
numbed my brain, that for the moment I really could not quite 
remember what country's child I was, and deemed it shortest to 
end my inward confusion by a hasty OuiP^ That "Oui!" 
wrecked everything: "Relying on French cheapness, I had 
stayed two days in the hotel ; an excellent gar^on had served me 
with especial reverence and attention. I had not been wrong, 
when I ascribed this obsequious service to the respect the creature 
cherished for my quality of Englishman ; of this I was positive 
when I observed his sudden change of manner after overhearing 
one of my frequent soliloquies in my mother-tongue." The 
waiter became "my brother. . . . Unfortunately this change of 
estimate had not come equally to pass in the cloudy mind of 
mine host. He seemed to have punctiliously stuck to my Ouit 
when he made up the reckoning for his hapless hospitality. To 
oblige me, he had written out this bill in English; certain in- 
explicably large figures upon it made me think there was some 
mistake, and that they were intended for another person, presum- 
ably a genuine Briton. But the host soon helped me out of 
doubt, and confirmed me in the true belief. The items were 
correct; my paradise was lost for aye, the soundness of my 
cendme system done to death " {P. W, VIII. 89-92). 

At dear Boulogne our pair of travellers, of course with dog, 
spent no less than a month ; but it was neither the famous sea- 
bathing, nor the sights of the place, that detained them, — simply 



l68 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the presence of one personage, acquaintance with whom was at 
that time a matter of moment to the young opeiatist. Immediately 
upon his arrival he had learnt that, among its other guests, the 
place was harbouring Meyerbeer* To him it must have seemed 
a special providence, thus directly on his entry into France to 
light upon the renowned composer of Robert and the Huguenots, 
What might not the recommendations of this influential maestro 
accomplish for his capture of the foreign stronghold ! '^ I made 
him acquainted with the two completed acts of my ' Rienzi ' ; in 
the friendliest manner he promised me his support in Paris," says 
Wagner in the Autolnographic Sketch of 1842. Meanwhile he 
had found a means of reducing his expenditure: *' Instead of 
lodging in Boulogne itself, he hired an apartment in its country 
environs; living was cheaper there, and he could work in un- 
broken quiet," as bis friend Gasperini tells us. ''Often have I 
heard him speak of those days of privation, but never with bitter- 
ness. He had such faith in himself, such a fund of youthful 
energy ; he believed himself so near the goal ; he was so certain 
that Paris would soon repay him for all his trials/' 

September 12 the instrumentation of the second act of Rienu 
was finished. Meyerbeer's interest in the work appeared sincere \ 
young Wagner's gratitude towards the world-famed man, who 
lent his aims such kindly recognition, was undissembled. This 
is proved by countless utterances of the period; warm-hearted 
and resilient confidence, in spite of all the strain it was put to, 
breathes from his every letter of this period to his mostly absent 
patron. That the unknown and impecunious German could not 
have the remotest prospect of getting his operas on to the Paris 
stage, was manifestly plainer to the worldly-wise composer than 
to his younger confrere. On his departure about the middle of 
September, Meyerbeer gave him a number of letters of intro- 
duction to leading Parisians: to Ant^nor Joly, director of the 
Renaissance theatre; to the director of the Grand Op^ra; to 
Habeneck, to music-publisher Schlesinger, even to his cUter ego 
and most trusty catspaw, Post-secretary Gouin. The pulling of 
the diplomatic strings of Parisian art was indeed this memorable 
man's peculiar forte, and his net was spread over the most 
distant circles of Europe itself; he held, in fact, a " chancellerie " 
of his own, prepared to swell the chorus of rkdame from the 
faintest whisper of preliminary gossip to the many-throated shout 



FROM RIGA TO PARIS. 269 

of acclamation of a work produced. Little as Wagner then knew 
of the devious windings of this labyrinth, the more must he have 
valued the declared intention to back him up ; the more heartfelt 
must have been his thanks, the more encouraging his hopes, and 
— ^the cruder his undeception. 

The last stage of his audacious journey lay before him, when 
he boarded the Boulogne diligence for Paris from his modest 
lodgings by the highway; every milestone passed brought him 
nearer to the Parnassus of all Europe, the "city full of endlessness 
and gloss and dirt." 

Those who know only the Paris of the Second Empire and 
Third Republic, have but little notion of the physiognomy the 
town presented to our young invader. It was not till Hausmann's 
prefecture of the Seine that a spacious thoroughfare was pierced 
through one of the worst-built and thickest-populated quarters of 
the city, from the Tuileries to the Bastille, the Louvre united 
with the Tuileries, the Place des Carrousels levelled and laid out, 
the main Boulevards extended to the Madeleine, the Champs 
Elys^es planted with shrubs and relieved with fountains, the 
Palais de Tlndustrie erected, the Bois de Boulogne converted 
into a pleasure-park and embellished with a wide expanse of 
water. Where broad symmetric streets and boulevards now 
alternate with well-kept open spaces decked with flowers, at that 
period we should have found dark and dingy haunts standing 
cheek by jowl with the Palais Royal, the Tuileries and uncom- 
pleted Louvre ; sheds and jugglers' booths and punch-and-judy- 
boxes wedged in between the two palaces; the glory of the 
Elys^es unkempt and badly lighted; a maze of filthy passages 
and tumble-down houses around the stateliness of Notre Dame ; 
the cut-throat slums of the Cit6, the airless, lightless alleys of the 
Quartier Latin, the hovels of a rookery on the Place Cambrai, a 
dusty desert of a Bois de Boulogne, a hideous wilderness of 
drinking-dens around the Arc de Triomphe, and many another 
spot a stranger would scarcely dare to pass at night At a like 
abomination in the old Quartier des Halles, No. 23 Rue de la 
Tonnellerie, did the young master, his wife and the big dog, reap 
their first experience of the chameleon city ; it was a hdtel garni 
of almost the lowest rank, — in this street there were none superior. 
The forbidding house had but one distinction, a bust of Molibre 
above the entrance, denoting it the poet's birthplace. Together 



270 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

with its whole setting of malodorous courts and alleys, the house 
has now been demolished, to make way for the Rue du Pont-neuf, 
No. 31 whereof is decorated with a memorial tablet. 

"Eh! I knew it well, the fusty old Rue de la Tonnellerie," 
says a former dweller in this quarter, Ernst Pasqu^ {Nord und 
Siidy 1884), "with its whole environment to match: the Rue de 
la Fromagerie, de la petite Friperie, du Marche aux Poires, and 
whatever else they then were called ! It was a narrow, dirty, 
gloomy passage, uniting the Rue Saint Honor^ with the Halles ; 
short enough, but hedged by houses of five and six storeys apiece, 
which, old and tottering, with their pitch-dark courts and frowsy 
little shops, made the reverse of an inviting impression. The 
whole quarter had been left exactly as it was some 50 or 60 years 
before, and ofifered a speaking portrait of the Paris of the previous 
century. Only as a rare event did a ray of sunshine strike these 
alleys that were scarcely ever free from mud, and never from 
vegetable refuse. For at midnight the maraichers of the sur- 
rounding district began their inroad, bringing produce to the 
Halles and March6 des Innocents, thundering down the Rue de 
la Tonnellerie with raucous oaths, to pile their cabbages and 
cauliflowers in pyramids against the gable-walls, almost up to the 
second storey. By night and day the noise was deafening, and 
the Rue de la Tonnellerie always reeked with the smell of 
vegetables, fruit, and cheese. '* 

Such was the external scenery of Richard Wagner's first advent 
to Paris, for the musical conquest of which he had journeyed all 
the way from Russia. This was the Paris hitherto represented in 
his £ancy by its palaces and theatres, its Notre Dame and Place 
de Gr^ve, its Boulevards, Faubourgs and other grand things ; the 
Paris that moved all Europe by its operas and revolutions, eh ! at 
times turned one into the other, — and wherein he now set foot 
" with very little money, but the best of hopes." 



IX. 
FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 

Introductions, — Meeting with Laube ; dinner at BroccPs; Heinr 
rich Heine, — Peckt^ Kietz^ Anders^ Lehrs, — Grand Opkra and 
Thk&tre des Italiens, — Conservatoire de Musique : Ninth Symphony, 
— Scribe and Berlioz, — Composition of French romances, — Fortunes 
of the '' Liebesverbof' at the Renaissance theatre,— A ''Faust'' 
overture, — Removal to Rue du Helder. — Bankrupt^ of the Re- 
naissance, 

*^ I am poor; in a few weeks ^ in fact ^ without a sou. 
But what of that? I have been told that I have talent p— 
was I to choose Tunis as the place for pmhing it? No; I 
have come to Paris, the hub of the worlds where artists of 
every race find recognition. Here I shall soon discover if 
folk deceived me when they credited me with talent^ or if I 
really own any,** 

KiCHA&D Wagnbr (An End in Paris), 

There is only one thing to compare with this first visit of 
Wagner's to Paris: that of Luther to Rome. In both cases 
the undeception of a trusting German idealist became the 
fulcrum of a Reformation. Wagner had brought with him as 
whole a faith in the " hub of the world, where the arts of every 
nation stream together to one focus," as the poor Augustine 
monk in the earthly centre of the Church, the holiness of 
Peter's-throne. He was prepared for many a rebuff, many a 
self-denial, in his honourable ambition; but his lively fancy 
limned the forum of Grand Opera with so many points of 
likeness to his own ideal, that he confidently reckoned upon 
finding here an honest verdict on the value of his art. Ex- 
perience soon demolished that belief, and changed his views 
in more than one direction. "I entered a new path, that of 
revolution against our modem Public Art^ — with whose condi- 
tions I had erewhile striven to comply, — when I looked upon 

871 



272 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

its glittering crest in Paris" (P. IV. I. 303). His grievous dis- 
illusionments were thus to pave the inner way for the Reformer. 

Gasperini sketches the outward course of these experiences 
with a few drastic strokes : " At Meyerbeer's bidding every door 
flew open to him : the director of the Grand Op^ra extends his 
arms, Schlesinger offers him a thousand services, Habeneck 
receives him as an equal ; in short, for one brief month Wagner 
returns each evening to his rooms in the Rue de la Tonnellerie 
delighted alike with Paris and the Parisians, astonished at the 
welcome tendered him, touched by the civilities wherewith he 
is heaped. His goal seems near, nay, all but reached. Next 
month his fever of elation cools: he fancies he observes that 
the Director is somewhat more constrained in his allusions to 
his opera, that he visibly draws back from naming any definite 
day of audience and merely doubles his cajoleries, the better 
to avoid a binding promise. With German punctuality he keeps 
all his appointments, only to find that the other party has for- 
gotten to make an appearance ; everywhere he encounters people 
who multiply the politeness of their assurances in measure as 
they mean to shake him off. One fine day he comes to the 
conclusion that he is on the wrong road, and all this civility 
is no more than a mask. Ere long, no further doubt is possible ; 
he is lonelier, more forsaken than ever, farther removed from 
the imagined fortune than on the first day of his arrival in 
Paris." 

Exaggerated though the opening of this statement, it is upon 
something similar that Wagner's own subsequent reflection would 
appear to rest: "It ha^ frequently been found difficult for a 
Frenchman to remember of his own accord a promise given; 
but he turns furious if we remind him of it" {F,IV. V. 52). 
Perhaps we may discover a more lenient explanation in the 
words of Rousseau regarding his own first entry into the great 
world of Paris : " Je fus bientot desabus^ de tout ce grand int^r^t 
qu'on avait paru prendre k moi. II faut pourtant rendre justice 
aux Fran^ais : ils ne s'^puisent point autant qu'on dit en protesta- 
tions, et celles qu'ils font sont presque toujours sinc^res ; mais ils 
ont une manibre de paraltre s'int^resser pour vous qui trompe plus 
que des paroles : on croirait qu'ils ne vous disent pas tout ce qu'ils 
veulent faire, pour vous surprendre plus * agr^ablement. Je dirai 
plus : ils ne sont point faux dans leurs demonstrations ; ils ont en 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS, 273 

effet le sentiment qu'ils vous t^moignent : en vous parlant ils sont 
pleins de vous ; ne vous voient-ils plus, lis vous oblient ; tout est 
chez eux Toeuvre du moment " {Confessions^ Book 4). 

In any case, the epistolary advices of the grand monarch of 
French Opera by no means produced so magical an effect as 
that described above. For the most part they fell quite flat: 
from the first our hero met with nothing but a cold politeness, 
which gave rise in fact to the ancient legend, current among 
Wagner's Paris friends, of a double file of correspondence, — 
Meyerbeer being supposed to have anticipated every letter in 
which he describes the young German musician as of eminent 
gifts by another in which he pooh-poohs him as incompetent, 
and apologises for his recommendation by explaining that it 
was the only way to get rid of him. Be that as it may, the 
mighty maestro soon appeared in person, on a flying visit, and 
seemed to be doing whatever he could for the aims of his 
prot^g^, thrusting him upon Ant^nor Joly, director of the ill- 
starred Thditre de la Renaissance^ and making him acquainted 
with other magnates of the Paris world of art. More was not 
feasible for the moment, and of course the Grand Opera was 
out of the question as yet 

To turn to a pleasanter quarter, an agreeable surprise was in 
store for Wagner : discovery of the presence of his old friend 
Heinrich Laube, who at last had realised his contemplated trip to 
Paris, though no longer with Saint-Simonistic objects. He had 
married in the same year as Wagner (1836), and since had travelled 
through Algiers and France to cull material for certain literary 
products, to the polishing of which he now proposed to devote a 
winter in Paris. With this end he had taken lodgings on the 
Boulevard des Italiens, — an extraordinary luxury for a German 
author in those days. ^'Strange fortunes had removed friend 
Wagner from my sight awhile, and I was no little astonished to 
see him suddenly enter my study in Paris," says Laube in the 
Ztg,f, d. elegante Welt (No. 6, 1843). "His inexhaustibly pro- 
ductive nature, unceasingly impelled and prompted by a lively 
fancy, had always interested me ; and I had always hoped that 
most excellent modern music would issue from a personality so 
filled with the culture of our day." This call must have been 
paid very soon after Wagner's arrival in Paris, for in October we 
find Laube introducing him to a fresh acquaintance, Friedrich 

s 



274 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Pecht, afterwards a well-known painter and writer on art, but at 
that time studying under Delaroche. 

In course of a widely-interesting reminiscence (Allg. Zig, 
March 22, 1883) Pecht tells us of a visit to the picture-galleries 
in the Louvre : — "As soon as I met Laube in the Salon Carr6 he 
said, ^ I'm going to introduce you to some compatriots, a younger 
brother of our cousin and your friend Fiau Friedrich Brockhaus,* 
lately ELapellmeister at Riga, but just arrived here with his wife. 
You both intend to seek your fortune here, for he is trying to get 
an opera performed.' Before long a youthful pair advanced to 
Laube, and the strikingly distinguished-looking man, well-favoured 
and attractive into the bargain, was presented to me as ' Herr 
Richard Wagner.' His features then shewed nothing of that 
sternness which forty years of combat stamped upon them later; 
on the contrary, a something soft, for all their marked intelligence 
and animation. Manifestly distracted and occupied with quite 
other things than Rubens and Paolo Veronese, whose pictures I 
was expounding with all the enthusiasm of a warm admirer, 
Wagner pleased me very well, but made no deep impression on 
me : he looked decidedly too neat and nice. There was a certain 
shimmer of refinement about his whole appearance. To be sure, 
something unapproachable as well, that might have struck a more 
careful observer, but to which we were much less accustomed then 
in German geniuses than nowadays." Minna also comes in for 
Pecht's first impressions : one would not have remarked in this 
pretty creature either the late actress, or the artist at all ; rather, 
a kind-hearted little woman, sober and without ^lan, devoted to 
her husband with all her soul, following him everywhere with 
bowed head ; but without the faintest notion of his genius, and, 
for all her love and loyalty, so fond of middle-class respectability 
that she formed his fundamental opposite. "Wagner's absent- 
mindedness at this first encounter," continues Pecht, " was only 
too explainable, as he had arrived in the foreign capital without 
resources, not even thorough master of the language, and at his 
wits' end what to do ; a fact he no longer concealed from us as 
our acquaintance wore on." 

Laube constituted the immediate link in this closer bond: 



* This relationship was based on Lanbe's marriage with the charming Idana 
Budllus, member of a family whose branches were connected with all the 
Leipzig set of merchant-scholars. 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 275 

" Good comrade that Laube always was, he soon introduced us to 
Heine. The occasion was a dinner in common at Brocci's, a 
famous Italian restaurant in the Rue Lepelletier, opposite the 
Grand Op^ra. Heine brought his wife, in those days entrancingly 
beautiful, merry and naive as a child ; she was a feast for the eyes 
of us all, and even put the beauty of Frau Wagner in the shade. 
Laube was just the man to prick Heine from the blas6 in- 
difference of his first greeting ; the graceful tact of Iduna Laube 
did the rest, and drew him to a perfect shower of witty rejoinders, 
— which he generally appeared to have studiously prepared before- 
hand Under the hail of meteors Wagner also thawed out of 
silence, and displayed that curious elasticity of his, that rarest 
faculty of complete detachment from the cares and worries of his 
daily life. He had the knack of telling a good tale, the sharpest 
eye for comic relief, the keenest ear for the accents of nature, and 
the surest taste for ever3^hing fine in the plastic arts as well.* 
As he had just made a hazardous voyage from Riga in a tiny 
sailing-vessel, driven out of his course up the coast of Norway, the 
story of that adventure soon held us all." Laube adds the further 
touch of " Heine, else so immovable, folding his hands in pious 
horror at this assurance of a German's." The conversation taking 
a turn towards the literary and political condition of the fatherland, 
with a few biting strictures by no means expressed in a whisper, 
" Heine suddenly bethought him that, in our treasonable conclave, 
we really ought to have a little care as to who might be sitting 
near us. Taking the hint, I strained my ear to the crowded room, 
and made the alarming discovery that German was being spoken 
at every table, whilst our own had become the object of marked 
and general attention. That put an end to Brocci's; but our 
dinners were resumed now here, now there, and belong to my 
most interesting Paris recollections." 

It seems doubtful whether Heine was again a partner in these 
little dinners, but Wagner met him now and then, and even paid 
a visit to his rooms in the Faubourg Poissonifere. The writer of 



* In confinnation of the last clause, see Dr O. Bie's important stndy, 
RicKard Wagner's VerhdUniss ntr BUdenden Kunst (Allg. Mus. Ztg. 1892, 
pp. 85-285) ; N. A. Harzen-MUller's Wagnet's Beziehungen su den bildenden 
Kiinsten (Mus. Wochenblatt 1893, Nos. 22-26); and C. F. Glasenapp's 
Hauptepochen der bildenden Kunst bet den GriecAen, mii Einleiiung: Richard 
Wagner Uber die bildende Kunst der Griecken (Riga, W. Mellin, 1890). 



276 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the Reisebilder^ according to Laube, was at that time more like an 
Abb^ of the eighteenth century, with his portly frame and unctuous 
humour. His outward circumstances were comfortably flourishing, 
and formed a vivid contrast to those of the poor German musician. 
Not that his literary activity, including his regular anonymous 
political correspondence in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeifung, 
brought him more than three-thousand francs a-year; but his 
millionaire Hamburg uncle made him a handsome allowance, and 
saw that it was paid him punctually. Heine^ however, liked good 
living, and had indulged in some unlucky speculations on the 
Bourse, which swallowed up the 20,000 fr. paid him by Campe in 
1837 for eleven years' copyright of his works. So the "German 
poet" — ^and worse, the political journalist — had taken the fatal 
step of accepting secret-service money from the French Govern- 
ment For eleven years, until the fall of Guizot, he drew a salary 
from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he euphemised 
as " the alms given by the French nation to many thousands of 
foreigners who had compromised themselves at home by their 
2eal for the cause of Revolution." * Such a man can never have 
been on very friendly terms with Wagner, and almost the only 
remark attributed to him, in this connection, is that recorded by 
Th. Hagen : " Do you know what makes me suspicious of this 
talent ? That it was recommended by Meyerbeer.^^ He knew only 
too well that the mainstay of Grand Opera would never support 
a rival in Paris who might prove at all dangerous. Beyond that, 
he cherished a peculiar dislike for his famous congener, a dislike 
usually reserved for those who had wounded his personal vanity, 
and was very fond of playing off his wit on him in conversation ; 

• Eugen Wolff: Brief e von Heinrifh Heine an Heinrich Laube^ Breslau, 
Schottlander 1893, p. 42. — The author and diplomatist E. Grenier, whom 
Heine familiarly nicknamed "the little French Goethe," was induced to 
translate a portion of this political Correspondence into French, for Heine to 
shew it, as Grenier tells us, '* to the Princess Belgiojoso, whom I had seen and 
much admired at the races in the Champs de Mars. LAter, a good deal later, 
he disclosed to me for whom I had translated those articles from the Augsburg 
Allgenieine : it was not for the fine eyes of the Princess — those great cruel 
eyes, as Musset calls them, — ^but for those of M. Guizot. Heine received 
6000 fr. a year from the secret-service fund, and had to shew the minister from 
time to time that he had earned it ; hence, apparently, he got me to translate 
the articles that were especially fiivourable to France. For that matter, my 
labour was unrepaid, as Heine never introduced me to the Princess after all " 
(£. Grenier, in the Reoue Blew 1892). 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 277 

for instance when he discounted the canard that Post-secretary 
Gouin had composed the whole of Meyerbeer's operas, suggesting 
that "possibly Gouin had really written nothing more than the 
fourth act of the Huguenots." * 

Pecht goes on to tell of the young Germans in whose company 
he now met Wagner frequently. " There was a fellow-Dresdener, 
the talented portrait-painter Ernst Kietz, who soon afterwards 
drew a capital portrait of Wagner. He was a pupil of Delaroche's, 
like myself, and particularly amused us by his obstinate adherence 
to the infinitive for every French verb. Presently he brought a 
learned friend with him, a poUtical refugee who held a small post 
in the Paris Library and called himself 'Anders,' but whose proper 
name we never discovered. As Wagner put it, we had all ' taken 
the vow of chastity and poverty,' and, with the best of will, could 
lend him small assistance." 

To these we may add the philologist Lehrs refenred-to by 
Wagner in a letter to Uhlig of October 1852 as "one of my 
dearest friends in Paris, who came to grief because he could not 
take a holiday to attend to his cure " — a warning only too sadly 
verified in Uhlig's own case a few months thereafter. This Lehrs 
was the only Hebrew in Wagner's intimate Paris circle ; his original 
distinctive name was Samuel, but he had changed it to Siegfried 
upon becoming a Christian. Author of various erudite treatises, 
his great work on Nicander and Oppian is mentioned in Didot's 
BibliotKtque Grecque. Lehrs died of consumption in April 1843, 
just a year after Wagner left Paris, and there can be no doubt 
that F. Praeger, with his easily-explicable passion for scenting out 
a "constant close intimacy of Wagner with the descendants of 
Judah," has turned him into the apocryphal " Louis " whose sur- 
name he is "unable to recall," but whose existence is vouched for 
by no authority^ — ^the similarity in the appearance of the names, 
if badly written, would amply account for the transfer, in view of 
that pseudo-biographer's indubitably failing powers and general 
tendency to muddle. 

Twelve years afterwards Wagner gives a thumb-nail sketch of 

this earliest Paris period. "The half-finished 'Rienzi' I laid 

at first upon one side, and busied myself in every way to make 

myself known in the world's metropolis. But I lacked the 

* See Appendix. 



278 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

necessary personal qualifications; I had scarcely learnt even 
the French tongue, instinctively distasteful to me, sufficiently 
for the most ordinary needs of everyday. Not in the remotest 
degree did I feel tempted to assimilate the Frenchman's nature, 
though I flattered myself with the hope of appealing to it in 
my own way ; I confided in music, as a cosmopolitan language, 
to fill that gulf between my own and the Parisian character to 
which my inner feeling could not be blind" (P.W, I. 301). 
Unluckily his confidence in music was misplaced : he could not 
play the piano well enough to give strangers a clear idea of his 
compositions, and the only wonder is that he made any head- 
way at all; as Pecht says, 'Mt can only be attributed to the 
magic of his temperament, his bubbling vitality and winning 
presence, together with his enormous force of will, that he got 
so far as to make people even listen to him." 

His worst disillusionment was of an impersonal nature. He 
had come to Paris with an exaggerated estimate of the art- 
institute that ruled all Europe at that time. True, this Grand 
Op^ra, so long the goal of his desires, still drew him as a magnet 
for awhile; but he very soon discovered that its wealth of 
precious means was squandered on a wholly spurious genre, a 
prey to virtuosity and brainless mannerism. The actual per- 
formances at this grand bazaar left him chilled to the bone by 
their want of any vital spark. He found the whole thing 
"commonplace and middling," and, in all the Acad^mie Royale 
de Musique, what pleased him best was the care bestowed on 
the mise-en-sc^ne and decorations. " Those who had only seen 
HaWvy'syww in Germany," he says in his Parisian Amusements 
(1841), "assuredly could never divine how it came to amuse 
the Parisians. The riddle is solved at once, when one sees 
the Paris curtain rise. Where we in Germany took fire at the 
powerful features of the composition, the Parisian has quite 
other fish to fry. For what a length of time have the French 
machinist and scene-painter known to strain and feed the curiosity 
of the opera-goer I Verily, he who sees this inscenation, needs 
long and careful scrutiny before he can exhaust the thousand 
details of the mounting. Who can take in the rare and lavish 
costumes at a glance ? Who can grasp at once the mystic mean- 
ing of the ballets? — But indeed it needs all these attractions, 
to disclose to the Parisians the intrinsic value of an original 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 279 

work ; for I tell you again, before all else they ask to be amused, 
—by hook or crook amused ** {P.JV. VIII. 78). This outward 
splendour of the performances at the Grand Op^ra — ^which he 
" did not attend very often " — would send a pleasurable warmth 
into his brain, and kindle the desire, the hope, to triumph there 
one day himself; but when he turned from the showy form 
to its contents, he was filled by reflections such as we have 
seen in his comparison between the Paris and the Dresden 
chorus. 

And what had the other subventioned lyric theatres, the 
Thd4tre des Italiens, the Op^ra Comique, the Od^on, to shew 
him ? If there lingered one vestige of his earlier " easy-going " 
views, it was finally expunged by the Italian singers and their 
perfumed audience. The critical lash he wields on a perform- 
ance of Mozarf s I?on Giovanni by wooden and voiceless heroes 
and heroines of the Italian Opera, Rubini, Tamburini, Persiani, 
and other of the public's pets, proves how little satisfaction was 
here for him to reap. The Op^ra Comique might have pleased 
him more, as he says in his Autobiographic Sketchy for 'Mt 
possesses the best talents, and its performances offer an ensemble, 
an individuality, such as we should seek in vain in Germany." 
Even in Opera and Drama (1850) he refers with approbation 
to the "entertaining, often delightfully witty genre** peculiar 
to this establishment But already in 1842 he has to deplore 
the degradation that has seized this stage: "Whither have flown 
the grace of Mdhul, Isouard, Boieldieu, and j^^w^i^ Auber,* scared 
by the contemptible quadrille rhythms which rattle through this 
theatre to-day?" {P. W. I. 16). 

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that, in his present 
doubtful situation, there was not a something in Wagner's mind 
resisting full and prompt acknowledgment of the hollowness of 
all he saw around. This something, as he tells us, was a "readi- 
ness to warm myself at any of that art-world's ignes fatui YrYad^i 
shewed the least resemblance to my goal: their sickly unsub- 



* With regard to his recent output, the Domino ncir^ Diamants de la 
Couronne etc., Wagner remarks in 1841 that ''opera-composing has become 
as much of a habit to Auber, as lathering to a barber. But the great master 
often stops at lathering now, and sometimes at bare soap-sudding. His fine 
keen razor, bright though its blade, one feels but seldom," etc, etc (P,W^ 
VIII. 125). 



28o LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

stantiality was mantled with a glittering show, such as I had 
never seen before. It was only later, that I became conscious 
how grossly I had deceived myself in this respect through an 
almost artificial state of nervous excitation. That gratuitous 
excitement, mounting glibly to the verge of transport, was 
nourished, unawares to myself by the feeling of my outward 
lot — which I must have recognised as completely hopeless if I 
had suddenly admitted to myself that all this artistic tinsel, 
that made up the world in which I was struggling to get on, 
was inwardly an object of my deepest scorn. My outward straits 
compelled me to hold that admission aloof, and I was able to 
do it with the ready placability of a man and artist whom an 
instinctive need of love lets see in every smiling semblance the 
object of his search " (P. W, I, 302). 

The solitary oasis in this desert was the old tumble-down house 
in the Rue Bergbre tenanted by the Conservatoire de Musique. 
Its modest placards were almost lost in the mass of theatrical 
posters and flamboyant puffs of other concerts; its hall was 
perhaps the poorest in gilding and such-like allurements — a 
crying contrast to the Salles Vivienne and Musard. And yet it 
was here that Wagner gained an impression of Beethoven's Ninth 
Symphony such as he had never experienced at the Gewandhaus 
concerts in his birthplace, and which stayed graven on his memory 
his whole life through. Over and over again does he recall it : 
"it was as if scales had fallen from my eyes," he tells us in 1869, 
"for in every bar the orchestra had learnt to recognise the 
Beethovenian melody. The orchestra sang that melody. That 
was the secret." He goes on to recount how Habeneck had 
rehearsed this symphony for one whole winter "without feeling 
anything beyond its incomprehensibility and ineffectiveness," 
and how that had moved him to rehearse it yet a second and 
a third year through, till at last the "novel Beethovenian melos" 
had dawned on every member of his band. " But Habeneck," 
he adds, "was at least a conductor of the good old stamp: he 
was master, and all his men obeyed him" (P,W. IV. 301). 
Thus had the orchestral director of the Conservatoire developed 
into a pioneer of the " noblest conquest of the German genius," 
against the full weight of a name such as that of F^tis, who had 
accused Beethoven of unnaturalness, extravagance, and striving 
for effect And now, however little the beau-monde may have 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 28 1 

relished the change, the works of Beethoven had become " the 
mode " in Paris, not a concert taking place without at least his 
name upon the programme. For all that, Wagner closes his 
earlier remarks on the Paris Conservatoire with the words : 
"These concerts stand alone, in utter solitude; they have 
influenced nothing." 

Among the various interviews of his first year in Paris we 
have a visit to Eugbne Scribe, apparently in prosecution of that 
infructuous correspondence of some time before. In his Parisian 
Amusements (1841) Wagner draws a humorous picture of this 
typical Parisian playwright and his countless avocations. "He 
is the epitome of the art of amusing, and has gained the most 
astounding credit for the establishment over which he presides 
with such exemplary diligence. That establishment is the whole 
of the Parisian theatres. In this household he receives all Paris 
every night, and has the knack of entertaining all as each desires. 
. . . Would you not expect him to be quite prostrate next day? 
— Go visit him at ten o'clock in the morning, and you'll be 
astonished — You behold him in an elegant silk dressing-gown, 
over a cup of chocolate. He certainly requires the light refresh- 
ment ; this very instant he has left his desk, where for two whole 
hours he has been flogging his hippogryph through that romantic 
wonderland which smiles upon you from the great poet's works. 
But think you he is really resting, with that chocplate? Look 
round, and you'll observe that every corner of the charming 
room, each chair, divan and sofa, is filled by a Parisian author 
or composer. With every one of these gentlemen he is engaged 
on weighty business, such as would not brook a moment's inter- 
ruption in the case of other people ; with every one of them he 
is hatching the plot for a drama, an opera, a comedy or vaudeville ; 
with every one of them he is devising a brand-new intrigue. . . . 
Moreover he is busied at the same time with a pile of well-turned 
billets to this and that client, polishing ofl* this or that applicant 
by word of mouth, and paying 500 fr. for a puppy. But amid it 
all he gathers matter for his coming pieces, studies with a fleeting 
smile the character of strangers just announced or done with, sets 
them in a frame, and in fifteen minutes makes a play of which no 
one as yet knows a word. I rather fancy I myself one day became 
a subject for him in this fashion, and shall be much surprised if 
we don't soon see a piece in which my plaintive wonder at the 



282 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

costly purchase of the puppy becomes the pivot of a telling 
situation" {F.IV. VIII. 80-81). 

His introductions to Habeneck, Hal^vy, Berlioz etc., led to 
nothing : ** in Paris no artist has the time to strike up friendship 
with another, for each is in a red-hot hurry for his own advantage." 
Among them Hector Berlioz, in spite of his stand-offishness, 
attracted him the most : '^ he differs by the breadth of heaven 
from his Parisian colleagues, since he makes no music for money. 
Yet he cannot write for pure art ; he lacks all sense of beauty." 
Wagner found him absolutely isolated, "with nothing but a troop of 
devotees around him, shallow persons wi&out a spark of judgment, 
who greet him as the founder of a brand-new musical system and 
completely turn his head* — while the rest of the world avoids 
him as a madman." The German musician heard the first per- 
formance of the Romeo and Juliet Symphony in November, 1839, 
and thus expresses himself concerning it a year and a half later : 
^'It filled me with regret. Amid the most brilliant inventions, 
this work is heaped with such a mass of solecisms that I could 
not repress the wish that Berlioz had shewn it before performance 
to some such man as Cherubini, who, without doing its originality 
the slightest injury, would certainly have had the wit to rid it of 
a quantity of disfigurements. With Berlioz' excessive sensitiveness, 
however, even his most intimate friend would never dare a like 
proposal" {P. JV. VIII. 134). 

Wagner's opinion of Berlioz' music never changed, nor will its 
justice in the main be disputed by the most generous critic to- 

* Compare Stephen Heller in the ^/^. Musikxeitun^ 1894 (P* 88) : " Even 
in 1838, the year I first arrived in Paris, Berlioz stood quite apart among 
the artists there. He was misunderstood, true enough ; but after the fashion 
of a man who really has something to be misunderstood : he had raised ' mis- 
understanding ' to a cachet ; the admiration of a large circle had given it such 
strident prominence, that it won him fresh friends every day. It was particn* 
larly artists in other departments that felt attracted, not so much by the 
music itself, as by its poetical framework, its picturesque programmes. Among 
these must be numbered many of the best poets and romancers : V. Hugo, 
Lamartine, Dumas, de Vigny, Balzac, the painters Delacroix and Ary Scheffer. 
All these wholly unmusical beings, who have the harrowing scenes of their 
dramas accompanied by a waltz of Stmuss (played slow, with mutes and a dash 
of tremolo), all mved about Berlioz, and displayed their sympathy in word and 
deed. And then a certain portion of the superiorly el^[ant world, folk who 
loved to buy the reputation for free-thinking cheap, incapable of telling a sonata, 
of Diabelli's from one by Beethoven." 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 283 

day. Nevertheless he prized the artist for his refusal to truckle 
to the Philistines, and deplored that poverty whose pinch he 
knew too well himself. In one of his Paris articles he jokingly 
characterises the gift of 20,000 fr., said to have been bestowed 
on the composer of the Symphome Fantastiqiie by the else so 
stingy Paganini, as the " wages of Hell " that conjure up Envy 
for good and deprive the recipient of even the world's pity. 
But Berlioz the writer could do without pity : as the intrepid 
critic of the Journal des Dkbats he made himself feared ; and 
the icrivain is always an object of respect to the French, — an 
experience presently to be reaped by the young master himself, 
when every road was barred to him as musician. 

Let us now inquire how Wagner was occupied, apart from 
waiting on celebrities, this first Parisian winter. Rienzi he had 
been obliged to lay on one side half-finished, to turn his attention 
to the wherewithal to gain himself a name more speedily. In 
An End in Paris he makes the hero unfold his plans for con- 
quering the capital, among which we find the composition of 
ballads and romances in the style of Schubert : " This is a genre 
that admirably suits my inclination; I feel capable of turning 
out something worth noticing there. I will get my songs sung, 
and perhaps may share the good luck which has befallen so 
many — namely of attracting the attention of some Director of 
the Op^ra who may happen to be present." So he becomes 
drawing-room composer, and sets music to a French translation 
of Heine's Beiden Grenadiere and two or three French romances — 
Mignonne by Ronsard, Dars^ mon enfant and Attente by Victor 
Huga* But however simple and easy he had striven to keep them, 
they seem to have been thought too odd and difficult for actual 

* For all their ephemeral design, the many points of contact presented by 
these graceful ' pieces d'occasion ' with the master's later creations shew how 
deeply they were rooted in his inner being. The characteristic rhythm intro- 
ductory to the Cradle-song is not merely most intimately allied to the Sailors' 
cry and Spinning-song in the Flying DuUhman^ but has a psychological 
resemblance to the wistful close of Senta's ballad, '* Ach, wo weUt sie, die dir 
Gottes Engel einst konne zeigen ? " Through the plastic feature of the look- 
out from the watch-tower, the main theme of Attente has a strong family- 
likeness to " Und Kurwenal, wie, du sah'st sie nicht? " in Tristan ; whilst the 
striking motive of moribund exhaustion in the Beiden Grenadiere is plainly 
related with the *' Kein Fleh'n, kein Elend seiner Ritter" oi Parsifal, 



284 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

delivery (or even French publication, except the first-named) 
and had no chance against the sentin^ental chansons of the 
fashionable drawing-room composer, Loisa Puget, whose name 
we meet so often in the Parisian Amusements etc. 

By Meyerbeer's advice he had opened negotiations, in the 
autumn, with the director of the Th^itre de la Renaissance. 
The Paris wits declared that no better name could have been 
chosen for this theatre, as it died three times a year as regular as 
clockwork, and was as regularly reborn. Ant^nor Joly was its 
accoucheur in ordinary, an old hand at pulling through a bank- 
ruptcy, and every-time disaster forced him to shut to the scarcely- 
opened doors of his ill-fated house he cried undauntedly Man 
thidtre est morty vive mon thidtre/ — Surely the obliging introducer 
must have known the nature of the quicksands toward which he 
gaily steered his trusting prot^gd. 

At this Th^itre de la Renaissance the future composer of 
Martha and Stradella had just enjoyed his first success, with Le 
Naufrage de la Miduse (composed by Flotow in concert with 
Pilati, and produced on May 31, 1839). That was clearly the 
genre for the house, and if Wagner wanted to succeed here, his 
field was pretty plainly marked. The score of Das Liebesverhot 
seemed just the thing, whilst the "somewhat frivolous subject" 
would admirably meet the views of this particular audience. 
After so warm a recommendation, the director could hardly help 
making the young German the best of promises, and one of the 
most prolific playwrights of the French metropolis, Dumersan, 
tame poet to the Th^Htre des Vari^t^s, was told off for the 
translation. To be sure, this recurrence to an earlier work 
was somewhat galling to a man who already had got so far 
beyond it; but that sort of consideration must be put in his 
pocket: it was absolutely necessary to create a stir as soon as 
possible. 

Unfortunately, from the first set-out he had to learn that other 
people took a very different standpoint: what to him was an 
object of the keenest hopes and fears, to them was but a trifling 
matter, to be delayed regardless of the victim's pain. His 
influential patron had rushed from Paris, and left him to his own 
devices : no epistolary admonitions from a distance could possibly 
make up for personal pressure. For two whole months Dumersan 
kept him waiting for the result of his labours, in spite of all 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 285 

remonstrance — two months of hardships which in themselves 
would have sufficed to bring him to the direst straits. 

From this miserable interlude there has survived the .manu- 
script of a complete French prose-translation of the Liebesverbot 
in Wagner's hand, with corrections by another {La Novice de 
Palenne^ Optra en deux acteSy 59 pages folio). Its origin is not 
quite manifest : either, impatient of prolonged delay, the young 
master at last resolved to do the thing himself, notwithstanding 
his defective French ; or it was merely a rough draft, thrown off 
as guide for Dyimersan. The point cannot be settled without 
careful examination of the handwriting ; but, like so many other 
valuable documents from this period, the manuscript has gone 
the way of the autograph-hawker, and fallen into undiscoverable 
hands. Upon the back of its last page, and a part of the title- 
page, we are told that there exists a touching souvenir, in the 
form of a sketch for a letter to Meyerbeer : the troubles of this 
time are so acute, that " they will certainly be sung some day by 
the best of poets in from 24 to 48 cantos." The meagre excerpts 
that have found their way into the public press display that 
humorous self-irony with which die writer was so accustomed to 
muffle his " perchance distressing cries for help " : he has scarcely 
realised that he is in Paris as yet, he says, but simply vegetated 
in his lovely Rue de la Tonnellerie — " You may imagine how a 
sensitive subject, like myself, has behaved in such conditions, 
how it has gasped for breath and grown most wretched." 

It was in this anxious time that came the hearing of that 
rehearsal under Habeneck of the first three movements of the 
Ninth Symphony, at the Conservatoire. Besides the aesthetic 
aspect, already dwelt on, for him it had a subjective, almost a 
personal import : *' I was transported across long years of aberra- 
tion to the joyful vigils of my youth, when I had spent whole 
nights in copying out this score, whose very look had plunged me 
in a mystic reverie. The magic of its hearing now was as a 
fertiliser to my inner aspirations" {P.W. VII. 242). He went 
forth into the falling night and chilling autumn air ; but he had 
gained fresh light and warmth within. At once he conceived the 
project of an orchestral piece by far the most important of any of 
his compositions hitherto. Its rapid sketch, and just as rapid 
execution, gave him a rallying-point against the depressing in- 
fluence of his struggles to secure his daily bread. This memorable 



286 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

work may truly be called a turning-point in Wagner's artistic 
career. He has styled it an Overture to Goethe $ Faust i but it 
was originally intended as the first movement of a grand Faust- 
Symphony^ never, alas! completed. On the other side of the 
sheet of paper which bears its earliest sketch there is to be found 
a fragment of a French chansonette,* — characteristic enough of 
the author's vicissitudes in Paris. While at work upon this 
"overture" in a cold and draughty garret (shared with his wife 
and the big Newfoundland dog), to add to all his other worries, 
he was plagued with excruciating toothache : but his spirits were 
not to be damped by any mundane evils. In the midst of com- 
position he is surprised by a visitor : Berlioz walks into Wagner's 
room, and finds him using the Traiti d^ Instrumentation (?) as a 
support for his hand while writing; Wagner rises to greet his 
guest, and at once turns the coincidence into a neat little compli- 
ment, for which Berlioz embraces him efiusively.f 

Amid his untold cares and humiliations, the young master had 
one source of unfailing relief a secret closely guarded from the 
world. His keenly sensitive and easily inflammable nature made 
him feel every sting with a double smart ; but it also offered him 
a means of palliation. The secret was — the man of steel could 
weep. The hot floods of tears of his infancy never failed him in 
the sorest trials of his manhood, though his friends were not 
permitted to be witnesses, still less his foes. " Let me be cursed 
if an enemy ever hears me moan : in his regard we must be bold 
as brass and hard as stone," he writes to Uhlig twelve years later. 
Laughter and tears are classed by the philosopher as the char- 
acteristic distinction between man and the beasts, and, perhaps 

* It remained among the master's papers down to 1864, when he wrote 
across it '^Famoses Blatt" and gave it to Hans von Bttlow, from whose 
possession it passed into Oesterlein's Wagner-Museum. 

t According to Comte Louis Fourcaud in the B(^. FesthUUter 18S4, who 
gives the anecdote on the authority of a conversation with the master himself. 
In the Bayr, Btdtier^ 1894, J. van Santen-Kolff points out that Berlioz' Traiti 
tt instrumentation et et orchestration modeme did not appear till 1844. How- 
ever, the Gazette Musicale of Nov. 21, 1841, contains the first instalment of a 
series of articles by Berlioz, De t Instrumentation : so that the anecdote may 
in reality refer to the Flying Dutchman overture ; or, on the other hand, we 
may easily connect it with some earlier article of Berlioz' in that journal, to 
which he was a constant contributor, — ^it would be so much more probable 
that Wagner should have used something thin, like the Gazette, as a protection 
to the paper he was writing on, than a book to elevate his wrist.— W. A. E. 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS, 287 

for that very reason, are the peculiar appanage of genius. 
Schopenhauer has it that we never weep on the immediate 
receipt of pain, be it even bodily, but solely on its repetition 
in our memory ; so that weeping may be called an act of pity for 
oneself* — compare the everyday expression, "sorry for himself." 
Now, the higher the faculty of recalling sensations, combined 
with the gift of imagination, the more intense will be the power 
of looking at oneself as another person, an " outsider," znd pitying 
in one's own misfortunes the object of mischances common to 
the human race. In this way the relief derived from tears would 
fall into the same category as that afforded by a charitable action ; 
and it is certain that, where not due to mere hysteria, the man 
to whose eyes tears come unbidden will invariably be found of a 
highly " sympathetic " nature. 

Wagner's /2zf^^/-overture may thus be termed the crystallisation 
of self-pitying tears called up by the Ninth Symphony. In his 
" programme " of that Symphony in 1846 he quotes from Goethe's 
Faust two mottoes for the first movement, namely 

Entbehren sollst du I Sollst entbehren Go wanting shalt thon ; sbalt go want- 
ing, 
and 

Nar mit Entsetzen wach'ich Moigens Grim terror greets me as I wake at 

auf, mom, 

Ich mochte bitt're Thriinen weinen, With bitter tears the light I shun 

Den Tag zn seh'n, der mir in seinem Of yet another day whose course 

Lauf forlorn 

Nicht einen Wunsch erfUllen wird, Shall not fulfil one wish, not one. 

nicht Einen. 

His own Faust'Oyeitm^ he prefaces with the motto : 

Der Gott der mir im Busen wohnt, The god that dwells within my breast 

Kann tief mdn Innerstes erregen ; Can stir the inmost of my being, 

Der ttber alien meinen Kr^ten thront, Holds all my powers at his behest, 

Er kann nach aussen nichts bewegcn : Yet naught without marks his decree- 
Und so ist mir das Dasein eine LASt, ing : 

Der Tod erwttnscht, das Leben mir And so my whole existence is awry, 

▼erhasst. Life hateful, and my one desire to die. 

The connection between stimulus and reflex action is here quite 
• WeU als Wille und VorsUliung I. 445-46- 



288 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

obvious. Richard Wagner's Faust is the man aweary of life, yet 
ever forced by his indwelling daemon to engage anew in life's 
endeavours. With the first bar we see him as if awaking to the 
light of ''yet another day/' and gazing round upon the grey 
expanse of emptiness, wherefrom the sorrows of existence leap to 
view in a curt ascending motive; after many a struggle a soft 
ideal rises in the turbulent soul ; again we have renewal of the 
combat, with still greater violence, as tho' a world itself had 
sprung to arms against the hero ; the ideal triumphs for another 
while, but fades away as night descends, and leaves us with a 
question all unanswered. In November 1B53, when Wagner was 
contemplating a revision of the score, he writes to Liszt : " You 
caught me nicely in the lie of trying to delude myself that I had 
written an * Overture to Faust' You have felt quite rightly what 
is lacking : it is the woman. Perhaps you would understand at 
once, if I called my tone-poem Faust in solitude. At that time I 
intended to write an entire Faust-Symphony ; the first movement, 
that which is completed, was this 'solitary Faust,' longing, de- 
spairing, cursing. The * womanly ' hovers before him as an object 
of longing, not as a divine reality, and it is just this unsatisfying 
image of his longing that he destroys in his despair. The second 
movement was to have introduced Gretchen, the woman. I had 
•a theme for her, but it was merely a theme. The work remained 
unfinished. I wrote my Flying Dutchman instead" At the 
beginning of 1855, when he had at length undertaken its re- 
scoring, he writes again to Liszt, emphasising once more this 
solitude of Faust's : *' All I have been able to do, is to develop 
the sentiment a little more broadly, in a kind of expanded 
cadenza. Gretchen of course could not be introduced, only 
Faust himself: 'A fathomless enraptured yearning drove me 
through fields and woods afar,' etc." 

In days gone by, when Richard Wagner was pretty frequently 
denied the title of musia'an, it was a common occurrence to be 
told that he didn't write Symphonies because he couldn^t. Let 
anyone attend a performance of this marvellous "overture" — ^a 
worthy pendant to Leonora No. 3, — consider its original destina- 
tion, ^en ask himself if any musician save Beethoven has ever 
written the first movement of a Symphony to equal it It is true 
that the work, as we hear it to-day, has been "refined" by the 
author's later experience, as he himself confesses ; but the ground- 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS. 289 

work and main features remain the same as in 1839-40. Who 
then shall say that in the Wagner of six-and-twenty there was not 
the making of a King of Symphonists, had he not felt that a 
grander sovereignty awaited him? 

Despite assertions to the contrary, this fragment of a Faust epic 
was not performed in Paris at the time ; whether it was that the 
young artist desired to wait for its production as a whole^ or that 
he deemed it inexpedient to make his bow before the Paris public 
with a work so much above its head. The opportunity offering, 
a month or two later, of having an orchestral work played over 
by the band of the Conservatoire, Wagner returned once more to 
his Magdeburg portfolio, and drew forth the Columbus overture, 
the ' parts ' of which he had brought with him. In the Revue et 
Gazette Mustcale of March 22, 1840, we accordingly read : " Une 
ouverture d'un jeune compositeur allemand d'un talent tr^s 
remarquable, M. Wagner, vient d'etre r^p^t^e par I'orchestre du 
Conservatoire, et a obtenu des applaudissements unanimes. 
Nous esp^rons entendre incessament cet ouvrage, et nous en 
rendrons compte." The Columbus overture we shall meet in 
Paris once again, when dealing with the Spring of 184 1. 

Meantime our other old Magdeburg friend, Das Ldebesverbot^ 
has not been making rapid headway. At last its author succeeds 
in inducing the dilatory translator to hear at least a little of its 
music, with the result that he receives next day a page or two of 
charming verses. Henceforward Dumersan himself is all aflame 
for the "new opera," undertakes to see it hurried on to the 
Renaissance boards, places himself in communication with the 
regisseur, Salom^, and obtains through him an interview with the 
director ; Dumersan is obliging enough to praise the music of the 
jeune Allemand to the skies, — Ant^nor shrugs his shoulders, and 
entrenches himself behind a bank of flowery phrases. Another 
spell of fruitless waiting; Joly makes no sign. One fine day 
Dumersan brings the doleful tidings : Salom^ has commissioned 
him to say that M. Joly will have nothing whatever to do with 
the opera, as in the first place its author is a German, and all the 
young French composers would be up in arms if they found a 
foreigner poaching on their preserves ; secondly all pieces, to be 
staged by him, must have been written expressly for his theatre ; 
thirdly he can give none but original French operas ; and fourthly 
— German music would be much too heavy for his audience. It 

T 



290 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

now is Wagner's turn to intervene. Over every obstacle of the 
Antechamber he forces his way to a second personal interview 
with the director ; all objections vanish like spectres at cock-crow ; 
the production is assured him, subject to a few vocal excerpts 
being tried through first. So Dumersan puts his best foot forward 
in the translating of three selected numbers ; Wagner seems to 
find the French text suit them even better than the German, 
and with the immediate prospect of a good performance of this 
sprightly work he actually regains an interest in his cast-off 
skin. 

Not to be too far from the theatrical centre, he exchanges his 
lodgings in the Rue de la Tonnellerie for brighter quarters on the 
fourth floor of 25 Rue du Helder, off the Boulevard des Italiens, 
— ^the furnishing of which on credit, as Pecht informs us, plunged 
him afterwards into no small difficulties. Spring has come ; the 
first winter of Parisian discontent is past; he breathes again at 
promise of a sure success. On the very day of his removal a bolt 
falls from the blue, with the news of the official bankruptcy of 
the Th^&tre de la Renaissance. Ill-luck has dogged him, sped 
before him, to his new abode. Reduced to extremities, he has 
to pitch his artistic key yet a tone or so lower : the Th^&tre des 
Varidt^, through Dumersan its regisseur and dramaturg, offers 
him the uncongenial job of writing music to a burlesque by 
Dumanoir, La Desunte de la Caurtille, But even this lean bone 
is snatched from him ; a rival vaudeville-vamper promptly stops 
the threatened competition. According to Gasperini, Wagner 
had already completed either a portion or the whole of the music, 
when the theatre-choir declared it "parfaitement inex^utable " ; 
one chorus, however, " Allons k la Courtille " — ^according to the 
same authority — was retained and had its hour of popularity. A 
passing echo, without one undertone of animosity, is to be found 
in the Parisian Amusements next year, when Wagner remarks 
that the Carnival weather is so bad that people prefer attending 
the Descente de la Courtille at the Th^itre des Vari^t^s to going 
to see the actual maskers return from that suburb whence the 
piece derives its title. 

He had been spared one humiliation, only to be exposed to a 
thousand others. "You see me done for" — ^he makes his dying 
German musician say — ^'I was not vanquished on the field of 
battle, but — horrible to utter — I fell a prey to hunger in the 



FIRST PARISIAN DISAPPOINTMENTS, 29! 

Antechambers, They are something terrible, those antechambers, 
and there are many, very many of them in Paris, — with seats of 
wood or velvet, heated and not heated, paved and unpaved. In 
those antechambers I dreamed away a fair year of my life. . . . 
Between I sometimes seemed to hear the wail of a ghost-like 
oboe; that note thrilled through my every nerve, and cut my 
heart. One day, when I had dreamed my maddest and that 
oboe-note was tingling through me at its sharpest, I suddenly 
awoke. I had forgotten to pay my usual homage to the theatre- 
lackey as I left the anteroom. With tottering steps I fled the 
haven of my dreams ; on its threshold I stumbled over my poor 
dog, who was antechambering in the street in wait for his more 
fortunate master, allowed to antechamber among men. . . . How 
long I lay, I know not ; of the kicks I may have received from 
passers-by I took no heed; but at last I was awoken by the 
tenderest kisses — ^from the warm tongue of my beloved beast " 
(P.W.NW. 61-62). 

Woven into this fiction is many a ghastly truth from the 
author's own experiences in the winter 1839-40. Here we meet 
his good dog Robber, with its daily bath in the fountain of the 
Palais Royal, and the sad story of its mysterious loss. For its 
master there seemed no end to troubles: what further step 
remained to take, to put his musical abilities to profit ? In vain 
had he harked back to his outlived Uebesverbot -, in vain had he 
turned from Opera to Salon ballads, from Salon to the Boulevard 
theatres. His Liebesverbot he now threw wholly overboard, feeling 
that he " could no longer regard himself as its composer." The 
change had already commenced amid the artistic desolation of 
Riga ; Paris had completed it ; from French and Italian influences 
he had gained whatever there was to gain for his musical develop- 
ment Pecht remarks how Wagner's Paris friends observed that 
" in this one year he had become another man " : true enough, — 
but we cannot follow Pecht in attributing it to " Paris's enormous 
power of bringing out one's intellectual faculties," except in the 
sense of a vis a tergo\ it would be as reasonable to suppose 
Luther prompted to his work of reformation by the " enormous 
intellectual stimulus" of Rome. Certainly, immediate contact 
with the centre of the Operatic solar-system had cleared his views 
in more than one direction. Had he not forced his way hither, 
across all obstacles, the mirage might not have been exposed 



292 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

for years in all its emptiness; at trumpery little German 
theatres he would still have felt that one court of appeal was 
yet to seek, for trial of that genre which erst allured him. 
Here he had learnt the absolute futility of all attempts at 
compromise. 



X. 

COMPLETION OF "RIENZI." 

Return to ^* Rienzi" — Musical hack-work, — ^^ Der flkgende 
HoUdnder^^ for the Grand Opkra, — Friendship of the needy: 
evening reunions at Wagner^ s. — Contributions to the Gazette 
Musicale. — Meeting with Liszt — ^^ Rienzi" finished. — More 
journeyman-work, — NapoUotCs re-interment, — New Yearns eve. 

In completing the music of Rienti I sought to render its 
artistic due to the tendency thai actwiUy had led my steps 
to PariSy and thus to close a chapter I had already found 
closed against myself: with that completion I shook off the 
dust of my past, 

Richard Wagnbr. 

Rejecting all further thought of the smaller Paris theatres, in 
June 1840 Wagner resumed the composition of liienzi; not 
with any view to its performance at the Op^ra, for in the best 
event it would be a matter of at least five years ere such a favour 
could be contemplated: it was Dresden that he had in eye. 
There a fine new opera-house was in course of erection, after 
Gottfried Semper's sumptuous plans ; the outer structure had been 
crowned by its roof-beam at the very time of our hero's audacious 
voyage to Paris; it only waited for internal decoration. At the 
scenic arrangements the best Parisian craftsmen were already at 
work, men whose achievements at the Grand Op^ra had so often 
won his admiration. The first of singers, Schr6der-Devrient, 
Tichatschek and others, he knew were engaged. Relying on 
acquaintanceships of earlier days, he felt that he might hope for 
admittance at the Royal Saxon theatre, if anywhere. 

On the manuscript score we find the commencement of the 
third act of Rienzi dated June the 6th, that acf s completion August 

•93 



294 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

II.* A comparison of the last three acts with the earlier two 
(written before the Paris expedition) shews unmistakable progress 
in the composer's inner evolution. In the interval, filled up with 
worries of all kinds, he had made a perceptible approximation to 
his own true path. We still have the conventional forms of 
duet, trio, etc ; but they are always in the closest correspondence 
with the dramatic situation — a. remark which equally applies to 
the solitary "aria," that of Adriano in act iii. In the prelude to 
the fourth we have the mood of the whole act distinctly stated, 
just as in the riper works; still more pronouncedly is this the 
case with the prelude and ensuing "prayer" in the fifth act — For 
a minuter analysis we must refer the reader to E. Reuss's suggestive 
appreciation already-cited 

Parallel with this resumption of I^ienzi we have a course of 
musical drudgery of the most depressing nature. The only re- 
commendation of Meyerbeer's that had borne real fruit, was an 
introduction to the publisher of the Gazette Musicale — Maurice 
Schlesinger, the "man with the black hair and never-resring eye" 
mentioned in the Report on Halkv^s Reine de Chypre {P. IV. VII. 
207), a congener of the almighty maestro. For him had Wagner to 
concoct "arrangements of favourite operas for all the instruments 
under heaven." Despairing sighs, extorted by the misery of such 
a plight, are still to be found in scattered scraps of writing with 
which the autograph-purveyor plies his golden trade. Not only 
interjections, however, but whole pages of a diary commenced in 
the summer of 1840 have inadvertently descended to publicity; a 
few extracts will supply an inkling of the sorrows of those days. 
" Tears have come unbidden to my eyes again," runs one of these 
monologues, dated the 23rd of June, " Is one a coward, to yield 
himself so readily to tears ? " Again, " An ailing young German 

* The musical sketcA for the third act appears to have been begun somewhat 
earlier, the see-saw between draft and orchestral completion occurring thus : — 

Third Act : Sketch, Feb. 15 to July 7, 1840 ; Orchestration, June 6 to Aug. 

II, 184a 

Fourth „ ,, , Jul. 10 „ Aug. 29 „ ; Orchestration, begun Aug. 14, 

184a 

Fifth „ „ , Sept 5 „ Sept 19 „ ; (Intermediate dates are lack- 

ing, but the final touch was 
put to the work on Nov. 19, 
1840.) 

Oyerture „ completed Oct 23, „ . 



COMPLETION OF " RIENZI." 295 

mechanic was here; — I asked him to come back to breakfast; 
thereupon Minna reminded me that she would have to lay out her 
last penny on bread. Poor dear ! thou art right — things are black 
with us ; for, everything considered, I can count on nothing with 
certainty but the very greatest misfere." Referring to those who 
display an interest in him, " My only hope would be shameful, 
were I to be convinced that I am reckoning on mere cUmsX 
Luckily I can but suppose that people, like Meyerbeer and Laube, 
would do nothing for me if they did not believe I deserved it.'^ 
Then he is tormented by the dread lest whim or chance should 
estrange these from him also : in fact, he says, their serious will 
to help him has been proved by nothing yet, and this gnawing 
doubt makes him sick at heart Monday, June 29, "What is to 
become of me next month, I know not. . . . True, I now have 
the prospect of earning a trifle by articles and essays in the 
Gazette musicale^ and shall also send articles to Lewald in Stuttgart 
for the '£uropa'; but even in the happiest event, what looms 
immediately in front of me is too overpowering not to drag me 
down." A painful calculation follows: "I have only 25 francs 
left. With them I have to meet a bill of exchange for 150 fr. 
on the first, and to pay my quarter's rent on the fifteenth ! . . . 
I still am keeping it from my poor wife, that things have come 
to such a pass, — hoping all along that Laube would send me 
rescue ; not until then should I have disclosed to her how we had 
had nothing else to count on, and how I had concealed it from 
her so as not to add another trouble to her mind, already quite 
unhinged by worries. ... On the first I can keep it from her no 
longer. God help me ! it will be a dreadful day, if help does not 
arrive." The day after, June 30, evening : " On our walk I told 
my wife to-day how we are oflf for money ; I pity the poor dear 
from the bottom of my heart ! It's a mournful bargain.* — Must 
set to work." f 

* Probably alluding to the pawning of Minna's peisonol trinkfits, as stated 
by Praeger.— W. A. E. 

t See Kllrschner's ya^r^MT^ (1886, page 289-90), where may also be found 
a set of private verses by Wagner dated August 4, 1840 : — 

Nun ist es aus, das schone Lied, das Lied von meiner Jugend ; 

die ich geliebt, ist nun mein Weib, ein Weib voU Gilt* und Tugend. 

Bin gutes tugendhaftes Weib ist eine gute Gabe ; 

sie ist mir mehr als Zeitvertreib, sie ist aU meine Habe. 

Ich wtlnschte Jeden gleicbes Glttck, ich gUb' es selbst nicht weiter ; 

doch denke ich zehn Jahr' zurtlck, so macht' ich's doch gescheidter. 



296 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

The reference to Meyerbeer shews that Wagner had not yet 
given up all hope of obtaining solid support for his Parisian 
schemes through the former's influence. As a fact, he was to 
receive another glimmer of hope from that direction — ^another 
disappointment. The absentee magnate suddenly reappeared in 
Paris, on a flying visit, made polite inquiries after the progress of 
his prot^g6, and placed him in relation with Leon Pillet, newly 
installed Director of the Grand Op^ra. It was a matter of a two 
to three act opera, to be composed by Wagner for that stage. 
As he had long been fascinated by the story of the Flying Dutch- 
man, a subject lay ready to his hand ; he lost no time in securing 
Heine's permission to borrow the latter's inventive treatment of 
the legend, drafted a sketch, and handed it to PiUet, who 
undertook to get a French textbook written for him on those 
lines. "Thus flBu: was everything under way," he says, "when 
Meyerbeer again left Paris, and had to abandon the fulfilment of 
my wishes to fiate." We shall see ere long what unawaited 
incident doomed this final hope of Paris also ; for the present 
we may simply note that Senta's Ballad, ^ the thematic germ of 
the whole opera" {jP.IV. I. 370), would appear to have been 
completed in verse alike and music at this epoch, i.e. in the thick 
of the composition of Rienzi — ^a characteristic instance of the 
overlapping of most of Wagner's dramatic works. 

Turning once more from the artist to the man, let us inquire 
how he is spending his scanty leisure hours in Paris. It is in 
no first-class society, nor even in the company of second-rate 
celebrities, that he passes the evenings of laborious days; for 
Heinrich Heine was barely an acquaintance, and Laube had left 
Paris in the Spring of 1840 to settle down at Leipzig. His sister^ 
the little "Cile" of whom we have lost sight for so long, had 
married Eduard Avenarius on March the fiflh, and come to live 
in frugal circumstances in Paris, whither her husband had been 
despatched as agent of the firm of Brockhaus. Besides these 
welcome relatives, Wagner expressly states that he " hardly mixed, 
at all with musicians: scholars, painters etc., formed my en- 
tourage, and many a rare experience of friendship did I gain in 
Paris." We have already met most of them last chapter: the 
"philologist and a painter" who figure as chief mourners in the 
End in Parts, Siegfried Lehrs to wit, who subsequently lent him 



297 

the Middle-high-German poem of the SdngtrkrUg and thus laid 
the foundation of Tannhausery and Ernst Kietz the portrait- 
painter; the pseudonymous Anders, to whom Wagner refers in 
a letter to Germany as "collaborator in the Gazette musicaUy 
employ^ at the Paris Royal Library, and one of the most 
thorough-paced music-bibliographs " ; Friedrich Pecht, and finally 
a Herr Brix, who had made Wagner's acquaintance just as he 
was eflfecting his unlucky change of quarters. They were simple 
"needy Germans" like himself, with no ambition to frequent 
the Caf(6 de Paris or the modish garden of the Cafi6 des Divans 
between the Grand and Comic Operas, where the artistic world 
forgathered, singers, actors, painters, sculptors and reviewers, 
where Scribe took notes for a new drama amid the clatter of 
dominoes, and Schlesinger drove bargains with Meyerbeer over 
a new score. In his Parisian Fatalities our hero devotes these 
words to his compatriots: "The most excellent, the truest 
Germans are the poor. . . . These needy Germans form a still 
community in Paris, and observe the vow of abstinence ; they 
mostly have plenty of talent and phantasy, and above all are 
faithful friends ; for my part, I here first learnt what friendship 
means." When he had exchanged the French metropolis for 
Dresden he wrote back to his humble friends in Paris: "Of 
an evening we sit alone, quite alone, and no one drops in as of 
yore. Ah! how the saddest states in life can leave sweet 
memories i " — and again, this time to Lehrs : " Here I am incom- 
plete. How the devil should I be blithe and merry, when 
hundreds of miles lie between us ? " 

One of the circle, that Friedrich Pecht so largely quoted in our 
previous chapter, has painted a lifelike picture of these social 
evenings : " We young Germans who knew him and cared for 
him, attracted alike by the unflagging riches of his intellect and 
our sympathy with his amiable wife, were all as poor as church- 
mice. So the only comfort we could tender him was the proof 
that he was not absolutely forsaken, that there were people who 
believed in him and formed a little commune of which he re- 
mained the imdisputed centre. You see, whilst he was already 
creating immortal works, however undervalued then, we all were 
simply scholars, and felt how high he towered above us. . . . 
A hundred times he cursed the fate that doomed him to make 
arrangements of Donizetti's music for Schlesinger, and would 



298 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

dissect its sugared triviality with comical wrath, but so per- 
spicuously that even I, an utter layman, could understand 
him. . . . The wonderful elasticity with which, for all his misery, 
he would rise at our evening reunions above the harass of the 
day, and devote his inexhaustible wit to characterising the great 
musicians one by one, so that each became quite breathing 
individualities, still sets me in astonishment ; for neither I nor 
any of my comrades at that age would have been anywhere 
approaching the position to deliver such terse and accurate 
judgment on any painter,— of mere disparagement, the first thing 
to occur to youth, there was not a word with him whenever his 
seething brain had come to calm. Even his intimacy with the 
musical products of every age was almost inconceivable in so 
young a man. He knew the earlier Italians, Palestrina, Pergolese 
and others, just as well as the older German school ; through him 
I gained my first idea of Bach, and Gluck was his constant 
preoccupation. Haydn's nature-painting; Mozart's genius, and 
the unfortimate influences of his position at Salzburg and Vienna ; 
the idiosyncrasies of the French, of Lully, Boieldieu, Auber; the 
matchless national accents of his darling Weber ; Mendelssohn's 
elegant drawingroom-music ; and lastly Beethoven, the monarch 
of them all : he would set these all before us, singing snatches of 
their melodies with such vivacity, such plastic power, that they 
linger in my memory to-day . just as he rendered them. I 
remember that even then he insisted on music's being a language 
in which much, if not all, grows out of date, unpalatable or 
unintelligible, in course of time. Thus there was very much in 
Mozart that was already old-fashioned — ^and he would hum the 
passages as he went on — a statement that appalled me at the 
time. Even the continual transformation of musical instruments, 
he said, was a cause of this inevitable antiquation ; and instru- 
mentation would still be revolutionised, Beethoven having been 
the first to put the orchestra on the right road. Then he would 
sketch with wonderful precision the specific character of every 
instrument, the work for which it was peculiarly adapted, the 
local-colour of its tone, and so on ; though I had no idea at that 
time that colouring and mood were chief distinctions of his talent, 
for it would have been impossible to decipher them from his 
harum-scarum playing. We were told, too, of the absurdity of 
modem Opera, against which he was already taking arms. Never 



COMPLETION OF " RIENZI. 299 

have I heard Rossini so aptly criticised, though with ample 
acknowledgment of his lavish gifts. But this entirely unknown 
young man dealt with all these famed musicians as his equals ; 
and we, who should have thought a like thing most presumptuous 
in a budding painter, found it so completely natural and justified 
in him, that it never struck us as self-conceit Manifestly, 
because it was nothing of the kind." 

Pecht also tells us of Wagner's singing and playing his own 
music to the little circle of an evening, though he hastens to add 
that he understood but little of it, since the composer "behaved 
to the unfortunate piano as an impatient master to a slave." He 
goes on to tell us how he gradually came to hear almost the 
whole of Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman thus rendered by 
Wagner : a little inaccuracy as regards the Dutchman^ since Pecht 
was no longer in Paris at the time of its actual composition; 
however, he would have heard Senta's Ballad, and probably some 
other fragments of the preliminary conception. "The whole 
daemonic music with which he pictured the howling of the 
tempest in the tackle, just as he had lately heard it off the coast 
of Norway ; the sailors' songs he sang to us, — it all is ringing in 
my ears to-day, after more than forty years. I can see him yet 
before me, every nerve on fire, as if drawing a whole world along 
with him. And in everything he did, even in outbursts of the 
most violent passion, he preserved the same exalted character. 
Thereafter I have seen Wagner under all possible conditions, in 
the fiercest storm of rage, as in the maddest fit of hilarity ; but 
never did he lose that special charm and dignity which stamps 
his music. I know absolutely no other artist in whom the 
artwork was so completely one with the man. . . . But as to 
deciding whether he was merely a highly talented and gifted man, 
or in very truth a great musician, I should have been as little 
prepared as anybody in those Paris days." 

We must leave the friendly circle, and return to the artist's 
work. The afiair of the Flying Dutchman at the Grand Op^ra 
. had entered a new and unexpected phase. At one of his calls 
on L^on Pillet, Wagner made the astounding discovery that his 
draft had so pleased the Director that he desirqd to use it in 
another fashion. It was this way : in accordance with a former 
promise, so he said, Pillet felt obliged to give another composer 
an opera-book as soon as possible; the draft at present in his 



300 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

hands seemed just the thing; surely Wagner would have no 
objection to parting with it when he reflected that he could not 
hope for any order from the Op^ra for quite four years, as there 
were so many other candidates with prior claims. Of course, the 
man went on, that would be too long for him to be dragging this 
subject about with him ; he would soon invent a new one, and 
console himself for the little sacrifice. The young master fought 
tooth and nail against the proposal, but could effect nothing more 
than its temporary postponement. He counted on Meyerbeer's 
speedy return, and was silent. 

His energies were now employed in a third direction ; besides 
his work at Rienziy and those fatal arrangements for Schlesinger, 
in July he became one of the so-called sub-editors of the Gazette 
Musicale^ the property of that enterprising music-dealer. During 
the three years 1840 to 1843 we find his name on the title-page, 
"Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, ridigie par M.M. . . . 
Richard Wagner." This paper appeared on an average twice a 
week, but the " sub-editors " had nothing to do with its editing ; 
they were merely occasional contributors, paid by the line or 
column. In his Communication to my Friends Wagner alludes 
to the engagement as follows: "The publisher of the Gazette 
Musicale commissioned me, besides arranging melodies for my 
daily bread, to write him articles for his paper. To him it was 
a matter of indifference, which I sent : not to me. Just as I 
found my deepest humiliation in the one task, I greedily snatched 
at the other to revenge mjrself for that humiliation. . . . Every 
line that I wrote was a cry of revolt against the conditions of 
our modem art : I have been told that this caused much amuse- 
ment" However, it was not with a cry of revolt that he led oflF; 
he had to feel his way first Fourteen days after the entry in 
his diary on June 29, to the effect that he had just been promised 
the job, his first article appeared (Sunday, July 12) "De la 
musique allemande"* — an eloquent appeal to the French on 
behalf of a proper understanding of the music of his homeland. 
Then comes a break, corresponding pretty closely with the 
composition of the fourth and fifth acts of Rienzi^ and we have 
nothing more till the appearance of an obviously bespoken 

* Immediately fadiig it, in the bound volume, we have an advertisement on 
the back of the previous number, " Les Deux Grenadiers : m^lodie de Richard 
Wagner. Piix : 5 fr." 



COMPLETION OF " RIENZI. 3OI 

review of Alexis LvofPs adaptation of Pergolese's Stabat Mater^ 
chiefly remarkable for its championship of Mozart's additions to 
the instrumentation of Handel's Messiah, This is followed a 
week later (Oct. 18, 1840) by the essay " Du metier de virtuose 
et de rind^pendance des compositeurs : fantaisie esth^tique d'un 
musicien," in which the idols of the Parisian beau monde^ Rubini 
and Persian!, are most damagingly hurled against the adamantine 
front of Don Giovanni. The " cry of revolt " had been raised, 
though the editor-in-chief clapped a mute on it.* 

This article, in its present or redintegrated form, is one of the 
wittiest things ever penned; but its wit is tempered by most 
solemn earnest. Beginning with a poetic fable, of the wonder- 
jewel found by the two miners of Salzburg and Bonn, it goes on 
to lay down the lines that should be followed by the musical 
interpreter, and, without naming names, contrasts the method of 
Thalberg with that of Liszt: "Indeed there are true artists 
among the virtuosi; they owe their reputation to their moving 
execution of the noblest tone-works of the greatest masters. 
Where would the public's acquaintance with these latter be 
slumbering, had not those pre-eminently elect arisen from the 
chaos of music-makery, to shew the world what These really were 
and did?" But the surroundings in which the great master's 
spirit is conjured up ! " All round sit high-bred ladies, row after 
row of high-bred ladies, and in a wide half-moon behind them 
sprightly gentlemen with lorgnettes in the eye. But Beethoven 
is there, midst all the perfumed agony of dream-rocked elegance : 
it really is Beethoven, sinewy and broad, in all his sad omni- 
potence. Yet who comes with him ? Great God ! — Guillaume 
Tell, Robert the Devil, and — who after these ? Weber the tender 
and true. Good ! And then : — ^a * Galop.' O heavens ! Who 
has once written galops himself, who has had his finger in pot- 
pourris, knows what a pinch can drive us to it when it is a 
question of drawing near to Beethoven at all costs. I took the 
measure of the awful need that could drive another man to-day to 
potpourris and galops, to gain the chance of preaching Beethoven ; 
and though I must admire the virtuoso in this instance, I cursed 
all virtuosity" (F.W, VII. 113). For the skit on the Italians' 
rendering, or rending, of Mozart's immortal work, which forms 



See my preface to Vol. VII. of the Prose Works.— ^f. A. E. 



302 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

this essay's peroration, we must refer the reader to the original ; 
it is too perfect to bear compression. 

It was somewhere near this date that the writer of the above 
made the personal acquaintance of one who was subsequently 
to form so important a factor in his career. In the first letter 
of the Wagner-Liszt Correspondence we read that Laube had 
met a friend and compatriot of Liszt's at Carlsbad in the summer, 
and spoken to him of Wagner and his plans, expressing a desire 
that the friend should bring the two artists together; Wagner 
himself is uncertain whether any letter of recommendation had 
ever been sent, but recalls the fact that he was casually introduced 
by Schlesinger in the late autumn of 1840. The relative position 
of the two men was radically different then to what it became in 
after years : Liszt, with his phenomenal playing, was worshipped 
by the public wherever he went, and moreover had the knack of 
making himself at home in the most exclusive circles, in fact was 
a polished man of the world ; Wagner was an unknown provincial, 
struggling in the direst poverty for a recognition not so light to 
compass. Wagner pays a call on Liszt, and it is by no means 
surprising that he should have returned from that call in bad 
humour; the external contrast of their natures would naturally 
be seized before the common bond within. With the greatest 
candour, at a time when the friendship and support of Liszt was 
the only rock left to build on — namely in exile ten years later — 
Wagner describes his impressions of this first encounter : * "In 
that world which I had longed to tread with lustre, when I yearned 
from petty things to grand, Liszt had unconsciously grown up 
from tenderest youth, to be its wonder and joy at a time when 
I could recognise nothing but its void and nullity with all the 
chagrin of a disillusioned man. I had no opportunity to make 
him know me in myself and work : superficial, therefore, as was the 
only knowledge he could gain of me, equally so was the fashion 
of our interview. This was quite explicable on his part ; for was 
he not in the daily throng of the most kaleidoscopic of affairs? 
I, on the other h^id, was not just then in the mood calmly and 
fairly to seek for the simplest explanation of a manner which, 

* Or possibly of the second visit, in the Spring of 1841 : either the one or 
the other would seem to have been of but short duration, and thus would have 
slipped from Wagner's recollection when writing his Cammunicaiion (1851). 
— W. A, E. 



COMPLETION OF *' RIENZI." 303 

civil enough in itself, was of all others the kind to ruffle me, I 
did not visit Liszt again, and he remained in that category one 
vie¥^ as foreign and inimical to one's nature." For all that, 
the surface contradiction of their natures did not prevent the 
honest critic from distinguishing between Liszt and Liszt's environ- 
ment : in the Spring of 1841 he writes to the Abendzeitung^ " What 
would and could Liszt not be, were he no famous man, or 
rather, had not people made him famous ! He could and would 
be a free artist, a little god, instead of the slave of the most 
fatuous of all publics, the public of the virtuoso " {F, W, VIII. 

136). 

On the 19th of November the Gazette prints the first instalment 
of the Pilgrimage to Beethoven (" Une visite ^ Beethoven : Episode 
de la vie d'un musicien allemand"), continued and completed 
Nov. 22 and Dec. 3. This delightful little tale is too well known 
to call for comment, though we may remind the reader of its 
echoes from Wagner's own journey through Bohemia eight years 
previously. Gasperini tells us, " Une visite d Beethoven fut trfes 
remarqu^e par Berlioz, qui en parla avec ^loge dans le Journal 
des DibatsJ^ Nor was this the only contribution of Wagner's 
warmly approved by Berlioz, as may be seen in his Voyage 
Musical 'y whilst Heine himself, according to Pecht, was charmed 
with the young man's writings. 

On this same November 19 the last touch was put to the score 
of Rienziy finished in an incredibly short time, considering all the 
circumstances. Not a moment did its author lose in posting off 
the bulging packet, five volumes big with hopes, to the bureau of 
the Royal Court-theatre in Dresden. What would be its fate? 
So far as he himself was concerned, not a stone was left unturned ; 
as proved by various letters of this date. One of them, written 
at the end of the month, is a petition to the King himself;* a 
manly document breathing that sincere devotion the author had 
always felt towards the person of his sovereign, and which he 
preserved even through and past the stormy days of revolution. 
On the 4th of December it is followed by a letter to General- 
direktor von Liittichau, pointing out that Rienzi is the work of a 
Saxon^ whose honest endeavour it is to devote his best and ripest 



• The full text will be found in R. Prolss' Geschichte des Dresdener Hof- 
theaters (pp. 252 et seq.). 



304 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

efforts to his fatherland, and suggesting that it might not unbe- 
comingly find a place among those works " selected for production 
immediately after the inauguration of the new house." That 
inauguration took place four months later, April 12, 1841, 
with Goethe's Tasso, followed on the operatic side by Webar's 
Euryanthe. Rienzi had to wait a full year and a half thereafter ; 
but what else could be expected ? 

" It was well that my opera was finished, for I now saw myself 
compelled to bid a long farewell to any practice of my art," says 
Wagner concerning this period, calling it '* the culminating point 
of the utter misery of my existence" {P. W. I. i8). None of his 
friends — as poor as himself — could help him, and nothing but 
wellnigh superhuman exertions in Schlesinger's mill kept body 
and soul together. The JFlying Dutchman was not to be dreamt 
of, for his whole time was absorbed by those cursed arrangements 
of "favourite operas," descending even to his abomination the 
comet-k-pistons. A fsunt notion of this orgy may be gained from 
an advertisement in the Gazette Musicale of the ensuing summer, 
offering to the musical world the overture and three suites from 
Donizetti's Favorite, the overture and two suites from Hal^vy's 
GuitarrerOy arranged by Wagner for two violins, for a string 
quartet, eta, etc. That, however, would only represent a portion, 
and the more ambitious portion of his hack-work, for to this day 
the autographs of similar pot-boilers are being dragged to light by 
the manuscript-hawker. 

But the man had eyes alert for what went on in the great 
world around him, and we come across more than one reference 
to a grand ceremony that took place this winter, the re-interment 
of Napoleon's ashes — no, not ashes, for Wagner expressly tells us 
that "they are now most scrupulously called U corps de tempereur, 
since the day when people learnt that the hero had been found 
in tolerably good preservation; wherefore also that elegant 
cast of Dantan's, representing Thiers with a casket containing 
Napoleon's ashes under his arm, has suddenly vanished from the 
shop-windows." England had consented to the remains of her 
once-feared enemy being removed by the Prince de Joinville from 
S. Helena for a second burial, and the event was celebrated in 
Paris with the greatest pomp. Wagner himself appears to have 
been much impressed by the prospect of the solemn function, for 
there exists a five-strophe poem of his bearing the date " Paris, 



COMPLETION OF " RIENZI." 305 

December 15, at 7 in the morning."* He must have risen to 
write it with freezing fingers, for, as he tells us elsewhere, " All 
the world knows that on that day God sent the Parisians an im- 
paralleled degree of cold." But the visitors to the chapel of the 
Invalides were not to be deterred by the state of the thermometer : 
" For these obsequies the Ministry of Public Affairs had formed 
the wise resolve that, in lieu of Rossini's Cenerentola [a hidden 
allusion to the '' ashes "] Mozart's Requiem should be sung. The 
high world of Paris was quite carried away by this flash of insight ; 
and thus it came to pass that our dilettantist duchesses and 
countesses were given something very different to hear, for once, 
from what they were accustomed to at the Italian Opera. With 
the most affecting lack of prejudice they accommodated themselves 
to everything: they heard Rubini and Persiani, — they melted 
away; instead of their fans, they dropped their muffs ; they leant 
back on their costly furs (for it was mortal cold in church on 
December 15, 1840)— and, just as at the Opera, they lisped ' C'est 
ravissant!'"(/'.^.VII. 145). 

This re-interment is connected in the Parisian Fatalities with 
the tragi-comic story of a young German whom Wagner sajrs he 
met after "freezing for four hours on the terrace" outside. 
Possibly the " young German " is the exaggerated portrait of a 
real person, but more probably a mere figment of the author's 
lively fsLTiCf, " He was a young man whom God knows what sad 
chance had driven to Paris. His attainments were quite beyond 
the common, for he was physician, jurist, writer, poet and scholar ; 
he understood Goethe's Faust from the Prologue in Heaven to the 
Chorus Mysticus, could write prescriptions and conduct actions- 
at-law with any man ; moreover he could copy music, and prove 
you that man has no souL Relying on these enormous acquire- 
ments, he naturally thought it easy to gain distinction in Paris 
even without a sou in his pocket." Wagner visits him in the 

* This docament also has found its way to the auction-mart : place, Berlin ; 
time, June 8, 1886 ; price, over a hundred marks. The verses are unrhymed, 
probably with an idea of their translation into French ; the last one runs as 
under: — 

' ' Doch was erblick' ich— jenes Denkmal dort, sieh' hin — was im Triumph 

man fUhrt — 
Ist's Beute, sind es stolze Siegstrophii'n, die er im femen Land gewann ? 

Sein Ehrenbette schliesst es ein — ein kleiner Hut dient ihm zur Zier — 
der ihn dereinst getragen, der Kaiser kehrt znriick I " 

U 



306 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

hospital of the Hdtel Dieu, for which he has a good word to say, 
and "supplies him with snuff/' while the young man is "busy 
elaborating a proof that the soul consists of carbonic acid and 
galvanism"; he finds him employment as a copyist, but "this 
channel soon dried up, as I unfortunately didn't know an 
overwhelming number of people with music to copy." The 
young man's story is pursued with much humour and ingenuity 
to the bathos of marriage with the draconian widow of an 
estaminet-keeper : "it passed in less than six Parisian months, 
and would have spun itself off still quicker, had my richly-gifted 
friend employed more vehemence in the solution of his problem, 
in a word, had it seemed good to him to try the Paris system of 
intrigue and hocus-pocus." 

Wagner's own feeling of utter hopelessness in Paris finds voice 
in the above. From the spectacle of luxury accompanied by the 
Requiem of a great musician who himself was shovelled into a 
pauper's grave^ he returns to his icy* quarters in the Rue du 
Helder with nothing before him but the most grinding drudgery 
to keep a home above his head. Not a line has come from 
Dresden; not even an acknowledgment of the receipt of his 
bulky score. Meyerbeer must be appealed to again : though he 
had profited nothing by the maestro's patronage in Paris, perhaps 
he could do something for him in Germany. It is touching to 
find a postscript in a letter to Schumann of the end of this 
December, begging him "not to let Meyerbeer be run down 
quite so much [in the Neue Zeitschrift\ as I owe everything to 
him, especially my approaching unbounded celebrity." This is 
the first letter to Schumann since the Konigsberg period, yet it is 
written with all the mirthful familiarity of an old companion, 
beginning : " I've been almost a year and a half in Paris, and am 
doing splendidly, for I'm not yet starved to death." Not a word 
is said about Rienzi, but he has heard that Schumann has just 
composed Heine's Grenadiere^ introducing ih^ Marseillaise : " Last 
winter I composed it too, and also wound up with the Marseillaise. 
What a striking coincidence ! — It was sung here and there, 
and has gained me the order of the Legion of Honour and a 
pension of 20,000 fr. a year, which I draw direct from Lotiis 
Philippe's private purse. * But I'm not puffed up, and herewith 
I privately re-dedicate my composition to yourself, though it has 
* An obvious slap at Heine. 



COMPLETION OF " RIENZI." 307 

already been dedicated to Heine. As an equivalent I hereby 
make known to you that I accept the private dedication of your 
Grenadiers, and am expecting the complimentary copy." 

With the same irrepressible gaiety of spirit the year was ushered 
out, for all the troubles it had brought him. Let Pecht be 
spokesman : " On New Year's eve I met Kietz at the caf(6, when 
he proposed that) as Wagner was sitting very dismally at home, 
we should arrange a picnic to see the old year fairly out No 
sooner said than done. Kietz knew the son of the famous Moet, 
and went off for a hamper of champagne at our common cost ; 
Brix, Anders and I were to see to a cold collation. All heavily 
laden we met at Brix's room, and marched in solemn procession 
— Kietz in front with the champagne, we others with all sorts of 
cold meats, Cheshire and Roquefort cheese, Vienna bread and 
sweet pastry — to the Wagners' apartments close by. It was no 
small surprise to them, when his wife opened the door. Wagner, 
whose temperament was just like a watch-spring, easily compressed 
but rebounding with redoubled energy, soon forgot all his cares. 
His humour, made still droller by his Saxon dialect, was of that 
finer quality which, for all its liveliness, never forgets the presence 
of women ; but his mirth was inexhaustible. As the clock struck 
twelve he jumped on a chair, and spouted forth a prophecy that 
lasted for at least thirty minutes, in which he contrasted our 
squalid past and present with the brilliant future that awaited us, 
sparing neither himself nor us an occasional sly dig. It all came 
so pat from his lips, so full of wit and free of hesitancy, that I 
have never heard verse so remarkably improvised in all my life. 
I don't know if Wagner ever treated others to a similar entertain- 
ment ; but I do know that none of us ever experienced such a 
treat again." 

We may close this chapter with Pecht's testimony that "the 
friends who did not despair of him in this his time of greatest 
straits were never forgotten or disowned in after days by the 
world-famed master ; he ever kept the same old faith with them." 



XL 
" DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 

*'An End in Paris?^ — Failure of the Columbus-cverture, — 
News-Utters to the Abendteitung, — Projected Life of Beethoven, — 
Henri Vieuxtemps^ Schindler^ Liszt — In the country near Meudon. 
—The " Freischutz'' in Paris.— '' Rienzi'' accepted at Dresden.— 
Poem and music of the " Flying I^utchman^^ — Return to Paris : 
efforts to get the " Dutchman " accepted at Leipzig^ Munich^ Berlin. 
— " Die Sarazenin." — " Tannhduser und der Sdngerkrieg auf 
IVartburgJ^ — Return to Germany. 

Certainly ** the effective stage-piece*^ farms the basis 
of the Dutchman no less than of Riensi. But everyone 
perhaps will feel that something important had happened 
meanwhile to the author; perhaps a violent shocks in any 
case a serious crisis, to which yearning and loathing con- 
tributed in equcd measure. 

Richard Wagner. 

Thb beginning of 1841 is marked by the appearance in the 
Gazette MusicaU of Wagner's essay " On the Overture," which 
may be classed with his first contribution, that "On German 
Music," as exhibiting the more reflective, or objective aspect of 
his literary work. This essay is of permanent aesthetic value, 
for although it does not absolutely fix the canons for construction 
of an overture, it sets clearly forth the only alternative courses. 
Its author himself would appear to have attached more weight to 
it in after years than to his other writings of this period, as he 
has given it a separate heading in voL i. of the Gesammelte 
Schrifleny not including it in what he groups as ''Tales and 
Articles of a German Musician in Paris." 

That " German Musician " — in reality a thin veil for himself — 

seems to have been a gradual creation of his brain ; there are 

several stages in his evolution. First we have simply the 

''Fantaisie esth^tique d'un musicien," as sub-title to The Virtuoso 

308 



'*DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 309 

and the Artist; [then "£pisode de la vie d'un musicien alle- 
mandy" as sub-title to the Pilgrimage; next, as a collective title 
for a proposed series of articles, '' Crotchets from the diary of 
a poor musician";* and finally "Caprices esth^tiques extraits 
du journal d'un musicien d^funt," as sub-title to The Artist 
and Fudlicity. There is something very characteristic of the 
dramatist, in this gradual projection of himself outside himself; 
the imaginary being, supposed to have penned these articles, had 
become a personage apart from the man who was really writing 
them, — ^and at last the author had to kill his double with the 
End in Paris, A postscript to its French version, Un musicien 
Stranger d Paris^ promises to publish in the next few numbers of 
the Gazette, '^ sous le titre de Caprices esth^tiques d*un musicien, 
les differentes parties du journal du dtfunt " ; yet Ihe Artist and 
Publicity (April 1841) and A happy evening (Oct — Nov. 1841) 
are the only further contributions to the French journal that can 
be properly regarded in this light The German Musician who 
came to Paris seeking fame and fortune was virtually dead and 
buried, and 'Mes partitions qui composent le reste de sa 
succession," ironically offered in that postscript to "MM. les 
directeurs d'Op^ra," remained the only part of the "defunct's" 
estate which Richard Wagner clung to. 

The End in Paris seems to have been first conceived im- 
mediately after the completion of Eienzt and the appearance of 
the Pilgrimage to Beethoven,^ to which it forms a touching sequel. 
Take these two tales, combine them with the Happy evening and 
Artist and Publicity^ and you obtain at very small expense of time 
a psychological picture of Wagner in the middle of his Paris 
period such as no Laube or Pecht has remotely attempted. 
These friends all remarked that "he had become another man," 
but they were none of them profound enough to gauge the 
import of the change : in Paris he had undergone a kind of self- 
" conversion," his soul had woken through dissatisfaction to dim 
consciousness of its own greatness, and therefore of its solitude. 
When the dying musician in the End in Paris makes his con- 
fession of faith and sees the heavens open with their fair 
assemblage of " disciples of high Art, transfigured in a heavenly 

♦ See Prose Works Vol. VII. p. xvii.— W. A E. 

t See the original sketch translated in my preface to Vol. VIII. Prose 
fVorJks.^W. A. E. 



3IO LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

fabric of sun-drenched fragrance of sweet sounds," it is a revelation 
of his own immortal genius, and he feels himself a member of 
the tribe of Gluck, Mozart and Beethoven : " I, also, am an 
artist" He can look with calmness on the shipwreck of his 
instant hopes, for ''A good spirit protects him, apparently his 
own: he is spared fulfilment of his wishes," and can bid his 
soul ** Laugh, be light-minded, — ^but have patience and suffer. — 
Dream ! Tis the best" {Artist and FubL). He puts it auto- 
biographically a few years later : '' The handful of true friends 
who gathered cheerily around me of an evening in the triste 
retirement of my rooms I thus informed that I had broken with 
every wish and every expectation of success in Paris, and that 
the young man who had come there with such notions in his 
head was positively dead and buried " {F, IV, I. 304). 

These words are literally true ; yet, even with all the glamour 
of Paris faded, he could afford to lose no opportunity of making 
himself known, for he had no definite prospect of a livelihood 
elsewhere. Thus we find him embracing the chance of at least 
appearing with an instrumental work before the Paris public. 
Schlesinger had the agreeable habit of giving the subscribers to 
his Gazette a series of vocal and instrumental concerts every 
year, in the Salle S. Honor^: the ninth of this season, on 
February 4, 1841, was to consist almost exclusively of German 
works rendered by German performers — a circumstance that 
drew from the critics a sarcasm anent its ''parfum allemand." 
Sophie L6we* (subsequently Princess Lichtenstein) sang Beet- 
hoven's Adelaide and an aria from Persiani's Inez de Castro-, 
Kathinka Heinefetter, the youngest of three sister vocalists, sang 
Schubert's Wanderer and the inevitable aria from Robert \ among 
other virtuosi, Charles Halle, played the pianoforte. The concert 
was to commence with an overture by Wagner : the FaiLst being 
out of the question, there was nothing for it but to fall back on 
Columbus, It was not a success, for reasons to be gathered from 
contemporary accounts. A. Specht, musical critic of the Artiste, 
sums up his impressions as follows: "The composer of the 
overture Christoph Columbus^ Herr Richard Wagner, is one of 
the most distinguished contributors to the Gazette Musicale. 
After the skilful way in which he had expounded his theories on 
the Overture in that journal, we were curious to see how he would 
• St^ Prose IVorks Vlll, 1 12- 1 13, 1 16 and 139. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER.". 3II 

apply them in practice. The Columbus overture may be divided 
into two main sections: the first depicts the doubts and dis- 
couragements of the hero, whose dogged adherence to his plan is 
dictated by a voice from above. Unfortunately the leading theme, 
intended to express this idea, was entrusted to the trumpets, and 
they consistently played wrong ; the real meaning of a very cleverly 
worked-out composition was therefore lost on all but a mere 
handful of serious hearers. The ideas in the work shew dignity 
and artistic finish, and the extremely brief closing Allegro gives 
exalted expression to Columbus's triumph. Monsieur Valentino's 
orchestra owes Herr Wagner a rehabilitation.'' To the same effect 
the reporter of the Gazette^ Henri Blanchard : '' Ce morceau, qui 
a plutot le caract^re et la forme d'une introduction, m^rite-t-il bien 
la definition d'ouverture que I'auteur a si bien d^finie demi^rement 
dans la Gazette Musicale? A-t-il voulu peindre I'infini de la 
pleine mer, de I'horizon qui ^mblait sans but aux compagnons du 
c^lbbre navigateur, par le tremolo aigu des violons ? Les entr^ 
dinstruments de cuivre reviennent trop uniform^ment et avec trop 
d'obstination ; d'ailleurs, leurs discordances qui choquaient les 
oreilles exerc^ et d^licates n'ont pas permis d'appr^cier k sa 
juste valeur le travail de M. Wagner qui, malgr6 ce contretemps, 
nous a paru I'oeuvre d'un artiste ayant des id^es larges, assises, 
et connaissant bien les ressources de I'instrumentation moderne." 
Berlioz, on the other hand, has nothing to say of this overture in 
his report to the Journal des Dkbats^ though a word of encourage- 
ment would have been of great service to the young composer, as 
that report was transferred to various German papers, among 
others the Neue Zeitschrift\ according to him, the main attention 
of the audience was centred on Frl. L6we, and even Hallo's 
excellence was scarcely noticed. 

So much for the view from without : Pecht gives us what we 
may call the family aspect of the little event As Wagner was 
engaged in the green-room, though he did not actually conduct 
his work, Pecht was entrusted with the duty of escorting Minna : 
'^ The hall was already fairly full, when we arrived and took our 
seats in the middle of the stalls. Frau Wagner, for whom so 
much was at stake, naturally sat in great nervous excitement, her 
heart in her mouth. The hall became more and more filled, 
especially with German fellow-countrymen. I myself was in 
the utmost state of tension, eager to hear at last what Wagner's 



312 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

music sounded like, and how it would be received by an audience 
bred on Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. But, little as I and the 
rest of the audience understood of the music, the case was still 
worse with the bandsmen: they had practised, or rather not 
practised, the work with great repugnance, and at an entry of the 
brass came so shamefully to grief that the audience, previously 
as still as mice, became restless and commenced to hiss. Poor 
Frau Wagner, who had been sitting with bated breath, at once 
burst into tears ; she almost had a fainting fit, and attracted the 
attention of everybody near us. In my terrible embarrassment I 
could think of no other expedient than downright rudeness, and 
told her I should have expected something more sensible of an old 
stage>hand, than to make a scene about stupid bandsmen. This 
piece of brutality had the effect intended ; her indignation brought 
the lady round a little, and we were able to beat our retreat un- 
obstructed. Scarcely were we out of the hall, than we met Wagner 
and our other friends, he shewing less dejection than annoyance 
at the contretemps. We all accompanied the couple home, to 
offer consolation : a task the easier, as we had at least made oat 
that a new style of music was being aimed at here with obvious 
power ; perhaps something unattainable, quite certainly not some- 
thing insignificant. Naturally we did our best to cheer our hosts 
by emptying the vials of our scorn upon the wretched orchestra, 
and praising the piece itself to the top of our bent But Wagner 
seemed to need no solace ; never have I seen him under a more 
delightful aspect, than after this defeat Not for a moment did 
he lose his reckless humour, when once we were comfortably 
seated at home : he was already laughing with one eye, ere the 
other had quite ceased weeping; his innate bravery had not 
forsaken him. A little supper stood awaiting us, to celebrate the 
expected success : we made it our consolation-cup. Quips and 
jokes soon passed the evening, and at midnight we left the com- 
poser more certain than ever of his genius." 

But supposing Germany were to fail him too ! This haunting 
fear is the only explanation of many a veering in his compass. 
He had as yet no news as to the acceptance or rejection of 
Rienziy and such silence was unbearable to a man in his pre- 
carious situation. Among the Dresden authorities appealed to 
by letter, the first to deign an answer was the Secretary of the 
Royal theatre, Hofrath Winkler, alias Theodor Hell (whom we 



•'DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 313 

met long ago) ; a marvellous specimen of Dresden's pigtail period, 
a man with a name for shifty ambiguity, and exhibiting in his 
relations with Wagner a strange mixture of sympathy and self- 
interest. Winkler referred to an official reply alleged to have 
been already despatched, though never received by Wagner, and 
gave him various well-meant hints as to minor obstacles to a 
decision on the part of the General Intendant, such as the 
introduction of a "Cardinal" in the plot, etc The worst of it 
was, in his muddling way he gave Wagner to understand that no 
text-book had been enclosed with the score, and thus induced 
him to write and send a second copy — with a few explanatory 
notes and modifications, to avoid any likely offence. A pencil- 
note by the Director, on this second copy, shews that it was a 
work of supererogation, for text-book and score were already 
reposing tranquilly in the hands of Reissiger (one of the two 
chief conductors). Laube, on the other hand, had meantime 
had a conversation with SchrOder-Devrient, and transmitted quite 
flattering tidings; whilst an old friend of the Geyer family, 
Regisseur and costume-designer Ferdinand Heine, sends a mes- 
sage now and again through friend Kietz. But that is all. 
Wagner's repeated attempts to accelerate the deadly slow court- 
tempo, his entreaties to Reissiger, Schr6der-Devrient, Tichatschek,* 
meet with hardly any response. Nine months later we find him 
writing to F. Heine : " You are silent ; Herr Fischer is silent, 
and I'm almost afraid the whole world would be silent if I did 
not write reports to the Abendzeitung and look up French 
comedies." 

Yes, it had come to hunting up French comedies for two 
different patrons who required that little fillip to their produc- 



* Wagner is most solicitous as to whether the part would suit the taste and 
style of this excellent tenor : no theatre in the world, he writes, could offer 
him artists of the dramatic stamp of Tichatschek and Schrdder-Devrient ; yet 
how would it be possible to put enthusiasm into a task one did not care for? 
The artist must be free, to devote warmth and affection to a r61e. The Rienzi 
that had sprung from his inmost heart was in the fullest sense of the word a 
hero^ — an inspired zealot who appears as a dazzling ray of light among a people 
profoundly degenerate, which he feeU called to enlighten and uplift. This 
Rienzi is of the youthful age of eight-and-twenty [Wagner's <«w»],— a circum- 
stance that, in conjunction with Wagner's estimate of the possibilities of the 
tenor voice, had moved him to write the part for a tenor^ and thus transgress 
the convention that tenors should be given none but lover's parts, etc., etc. 



314 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

tivity, in return for whatever problematic service they might 
render the cause of poor Rienzi. "Young Germany" could no 
more get on without its pinch of Lutetian salt, than could the 
palate of old Pigtail. " Here, my good Laube, I send you sous 
bande the sort of pieces you desired," says a letter of Wagner's 
dated March the 13th.* "Their selection was a matter of some 
perplexity to me at first; but I went through the repertory of all 
the theatres for the last few months, choosing the pieces that 
had been oftenest given and most discussed, and was fortunate 
enough, after buying them, to find my choice approved by some- 
one who had seen them all upon the stage. The money for it 
I got Heine to advance me " — manifestly with Laube's authority. 
The other customer for the latest articles de Paris was our old friend 
Hofrath Winkler of Dresden, with an insatiable appetite for spice 
and novelty. Throughout the whole of 1841 he managed to 
chain the young master to the tailboard of his rumbling old cart, 
the Abendzeitungy by the promise of his protection of Rienzi, No 
less than ten long news-letters did he extract from Wagner in the 
period Feb. 23 to Dec. 31, — not counting the German reprint of 
his pair of Paris novelettes. Only two of these, the report on 
the Paris Freischutz and that on Hal^vy's Reine de Chypre^ did 
Wagner think fit to include in his Collected Writings (1871) ; but 
the reader will find the remainder translated at length in Vol. VIII. 
of the Prose Works, and may judge for himself of the wonderful 
vim that kept the author head-erect in the midst of his endless 
worries. The first of the series makes significant allusion to the 
Mont de Pi^t^ — or pawnbroker's shop: on June 8, 1886, its 
manuscript was publicly sold in Berlin for a hundred marks, and 
dirt-cheap at that ; but if the writer received a bare fifth of such a 
sum for his contribution, he might think himself lucky. 

The private letter to Laube, mentioned at the beginning of 
the last paragraph, contains a few sad personal particulars. 
Spring has come, but with no promise for Wagner : his work is 
drawing to an end, he says (apparently those "arrangements" 
for Schlesinger), and there is no hope of any more (a little later 
on, though). He is not yet clear of his debts, and has had the 
additional misfortune, owing to ignorance of French regulations, 
to give notice to quit his quarters in the Rue du Helder a 
week too late, thereby upsetting all his plans for a cheap summer 

* In the possession of M. Alfred Bovet, of Valentigne7, Doubs, France. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 315 

holiday. As to his rich brother-in-law Friedrich Brockhaus, 
" I have no answer from him yet. Oh ! I know the sort of 
people ! " * His literary work, helpful as it may be to him 
otherwise, brings him next to nothing in ; and it is a misery 
to see absolutely no prospect of succeeding as musician. He 
must make up his mind to take a bold step the beginning of next 
winter, — bold indeed, in fact impracticable, for it is this: "I 
must give a grand concert with the Conservatoire orchestra and 
chorus, and bring my best things out \ otherwise not a soul here 
will ever get to know me. But that could only be brought to 
pass by a favourable issue to my Dresden business. How much 
longer is that going to take? For three months the people have 
had my packet, and not a single direct word have I obtained 
from them. If only I knew what they're brooding ! " At the 
letter's close he speaks of the approaching departure of friend 
Pecht, who had just sent in a fine picture to the annual exhibi- 
tion;! but the quick of his trouble lies in the last postscript, 
wedged in at the paper's very edge, " Der unselige Meyerbeer/ / / " 
— "That wretched Meyerbeer!" This was on March 13, 1841, 
after Wagner had waited in vain a whole fourth of a year for an 
answer from Dresden. The sequel plainly points to his having 
adopted some means or other at this very time, to bring pressure 
to bear upon Meyerbeer ; for on the i8th of the same month the 
almighty one at last despatches a letter from Baden to von 
Liittichau at Dresden. The general tone of Meyerbeer's epistle 
seems that of a man who is anxious to rid himself at one stroke 
of an importunate suitor ; but it will be fairer to let the reader 
form his own opinion from a faithful translation of its text, 
especially as this is the only written document available on the 
Meyerbeer side of the question : — 

Baden, 18. 3. 41. 
Your Excellency 

Will forgive me if I burden you with these lines ; but I have too vivid 
a remembrance of your constant kindness to myself, to be able to refuse a 

* When the answer came, as Tappert tells us {Mus, IVoch. 1888, p. 17), 
it was to the effect that assistance must depend on the applicant's changing 
his mode of life ; to which Wagner pointedly replied, *'Had I had the good 
fortune to be made a musical conductor in Leipzig, I should never have hit 
on the eccentric idea of seeking my fortune in Paris." 

t Poor Pecht had got through all his money, and must return home with 
nothing but the barren laurels of an acceptance ; his departure was closely 



3l6 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

young and interesting countrjrman, when, with perhaps too flattering a 
reliance on my influence with Your Excellency, he begs me to support his 
petition with these lines. Herr Richard Wagner of Leipzig is a young 
composer who not only has a sound musical education, but also much £uicy, 
and moreover possesses general literary culture ; and whose whole situation^ 
I should say, deserves sympathy in his fatherland in every respect. His 
greatest wish is to have the opera '* Rienzi," both text and music of which he 
has himself composed, brought to performance on the new Royal Stage at 
Dresden. Certain pieces from it, that he played to me, I found full of fancy, 
and of much dramatic effect May the young artist enjoy the protection of 
Your Excellency, and find opportunity of getting his fine talent more generally 
recognised. Once more I crave the indulgence of Your Excellency, and b^ 
you to preserve me your condescension and good will. 
Most respectfully 

Your Excellency's most faithful servant 

Meybrbebr. 

A slight inflammation of the eyes compels me to dictate this letter.* 

It is impossible to say whether this letter had any direct 
influence upon the ultimate decision of the Dresden Intendanz ; 
but it certainly did not act like magic, for no official answer was 
received by Wagner until another three months later. 

To pursue our chronicle : on April i the Gazette brought out 
that priceless gem, Le Musiden et la publicity — still better in its 
German form of Der Kunstler und die Offentiichkeit That its 
exquisite blend of wit and sadness was lost upon the editor-in- 
chief, £. Monnais, seems proved by the singular curtailment of 
the French version. Perhaps it was for this reason that the 
" excerpts from the pocket-book of a defunct musician " came to 
a sudden end, and Wagner turned the direction of his literary 
efforts mainly homewards. We have already seen how he began 
to supply the Dresden Abendzeiiung with chatty feuilletons at 
the end of February : their series is unbroken to the end of the 
year, varied only by the reproduction of the Pilgrimage and End 
in the German tongue. Nor is Hofrath Winkler's paper the only 
recipient of his attentions in the fatherland. Last summer, in 
the thick of his work at Rienzi^ he had been asked by August 
Lewald for co-operation in the Europa : to eke his living out 

followed by that of Brix, for Buenos Ayres. Another of the circle, Kietz, 
exhibited " an excellent crayon-drawing," the portrait of Minna, who, it wiU 
be remembered, was " as pretty as a picture." 

* The original German will be found in R. Prolss's Beitrage zur Geschichte 
d$s Hofiheaters su Dresden. 



*'DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 317 

by " amusing contributions " he sends the Parisian Amusements ^ 
soon to be followed by the Parisian Fatalities. The manuscript 
of the first-named he accompanies by his three unpublished 
French romances, Dors man enfant^ Mignonne and Attente^ at 
the same time begging with engaging frankness for their speedy 
publication, ''less out of vanity, to my shame be it said, than 
for want of money. A rascal, who makes himself out better than 
he is — I've been so treated here ! " 

Thus bandied from five-line to one-line composition, it would 
have been some consolation to know that his literary talent at 
least was being put to higher use. Occasion lay to hand. Anders, 
the Beethoven-worshipper, had for years been accumulating quite 
a mass of invaluable biographic and bibliographic material con- 
cerning his idol ; but, his pen being too heavy on the wing, its 
arrangement and elaboration had hitherto lain dormant in the 
mind of the collector. He now approached Wagner with a view 
to the erection in common of a great literary monument, he to 
supply the matter, Wagner its sifting and working up. Imagine 
the possibilities opened out : at a time when Wagner's scriptorial 
style was at its most perspicuous ; when the veil that covered the 
Bonn master's last great works was scarcely lifted ; and when the 
public verdict on that giant among giants was left to people like 
F^tis, Ulibicheff and so on. Wagner embraced the proposal with 
enthusiasm, and from March to May of 1841 he strove his utmost 
to obtain the necessary go-between, a publisher. Apparently he 
never got quite so far as to commence the actual writing of this 
Life ; in his present situation that could not very well be under- 
taken without some prospect of pecuniary reward. Through Laube, 
Lewald, Theodor Hell, as intermediaries, the work was offered 
to three of the most eminent German publishers, to Brockhaus, 
Cotta, and Arnold. To all three of them was submitted a com- 
prehensive draft-prospectus for the trade, dealing with the contents 
and proposed method of the work, its exact form (two volumes, 
of about 480 pages each), together with a proposal about the 
author's fee and an undertaking to complete and forward the whole 
of the manuscript in course of one year. What measures these 
enterprising purveyors of literature may have taken to ensure 
success, deponent sayeth not : the project was never realised. 

In the prevaOing gloom of this Paris period one is apt to foiget 
* All published in the Europa in the course of 1841. 



31 8 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

its passing gleams : to such belongs the re^ncounter with Henri 
Vieuxtemps. Wagner had made his acquaintance two years 
previously at Riga, where Vieuxtemps (on an artistic tour with 
Franz Servais) had given two concerts in the theatre precisely at 
the time of the death of Holtei's wife, the consequences of which 
bereavement had led to Wagner's own starting on his desperate 
road to Paris. In the midst of " plaudit-seeking virtuosi with 
their dishonouring airs variis, their fantaisies and polacca guer- 
rieraSy' the appearance of this sympathetic youngster was a verit- 
able balm. His d^but at the Conservatoire concert of Jan. lo, with 
a grand violin-concerto of his own composition, won from Wagner 
these words of warmest approbation : " So one man has dared to 
restore his art to that dignity from which it had been so shamefully 
debased; to place himself before the jaded ears of the crowd with 
a noble, sterling piece of music, purely and chastely conceived, 
performed with life and freshness, — a composition for which he 
claims the exclusive attention of his audience, and to which he 
manifestly welds his art of virtuoso with a single eye to lifting his 
work to an ideal understanding" {F,W, VIII. 117). But the 
prettiest among his several references, and that which points 
most clearly to an intimacy, is where he relates how Vieuxtemps, 
supposed to be lodging opposite, had seen him come home tired 
out with listening to bravura feats : " Humanitarian that he is, he 
came across with his fiddle, sat down by my bed-side, and played 
me something gratis, I fell into a lovely sleep ; delicious dreams 
came over me ; I heard the voice of Goethe singing, ' Schwindet, 
Ihr dunkeln Wdlbungen droben,' and in broad daylight I saw in 
heaven's heart that star which drenched my soul like the blessing- 
freighted eye of Mozart. Ail grew bright and happy; when I 
awoke, the player was standing by me, as though he had just ful- 
filled a work of mercy. I thanked him, and we spoke of it no 
more" {ibid, 127). Fond as Wagner was of talking, the highest 
mark of his approval is always contained in that recurrent closing 
formula, "Not another word." — This was in the Spring of 1841, 
from which time also dates a joint greeting of " Vieuxtemps and 
friend Kietz " to Ferdinand Heine. Soon afterwards Vieuxtemps 
left Paris, to extend his conquests to England, and the friends did 
not meet again till a few years later in Dresden; after that, at 
Zurich 1852 — on which latter occasion Wagner once more ex- 
presses his admiration in a leaderette in the Eidgenifssische Zeitung, 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 319 

Presently we have another figure introduced, by way of 
caricature, indirectly concerned with that projected Life of 
Beethoven : this is Anton Schindler, of whom rumour says that 
he had his visiting-cards printed with "Ami de Beethoven." 
Wagner calls him " Beethoven's man in the flesh — ScAindler, the 
intimate Schindler." " The intimate Schindler " is itself a volume 
of sarcasm compressed into one epithet, but Wagner is in a 
bantering mood, and gives us a line or two more of description : 
'*the man is full of unction, and further bears a striking likeness 
to some Apostle whose face I can't quite call to mind. He has a 
brave appearance, mild manners and beaming eyes, wears a 
brown coat, and ordinarily Beethoven's portrait" (i&id. 129). 
The victim of this playful satire had just perpetrated his 
Biographie Beethcven's mit Portrait und twei Facsimiles (1840), 
and had come to Paris to glean material for its sequel, Beethoven 
in Paris (1842). Unfortunately in the book first-named he had 
chosen to fall foul of Anders, who had recently issued a brochure 
for the benefit of the Beethoven memorial containing a French 
translation of Ries and Wegeler's Biographische Notiun iiber 
Beethauen, Anders was justly indignant at being openly accused 
of falsification, and his annoyance appears to have filtered to the 
ears of Schindler; for, as Wagner humorously puts it, "When 
the Man of Beethoven reached Paris, he was so agreeable as to 
invite Anders to a conference, with the object of radically proving 
to him the truth of his assertion. The conference took place 
[evidently in the presence of Wagner] ; it was a dreary day, and 
Schindler in a surprisingly mild mood. After Anders had 
demonstrated to him line by line that he had not allowed himself 
the smallest material addition to the original Notices, the beaming 
eyes of Beethoven's Man ran over, and in an excess of tameness 
he seized Anders by. the hand, assuring him that, had he known 
hintf he could never have permitted himself that little jest; 
moreover, he solemnly promised him a brilliant reparation in the 
second edition of his book. . . . How great is the docility of 
Schindler, how strongly developed the bump of his astounding 
logic It therefore pains me to see him bootlessly squandering 
his eminent elucidative powers on the incorrigible Parisians. 
May his good angel waft him soon fi-om hence!" {iM. 130). 
The amusing part of it is, that Schindler was so impervious to 
sarcasm as actually to go out of his way to praise the very articles 



320 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

in one of which he had been so bear-baited : " Herr Wagner's 
correspondence-reports pre-eminently merit the attention of musical 
Germany; he always keeps to the matter in hand, which he 
thoroughly understands, and loves to speak the truth out freely, 
according to his best conviction." Is this another ''brilliant 
reparation," or a ponderous attempt at repartee? 

In this same Spring, to judge by the first of the letters (Mar. 
24, 1 841) in their published Correspondence, Wagner appears to 
have paid a second visit to Liszt The more one thinks of it, the 
more one is inclined to believe that it is to this that the passage 
already quoted from the Communication refers. In any case, the 
letter itself is so enigmatic, that it is impossible to guess the 
visit's object ; perhaps, though this is pure conjecture, it was to 
woo Liszt's influence for the Rienzi scheme. It would be of no 
great consequence, were it not the first link in an ever-memorable 
chain, and further remarkable for Liszt's having preserved it 
How many a stranger must have written to the fdted artist in a 
similar strain ! There must have been something about Wagner 
that sub-consciously impressed Liszt at the time, for him not to 
have destroyed this first epistle. But there was still a great gulf 
set between them, the yawning gulf of Paris. How nearly it 
devoured them both, in opposite ways I On April 24 Liszt gave 
his grand concert, conducted by Berlioz, for Beethoven's memorial : 
we have already quoted the remarks it drew firom Wagner anent 
Liszt's genius, so let us view the darker side. " The programme 
consisted of nothing but Beethoven's compositions : nevertheless 
the fatal public demanded with a voice of thunder Liszt's taur^- 
force par excellence^ the fantaisie on Robert the DeviL There was 
no escape for the gifted man ; so, with chagrined words, ^Je suis 
le serviteur du public; cela va sans dire/* he sat down again to 
the piano, and played the favourite piece with crashing brilliance. 
Thus is each crime avenged on earth. Some day in Heaven, 
Liszt will have to perform that piece before the assembled public 
of the angels. Mayhap it will be for the very last time" {P, W. 
VIIL 137). 

More and more thoroughly each day was Wagner disgusted 
with Paris and his former " monstrous aspirations of conquering " 
it. In a passage in the FatcUities^ which clearly bears a personal 
application, he says: ''Such wishes generally lead to the most 
desperate ennui ; then the arts of Liszt and Chopin, the tones of 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." $21 

Duprez and the Dorus-gras, eh ! even Rubini's immortal trills, 
are seldom able to dispel a tedium they far more frequently 
increase. What a mercy, when Spring appears, and gives one 
a pretext for fleeing from Paris with its unspeakable tempta- 
tions and stupefying din; after a winter passed in hard 
abstentions, the German yearns for the tranquil joys of country 
life." 

But where to find country near Paris ? For miles around the 
land was occupied by the villas of ex-ministers and plutocrats. At 
last he hit on Meudon. Gasperini informs us that at that time 
there were quite a number of pretty little houses lying back from 
the road between Meudon and Bellevue, only a few paces from 
the magnificent park. Wagner took lodgings in one of these, 
Avenue de Meudon 3. " How I breathed again," he continues 
in the work last-quoted, " for to have no neighbours is a privilege 
one learns in Paris first to prize." The account that follows, of 
his landlord's little ways, is most amusing, but too obviously a 
caricature to be impressed into our service: its moral, which 
will be endorsed by most people, is that even in the country, 
unless one happens to be a millionaire, one cannot be quit of 
noise. 

Wagner removed to Meudon at the end of April (39th), but it 
was some time before he could settle down again to solid work. 
His beloved Freischiiiz is about to be performed for the first time 
at the Grand Op^ra, and he is horrified to hear that it is to be 
provided with recitatives and made generally amenable to the 
'' statutes" of that institution; so he sets to work and writes a 
most charming article for the Gazette (appearing May 23). He 
fears, and justly, that the French won't understand the subject 
of this opera, and he therefore narrates the legend for them with 
al] that idyllic poetry of which he was so great a master when he 
chose; then he makes bold to express his dread of the crushing 
effect of grand ballets and elaborate declamation upon its simple 
texture ; and winds up with a cry from the heart : " Ah ! would 
ye, could ye, hear and see our own true * Freischiitz,' perhaps ye 
then might feel what fills me now with mournful visions, might 
strike a friendship with that quiet trend which lures the German 
from the life of great cities to Nature, to the Forest-solitude, there 
to revive those inborn feelings for which your very language has 
no words." Thus he strikes with unfailing accuracy of aim at 

X 



322 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the radical difference between the French, or rather the Parisians, 
and the people of his fatherland, emphasising the very instinct 
that has temporarily driven him out of Paris. 

The first two months of his Meudon outing were not to be 
devoted to that " quiet trend." Almost from day to day we can 
follow him through his business cares. A torn sheet of paper 
dated May the 4th has come down to us, bearing on the one 
side a suggestion for the full cast of Rienziy on the other a jumble 
of disconnected sentences, the names of Berlioz, Liszt and Chopin, 
and amid it all the ejaculation, " My God, why ever are we so 
unspeakably unlucky?" Obviously this was commenced as a 
string of notes for that news-letter of May 5 to the Abendteitung, 
which treats of Liszt and Berlioz. On the 7th of May we have 
a covering private letter to the Hofrath, containing the last ex- 
haustive plan for the Beethoven biography, with a request that 
Winkler will use his influence to gain over Arnold for the under- 
taking; at its close he refers to Rtenzi: '*It is of incalculable 
importance to me to know soon — very soon — whether my opera 
has been definitely accepted and set down for performance." 
The next few days must have been devoted to the second of 
his pair of articles for the Europa^ the Parisian Fatalities^ for 
which he retains the ironical pseudonym adopted with the first, 
" W. Freudenfeuer " (best translated into French, " Feu de joie "). 
On the 25th of the month, three days after a cheerless birthday, 
he returns to the charge with another letter to the Dresden 
management, determined to hasten a decision, however it may 
fall out. Then comes a hearty epistle to Reissiger, an endeavour 
to enlist his mediation: he cannot understand why Herr von 
Liittichau has not declared his intentions ; he asks for nothing 
beyond a definite answer, whether L. will give the opera or not^ 
— " As for the state of mind of a private Parisian composer in 
summer and the country, you and Hofrath W. may perhaps be a 
little wrong in supposing it much cheerfuler than the Paris 
atmosphere had left it. . . . If you and Herr v. L. could only 
gaze into the curious mesh of miseries, hopes, outlooks, follies, 
plans, distractions, etc., that constitutes my present situation, I 
am perfectly certain you would know at once whether you ought 
to vouchsafe me an immediate Yes or No." 

From time to time the young master had to break his retire- 
ment by a business visit to town. There still exists the draft of 



*'DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 323 

a French letter in which he begs from the management of the 
Op6ra the favour of a ticket for their first performance of Der 
Freischutz (June 7, 1841), requesting them to acquaint him the 
day before the performance, and to despatch the ticket itself ''au 
magazin de Mr Maurice" Schlesinger. Theory/ performance in 
France of Weber's most popular work, twenty years after date ! 
Not that it had been altogether overlooked in Paris, for Castil 
Blaze had transmogrified it into a Robin des bois at the Op^ra 
Comique ; but that was something beneath contempt. Now the 
French were to have the Freischutz " as it is " ; in fact, a little 
more so. Pacini had translated the text as faithfully as possible, 
whilst Berlioz had added lengthy recitatives, also ballet-music 
compiled from other works of Weber's. The result had been 
foreseen by Wagner; how far his fears were justified, may be 
gathered from his intensely comical report to Germany {P.W. 
VII.). Yet money was coined by the work — which went through 
twelve repetitions down to August; and Wagner thought that 
some of this golden stream should be diverted into the rightful 
channel. From Dresden he had heard of the financial straits of 
the heirs of his " beloved model," and at once he took the afiair 
into his own hands. He posted off again to Paris, and button- 
holed the Director of the Op^ra. L^on Pillet, the gentleman in 
question, was willing enough to assent to his proposals ; only, the 
droits hauteur having already been ceded to the "arrangers," the 
ordinary receipts could not possibly stand a further tax. How- 
ever, there might be another way open : if Frau von Weber would 
write a letter asking for it, he, Pillet, might arrange a special 
performance for the benefit of her late husband's heirs, and hand 
over to them half the takings, estimated at from five to ten 
thousand francs. It was on July i that Wagner received this 
personal intimation, and, without waiting to return to Meudon, at 
once sent off the news to Dresden. His letter, addressed to 
Hofrath Winkler as trustee of the Weber family, is now in the 
hands of M. Alfred Bovet of Valentigney, and runs as follows : 
" For my part I should be only too happy, if I could be of any 
use in this affair; which might be possible, as Herr Pillet has 
some reason to consider me a little, especially in my second 
capacity, that of literary man, or rather, journalist. You see, as I 
myself have started the ball, it would be the easiest thing for me 
to expose him, were he to display no earnest desire to fulfil the 



324 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

hopes he has now thrown out, — ^though I really have no ground 
to fear that."* 

Considering the ridiculous charge of ''boundless egoism" so 
frequently levelled at Wagner, mainly by people unworthy to loose 
his shoe-latchet, it is a matter for some congratulation to be able 
to produce this document from a time when all his energies were 
needed to stave off the wolf from his own door. The day before 
(June 30), after waiting five whole weeks for an answer to his last 
petition, he had sent off another, a still more urgent letter to the 
directorate of the Dresden Court-theatre. It was crossed by the 
answer so long delayed, the definite intimation by von Liittichau 
that Rienzi had been accepted at last ! Thus was his unselfish 
action unconsciously rewarded. He must have received the letter 
almost immediately on his return to Meudon, for it is dated June 
the 29th. Its substance is as under : — 

The textbook and score of your opera Rienzi having been carefully examined, 
I have the pleasure to inform you of the acceptance of this your opera. It 
will be presented at the Royal Court-theatre as soon as possible, let us hope 
in the course of next winter. 

We may imagine the effect of this almost despaired-of stroke of 
fortune on the struggling man. At last his first ambitious work 
had been accepted, and that at one of the chief court-theatres in 
Germany! "This acceptance," he says himself in after years, 
" broadly-speaking meant for me an almost amazingly encourag- 
ing omen, and withal a friendly greeting from Germany that 
made my feelings all the warmer for my native home, as the 
worldly blast of Paris was daily freezing me the more. Already 
with all my hopes and all my thoughts I lived in Germany alone ; 
an ardent, yearning patriotism awoke within me, such as I had 
never dreamt before " (P. W. I. 3x0). It was enough to turn his 
head ; but it simply set him to work in earnest once again. He 
well might deem it worth returning to creative work, with such a 
prospect opened out. 

It will be remembered that the affair of the original Flying 
Dutchman draft had been left in suspense, as Wagner could not 
see his way just then to parting with the subject. At the same 
last interview with Fillet (a day or two before the recent glorious 

* Owing to a chapter of accidents, or negligences, on every side but 
Wagner's, the Benefit never came off, — see Letters to Uhlig &*c., pp. 449-50. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 325 

news) when he had interceded for the heirs of Weber, he himself 
had a bitter pill to swallow. He had previously learnt in a round- 
about way that, whether he consented or not, it would make no 
difference — his draft was already handed to Paul Foucher for 
versification,* prior to being given to another composer to set to 
music. So he took the bull by the horns, and agreed to sell the 
draft and right of performance at the Paris Optra for 500 fr. 
(;^2o) — apparently reserving the liberty to make use of his 
subject elsewhere. At anyrate the money would relieve some of 
his instant cares, and clear a breathing-space. Coming almost 
simultaneously with the acceptance of Rienzi^ it was relief and 
incentive in one, and he lost no time in turning his latest subject 
into German verse. 

" It was the first folk's-poem that forced its way into my heart, 
and called on me as man and artist to point its meaning and 
mould it to a work of art. From here begins my career as poety 
my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera-texts," the author 
says in his Communication^ but hastens to add : " In it there is 
so much as yet inchoate, the joinery of the situations is for the 
most part so imperfect, the verse and diction so often void of 
individual stamp, that our modem playwrights will be the first to 
count my designation a piece of impudence demanding strenuous 
punishment. . . . The form of this poem, however, as that of all 
my later ones, was dictated solely by the subject-matter, insomuch 
as that had become a definite possession of my life, and insofar 
as I had gained any general aptitude for artistic construction." 
In other words, he had begun to have a dim idea of his own 
peculiar path in Drama, and followed it according to his present 
lights. 

The poem completed post-haste, the next thing was to hire a 
piano, to assist its musical composition : after three quarters of a 
year, Wagner felt he needed to work himself back into a musical 
mood.t:"When the piano arrived," as he says in the Auto- 
Hographic Sketchy '' my heart beat fast for very fear ; I dreaded to 



* Paul Fottcber, brother-in-law of Victor Hugo, had already written, or 
lent his name to, a round fifty pieces of the most varied description for the 
Paris boulevard-theatres ; to tbe text of the Vaisseau fantdme, subsequently 
set to music by Pierre Dietsch (a miserable failure) he appears to have 
merely lent bis name, according to the fashion satirised by Wagner on page 
160 of Vol. VIIL of the Prpse Works. 



326 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

discover that I had ceased to be a musician. I began with the 
Sailors' Chorus and the Spinning-song; it flew as if on wings, 
and I shouted for joy at the feeUng within me that I still was a 
musician." He had an audience, too; for sister Cacilie, with 
her husband and baby son, had taken lodgings close by for the 
summer. "My parents," says F. Avenarius, "were present at 
those first rehearsals. It was in a little room whose only furniture 
consisted of that hired piano, a couple of tables and a few chairs. 
My parents have told me how, after bursting into loud exclama- 
tions of joy, he turned to them with ' Eh ! Doesn't that sound 
something like?' Then a knock came at the door: M. Jadin 
the landlord, an old original amusingly described by Wagner, had 
sent up a message requesting to stop that sort of strumming " — 
the very earliest criticism on the music of the Flying Dutchman, 

If it was in a sorrowful mood that Wagner first conceived the 
subject of his latest work, "all the irony, all the bitter sarcasm 
which in a kindred plight is all that remains to our literary poets 
to spur them on to work " — as he says with obvious allusion to 
Heine's treatment of the subject — he had already put behind him 
in his literary articles, and could yield himself without reserve to 
"the good angel which preserved me as an artist, nay, which 
really made me first an artist when my soul commenced to revolt 
with greater energy against the whole condition of our modem 
art. . . . That good angel was Music " (P, W, I. 304-5). And that 
good angel helped him valiantly, for, "I had only to take the 
various thematic germs in Senta's Ballad [already composed] and 
develop them to their legitimate conclusions, and I had all the 
chief-moods of this poem, quite of themselves, in definite thematic 
shapes before me. It would have been deliberately to follow the 
example of the arbitrary opera-composer, had I chosen to invent 
a fresh musical motive for each recurrence of one and the same 
mood in different scenes ; a course toward which I did not feel 
the least temptation, as I had only in mind the most intelligible 
portrayal of the subject, not a mere conglomerate of operatic 
numbers" {ibid. 370). It is significant of this spontaneous 
origin, that he also tells us he felt strongly inclined to entitle the 
finished work "a dramatic ballad." 

In the above self-criticism we see the genesis of what has 
since been called the Leitmotiv^ or "leading motive" principle. 
Like everything else in a nascent stage, its application to the 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 327 

Flying Dutchman was somewhat elementary, and necessarily eked 
out by expedients from the Operatic school. Still, the great 
reform of musical drama had been commenced, and that 
wellnigh unconsciously. So little reflection was there in the 
process, that the whole music (with exception of the overture) was 
composed in seven weeks. The last page of the completed draft 
bears the date September 13, 1841 ; the title-page a motto 
strikingly descriptive of his own situation : " In night and sorrow. 
Per aspera ad astra, God grant it R. W." 

Once more he was overwhelmed with troubles, and it was two 
full months before he could commence to write his Dutchman 
overture. Pecht tells us of a heart-rending letter sent him in 
these days from Meudon — unfortunately destroyed, with other of 
Wagner's letters, by a fire in Pecht's father's house. In strangely 
vivid contrast, the Gazette Musicale publishes at this very time 
(Oct. 18, 24, and Nov. 7) Wagner's Une Soirie heureuse : fantaisU 
sur la musique pittoresque — "A happy evening" — the style of 
which seems to point to an earlier, more cheerful epoch. It 
certainly does not reflect his state of mind at the hour of its 
appearance, for the dilatory progress of afiiurs in Dresden is 
simply torturing him. True, at the end of August or beginning 
of September he hears from Winkler that his Rienzi will be taken 
in hand immediately after the production of a new opera by 
Reissiger; but down to the middle of October nothing more 
definite has been reported to him^ Naturally he is impatient to 
know how such an elaborate work is to be mounted, cast, etc.^ 
etc., for on that depends its failure or success ; so the twin letters 
of Sep. 7 to W. Fischer and F. Heine are followed on Oct. 14 by 
a triplet addressed to Reissiger and the two last-named, all dated 
from Meudon, all breathing the same anxiety about a matter that 
to him is of vital importance. 

Meanwhile autumn winds and chilly nights have driven him 
from his country retreat (the last set of letters announced Oct. 25 
as the latest date on which an answer would reach him at 
Meudon), and he has returned to Paris, now putting up at 14 
Rue Jacob. "Should you have wished mere news about the 
autumn in and round Paris," he commences a news-letter dated 
Nov. 5 to the Abendzeitungy " I could have placed myself at your 
command some time ago. I would have told you of fearsome 
soughing and howling of the most autumnal and most obstinate 



328 Life of richard wagner. 

of all the winds, which for three full moons has stormed through- 
out the Paris district, — of merrily flickering chimney-fires, of 
mournfully fluttering leaves of trees, of sturdily streaming floods 
of rain — so that you should recall the best of Hoffmann's fairy- 
tales " — or his own Flying Dutchman^ the overture and scoring of 
which must have been undertaken somewhere about this time. 
Hazard has preserved a sheet of paper evidently used as a pad, 
or support for the hand when writing the above : while a perfect 
coruscation of wit and sarcasm is being fired off for the public, 
the pen half-mechanically splutters on to the auxiliary sheet all 
kinds of melancholy private interjections, among which the name 
of Rothschild occurs quite half a score of times, once with the 
after-cry " O millions, golden shiners I " 

On the 24th of November the young master kept the fifth 
anniversary of his wedding-day, in care and vrant. What an 
unbroken chain of troubles, trials, barren hopes, and plans 
frustrated, hung between! Poor Minna must have felt the 
hardships of their daily life even more keenly than himself; but 
that only made matters worse, — Wagner needed a helpmate of 
tougher metal than the pretty little lady whom we have just seen 
almost swooning away at a concert's failure ; the domestic virtues 
of economy and order are not the only ones demanded of the 
wives of workers ; a little cheerful female bravery, a measure of 
sympathy held out to aims beyond her understanding, would 
have been a welcome increase to her dowry. If she had to 
scrape and moil to make both ends meet, her husband had to 
labour by the sweat of his brow to procure "the necessary 
wherewithal " for his return to Germany. " I was obliged for its 
sake," he tells us in the Communication^ "to betake myself once 
more to hack-work for the music-sellers. I made arrangements 
from Hal^v/s [and other] operas. Yet a new-won pride already 
saved me from the bitterness this humiliation had inspired in me 
before." 

On the first of December we have Wagner appearing in a new 
capacity, that of "art-critic" in the sense which vulgarly restricts 
the term to a reporter on paintings or sculpture. Through Kietz 
he had been admitted to the private view of a great mural picture 
which had taken Delaroche four years to paint. The locality was 
the room appointed for distribution of prizes in the Ecole des 
Beaux Arts, and the subject a classical treatment of that act itself. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER. 329 

Those who are curious as to how Richard Wagner acquits himself 
in this department, will find the criticism, or rather the apprecia- 
tion, on pages 165-6 of Vol. VIII. of the Prose Works ; it naturally 
is directed more to the idea and composition of the picture, than 
to technical details. At this private view he was witness of an 
affecting scene, when Delaroche entered the room, received the 
clamorous congratulations of his pupils, and with tears in his eyes 
gave off a little speech in which he urged them all to " courage 
and perseverance." Three weeks later, in course of a criticism of 
Scribe's Une chaine, Wagner wishes his countrymen " would copy 
the Frenchman's diligence ; for I am persuaded that, next to their 
great talent, the actors of the Thditre Fran9ais owe the fine 
perfection of their ensemble mainly to their exemplary diligence." 
The words of Delaroche had fallen on a quick ear ; the instance 
is a minor one, yet sufficiently symptomatic of the promptness 
with which Wagner would always seize a point, to extend its 
application. But if his penetration of the secret of French acting 
was due to the hint of an artist in another branch, his probing of 
the secret of French comedy is all his own : " When I saw this 
piece of Scribe's performed by the actors of the Theatre Fran^ais 
it became clear to me why we Germans have no Comedy worth 
the name, and why the French will always have to help us out. 
'Tis the whole thing: Paris, its salons, countesses, boulevards, 
lawyers, doctors, grisettes, mattresses, journals, caf6s — in short, 
just Paris itself, that makes these comedies; Scribe and his 
friends are really nothing more than clerks, amanuenses of that 
great, that million-headed pla3n¥right." 

For all its supremacy in comedy, perhaps because of it, he was 
longing to escape from Paris : " It was the feeling of utter home- 
lessness, that roused my yearning for the German homeland; 
yet this longing was not directed to any old familiar haunt that 
I must win my way back to, but onward to a country pictured in 
my dreams, an unknown and still to be discovered haven, of 
which I knew this thing alone — that I certainly should never find 
it in Paris" {P.W, I. 310). As he goes on to say, it was the 
longing of his Vanderdecken ; with the scoring of whose drama 
he was even now engaged, in whatever moments could be 
spared between writing private letters to Dresden about the 
interminable preliminaries for Rienzi^ and public letters about 
what was going on in Paris. 



330 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

In the latter category we have two delightful articles. The 
first, perhaps the wittiest of all his literary products, is an airy 
persiflage of Rossini's Stabat Mater and its dilettantist audience 
(contributed to Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift) : it would be hard 
to beat the sentence in which he says that nothing had been 
heard of Rossini for ten long years, since " he sat in Bologna, 
ate pastry, and made wills " ; or the delicious scene that follows 
it, where the Italian maestro and the banker Aguinaldo are 
supposed to take a drive together 'Mn a well-appointed chariot'' 
and suddenly seek absolution for their sins. In fact the seven 
pages of this pasquinade are crammed with spice and humour. 
Dated December the isth, it is signed "H. Valentino," thus 
completing the joke by borrowing the name of the conductor at 
the Salle S. Honors who had murdered the Columbus overture. 

The second of these winter articles was written the last day of 
Wagner's last year in Paris. Dealing with the premiere of the 
Reine de Chypre (Dec. 22, 1842), which he necessarily had to 
attend in his twofold capacity of pianoforte-arranger and reviewer, 
he has a slap at the fatuity of German librettists and the eager- 
ness of German Directors for the latest Paris novelty. A word 
of characterisation is devoted to Schlesinger, "with the black 
hair and never-resting eye, full at once of nervousness and 
admiration, examining his neighbour's features for the effect of 
the last aria, and at the selfsame instant praising up its glorious 
theme. 'Tis no other than the music-publisher, who has already 
paid the composer 30,000 fr. in cash for his right to the score." 
But Schlesinger's portrait has a more interesting pendant, that 
of Richard Wagner himself: "Do you see the young musician 
there, with pale cheeks and a devouring look in the eye? 
Breathless he listens to the performance, gulps down the outcome 
of each single number : is it enthusiasm, or jealousy ? Ah ! 'tis 
the care for daily bread. Should the new opera prove a success, 
he has reason to hope that publisher will give him orders for 
fantasias and airs varies on its * favourite melodies ' " {P. W, VII. 
207). This opera is also briefly mentioned in a news-letter of 
Dec. 23, where the Abendzeitung is informed, in passing, that it 
" won a marked success," and in a letter to the Zeitschrift dated 
Feb. 5 — "Hal6vy's Reine de Chypre is not bad; some of it 
beautiful, much of it trivial." A longer report, that to the 
Gazette we shall refer to in the order of its appearance. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 33 1 

1 84 1 had come to a close, and with it the scoring of Der 
fliegende Hollander: ''Naturally nothing now lay so much at 
my heart, as the wish to bring it to a speedy hearing in Germany. 
From Munich and Leipzig I had the disheartening answer : the 
opera was not at all fitted for Germany. Fool that I was! I 
had fancied it was fit for Germany alone, as it struck chords that 
can vibrate only in the German breast" Not to be daunted, 
he next tried Berlin, sending his score with a covering letter 
to Graf von Redern, the Intendant there, to whom he had 
already addressed himself provisionally from Meudon soon after 
the Dresden acceptance of Rienzu A year ago the Prussian 
throne had been ascended by Friedrich Wilhelm IV., who 
enjoyed the reputation of being a highly-cultured prince; his 
proclaimed intention to raise Berlin to the rank of the metropolis 
of German art and science inspired Wagner with the best of 
hopes. Those hopes find expression in a missive to the King 
of the same date as the letter to Redern. Wagner begins with 
an allusion to the need of a resolute and powerful patron of Art 
in the German fatherland, at a time of such subservience to 
foreign influence ; so far had it gone, that men of parts, especially 
musicians, had had to seek their livelihood abroad — in Paris; 
how many a talent must therefore still lie slumbering, or almost 
have rotted away! But, he proceeds, the King's own promise 
to protect the arts has sounded forth, and every day brings fresh 
and varied proof of how His Majesty intends to keep it ; relying 
upon that, and conscious of the uprightness of his own endeavour, 
he begs the King's protection of his latest work. 

It is characteristic, that Wagner should have sent his specta- 
cular Rienzi to the Dresden court, with its traditional love of 
splendour, — his far more Germanic Hollander to a court where 
"German culture" was now professedly the order of the day. 
But alas 1 Berlin also had its traditions. Just as Frederick the 
Great once rejected Lessing's application for the post of Librarian, 
and appointed a French nonentity instead, so his august descen- 
dant fancied he had done enough for German music when he 
made two aliens, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, his Generalmusik- 
direktors. The King of Prussia deigned no answer. 

Another course lay open. For all his countless disillusions 
since setting foot in Paris, the young master had not quite lost 
his faith as yet in Meyerbeer's sincerity. What more natural, 



332 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

than to appeal for his assistance at the Berlin theatre, where the 
composer of the Huguenots was all-powerful ? To have omitted 
to do so, might have been Construed as a slight So Wagner 
begs his somewhat lukewarm patron to throw his weight into 
the scale with Count Redern. He receives from Meyerbeer a 
brief assurance of his recommendation, and replies with efiiisive 
gratitude: "Two words from you have made me happy again, 
and thoroughly reconciled me to my fate. . . . Poor fool that I 
am, always working for the future, and hearing, seeing nothing, 
eh ! barely existing, in the present — I was sitting in my den with 
my poor tormented wife, and looking at thfe harvest of the last 
outlived, or rather racked-out summer. That harvest, a stupid 
textbook and a fair-sized score, lay before me dumbly asking what 
was to become of them. I could think of nothing more sensible, 
than to pack them up and enclose them with a deferential note 
to Graf von Redern ; I knew they would simply moulder there, 
but nothing better could I think of. Then the evangel was 
opened to me, for there stood written by your honoured hand 
* I will endeavour to secure it with the Graf von Redern ' ! ! — Ah \ 
if you knew what a measureless boon you have thereby conferred 
on me." * Joy and gratitude had really run a little too far ahead, 
and ere long the writer had to learn that " the acceptance of this 
opera by the Berlin Court-theatre directorate had been nothing 
more than a cheap and artificial compliment" {P.W, I. 319). 
That knowledge mercifully denied him for the present, he 
could now look forward to the production of two important 
works of his at two large theatres, and involuntarily reflect 
on the strangeness of the fact that Paris, despite its dashing 
of his local hopes, had been of the greatest use to him for 
Germany. 

Unfortunately, Dresden continued to try his patience week by 
week and month by month. The official acceptance of his Rienzi 
had spoken of its production in course of this winter ; but the 
necessity of first rehearsing a new opera of Reissiger's, Ad^le de 



* The above extracts go to confirm the opinion expressed by Mr Houston 
Stewart Chamberlain with reference to many of Richard Wagner's letters, 
namely that it would be absurd to judge by them the value of the addressee, 
for " genius is creative, not only in its works of art, but in its daily inter- 
course " ; in other words, the master often idealised his correspondents. As 
to the present instance, see Appendix. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 333 

^m: (produced Nov. 26, 1841)* and after that Hal6vy's Guitarrero^ 
and after that again an opera of Mercadante's for sake of a touring 
prima donna — had already half devoured the winter season. '' If 
it should occur to another 'star' to cross my path, or should 
things succeed each other at this rate, so that my opera cannot 
come out before Easter," he writes to F. Heine Jan. 4, 1842, " I 
foresee with mournful certainty that the word will be, * It's too 
late now. Next winter.' But if you or any other person exactly 
realised how my whole situation, all my plans, and all my resolu- 
tions are ruined by such procrastination, some pity surely would 
be shewn me. Should it really come to this, that my opera must 
be wholly laid aside this winter season, I should indeed be 
inconsolable ; and he or she who might be to blame, would have 
incurred a grave responsibility, perhaps for untold sorrows caused 
me." On the 17th of the month Councillor Winkler pacifies him 
with a letter about the great splendour with which Rienzi is to 
be staged, "two new scenes, and costumes estimated at 537," 
but at the same time announces the dreaded postponement; 
which Wagner, contrary to what might have been expected, 
treats with philosophic composure (see letter to Fischer of Feb. 5). 
Like the eel, he is getting used to skinning. 

Meantime the creative region of his brain has not lain idle. 
Two major works have been accepted — the founders of his 
future fame — and already he is planning others. How little 
' reflective ' had been his choice of a legendary subject with the 
Flying Dutchman^ is proved by his going to history for its 
immediate successor, though the opera was never really carried 
out. Those who have read his first report on Hal^vy's Reine de 
Chypre {jP,JV. VII.) will remember his half-jocular advice to 
German librettists : " If you have the knack, you must go read 
journals, novels, books, above all the great book of History. 
Youll not have far to seek before you find a half or whole page 
that tells you of some strange event Ponder this event a little ; 
draw three or even five bold lines across it, which you may call 
aets if you please ; give each of these acts its due share of the 
action, make this interesting . . . and before one can turn one's 

* " My quondam colleague in the Dresden Kapellmeistership, the departed 
Gottlieb Reissiger, once bitterly complained to me that the identical melody 
which in Bellini's Romeo e Giulia always sent the audience mad, in his own 
Adile iU Foix made no effect whatever" (P. W, VI. 145— written 1879). 



334 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

wrist you'll have an operatic subject to the full as good as any 
for which our German musicians beside Parisian text-wrights." 
In his Communication (1851) he tells us how he followed his 
own advice — or more probably anticipated it : * " I turned the 
pages of the book of History, to seek again an operatic subject. . . . 
At last I fastened on one episode that seemed to offer me the 
chance of giving freer rein to my poetic fancy. This was a 
moment from the last days of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. 
Manfred, son of Friedrich II., tears himself from his luxurious 
lethargy, and throws himself into Luceria, assigned by his father 
to the Saracens after their dislodgment from Sicily; chiefly by 
aid of these warlike sons of Araby, he wins back from the Pope 
and ruling Guelphs the whole of the disputed realm of Sicily and 
Apuleia. Into this purely historic plot I wove an imaginary 
female figure : her form had taken shape in my mind from the 
memory of an engraving, seen long before, representing Friedrich 
II. surrounded by his almost exclusively Arabian court, with 
singing and dancing women.f The spirit of this Friedrich, my 
favourite hero, I now embodied in the person of a Saracen 
maiden, born during the Kaiser's peaceful halt in Palestine. 
Tidings of the downfall of the Ghibelline house have come to 
the girl in her native home; she makes her way to Apuleia. 
Here she appears at Manfred's court, inspires him by her 
prophecies, and spurs him on to action. Spreading enthusiasm 
wherever she goes, she kindles the Arabs in Luceria, and leads 
the Kaiser's son through victory after victory to throne. She 
has kept her parentage a secret, the better to work upon Manfred 
by the mystery of her apparition ; he falls passionately in love 
with her, and fain would break the secret's seal : she waves him 
back with an oracular saying. His life attempted, she receives 
the blow in her own breast : dying, she confesses herself his 
sister. Manfred, crowned, takes leave of happiness forever." J 

• The date of the first draft of Die Sarassenin cannot be established to a 
nicety ; all that can be said for certain, is that its plot was conceived in the 
winter of 1841-2. 

t It is also possible that Wagner had read or heard of Immcrmann's drama, 
JCaiser Friedrich II,, in which the two sons of the Kaiser, Enzio and Manfred, 
both fall in love unwittingly with their sister Roxelane. To this hypothesis, 
however, we cannot assign much weight. 

t In Vol. VIII. of the Prose Works will be found the full text of the 
libretto constructed on these lines in 1843. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 335 

All thoughts of proceeding farther with Di^ Sarazenin were 
promptly thrust into the background when the old Tannhduser- 
Lied fell into his hands, as if by providential chance, and im- 
mediately usurped his fancy. It will be remembered that he 
had made acquaintance with Tieck's version of the story in his 
youth; it had then '* aroused his interest in the same fantastic 
fashion as Hoffmann's tales," but made no deep impression on 
him. '' I now read through Tieck's utterly modern poem again, 
and understood at once why his coquetry with mysticism and 
Catholicism had not appealed to my sympathy; the folk's-book* 
and the homely Lied with its simple genuine poetry explained 
this point to me"(/^^. I. 311-a). Wagner goes on to relate 
how he had found Tannhauser connected in this enigmatic 
" folk's-book," though very loosely, with the Minstrels' Contest 
at Wartburg; but no inquiries have as yet been able to 
substantiate either the one point or the other. True, a certain 
£. T. L. Lucas had endeavoured to prove the identity of Tann- 
hauser with Heinrich von Ofterdingen in course of a learned 
pamphlet Ueber den Krieg auf Wartlmrg published at Konigsbetg 
in 1838. Possibly Wagner had heard something of this, but in 
any case it is to his own creative genius that must be attributed 
the welding of these two characters and stories into one in- 
separable whole : the old legend of Tannhauser and the Venus- 
beig had nothing whatever to do with the Minstrels' Contest, whose 
hero is Heinrich von Ofterdingen. — He continues (still in 185 1) : 
" With this second subject, also, I had already made acquaintance, 
through a tale of Hoflfmann's ; but, just as with Tieck's Tann- 
hauser, it had left me without the smallest incentive to dramatic 
treatment." Luckily, one of his friends, the "German philo- 
logist" Lehrs, happened to possess a copy of the old Middle- 
high-German poem of the Sdngerkrieg auf Waridurgy and lent 
it to Wagner, on whom it " breathed the air of home," the home 
whence sprang Der Freischutz. Now, " this poem is set in direct 
conjimction with an epos of Lohengrin, That also I studied, 
and thus at one blow a whole new world of poetic matter was 
opened out to me ; a* world of which in my previous hunt for 



* This "folkVbook" is untraceable ; Herr Glasenapp thinks it may have 
been the Deutsche Sagen of the brothers Grimm. In The Meister No. XIV. 
(1891) will be found a review of Dr Wolfgang Golther's researches into the 
question {Bayr, BL 1889).— W, A. E. 



336 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER- 

operatic matter, mostly ready-made, I had not had the least con- 
ception." Thus the whole of what may be termed his Dresden 
crop lay already sown before he said goodbye to Paris. 

Looking back at this brief, but most important stage in his 
development, we now observe that, having already embarked on 
his own new voyage of discovery with the Hollander^ he was on 
the eve of a return to "grand" five-act "historic" Opera with 
his Sarazenin project, when rescue came to him in the shape of 
Tannhduser. "That picture [of Manfred and Fatima] which 
my homesick brain had painted in the departing Ught of an 
historical sunset, not without a certain warmth of colour, 
completely faded from my sight so soon as ever the shape of 
Tannhauser revealed itself to my inner eye. That picture had 
been conjured from outside; this shape sprang from my inmost 
heart. In its infinitely simple traits it was wider-embracing, to 
my mind, and alike more definite and plain, than the rich and 
shimmering tissue, half historical and half poetic, that concealed 
the supple human form my soul was longing for." 

While this internal process was going on, affairs outside were 
not at an absolute standstill. At Dresden the friendly chorus- 
master Fischer was taking his people through the first stages of 
a general study oi Rienzi\ F. Heine, too, was busy at the sketches 
for those " 537 new costumes." For his own part, impatient at 
his distance from the scene of action, or inaction, Wagner had 
fully made up his mind to leave Paris at Easter; the only 
question was, how to procure the necessary funds. As a help 
towards this he wrote the second of his two long articles on the 
Reine de Chypre : the first had been despatched to the Abend- 
zeitung, this second one appeared in the Gazette Musicale of 
Feb. 27, March 13, April 24 and May i.* Exactly when the 
beginning and end were written, we cannot say; but on the 
back of the twelflh page of the manuscript for the second 
instalment (according to the catalogue of an auction-sale in after 
years) occurs the following note : " Authorised by Herr Schlesinger, 



* This article has not been included in the Ges. Schr,, perhaps on account 
of the German MS. having passed out of the author's possession (among 
Minna's papers?), perhaps because of its somewhat too lavish praise of 
Hal^vy; but an English rendering will be found in Vol. VIII. of the 
Prose Works, The Paris Freischiitz, as will be remembered, was also the 
subject of two diflferently-destined articles. — W. A .E. 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 337 

I send to Herr Duesberg [apparently the translator] the continua- 
tion of my article on Hal^vy, as it is to appear in the next 
number. . . . Paris, 26th February, 1842, Richard Wagner." 

This second article on the Reine de Chypre is perhaps the 
most valuable, from an aesthetic standpoint, of all Wagner's 
writings of the Paris period, and for two reasons: firstly, 
since it contains the earliest definite statement of his re- 
quirements for a "perfect opera"; secondly, because of its 
pregnant criticism of the French operatic school In its pre- 
amble will be found the memorable sentence: "To obtain a 
perfect work, it would be necessary that its idea should come at 
like time to the musician and the poet" Wagner admits that 
"this is a case almost unheard of," but does not consider it 
impossible — and no wonder, for already it was being realised, 
though the musician and poet were one person there. Then we 
have his first open advocacy of the freely-treated legendary subject : 
" Of a sudden some marvellous tradition conjures up before them 
figures vague, indefinite, but beautiful and enchanting : ravishing 
melodies, quite novel inspirations beside their brain, like dreams 
and poetic forebodings. Then a name is uttered, a name from 
tradition or history, and with that name a full-fledged drama has 
occurred to them. Tis the poet who uttered it; for to him 
belongs the faculty of giving clear and definite form to what 
reveals itself to his fancy. But what weaves the charm of the 
ine&ble round the poetic conception, what reconciles reality with 
the ideal, — the task of seizing that belongs to the musician." 
Here we have the manifesto of the poet-composer who at that 
very moment was building up, tho' only in his brain, the future 
Tannhduser, 

As to the second point, the criticism of the French school of 
Opera, it is significant that not a word is said of M^erbeer^ though 
his congener Hal^vy is held up as model for the younger French 
to follow. Auber comes in for high words of praise, as regards his 
earliest products; whilst the influence of the modem Italian 
masters is strongly deprecated, — so strongly, in fact, that the 
editor-in-chief excised a passage. What was the wording, or 
even the extent of that omitted portion, we shall never know until 
the private purchaser of the manuscript (whoever he may be) shall 
consider that the disbursement of 150 marks does not entitie him 
to withhold the information from those most interested in such 

Y 



338 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

matters. Too many a private document of Wagner's has been 
impertinently dragged to light of day, against all right or usage ; 
but here is a case where the master himself desired a public 
verdict, as may be gathered from the following episode. Thirty 
years later he tells us in his article on Auber : " When reviewing 
a new opera of Hal^vy's for the * Gazette Musicale ' I took occa- 
sion to rank French operatic music above the Italian. With entire 
sincerity I deplored the emasculation of taste at the Grand Op&a, 
where Donizetti with his slipshod sickly mannerism was gaining 
more and more the upper hand, and crowding into the back- 
ground the excellent beginnings of an individual, specifically French 
style in Grand Opera. I adduced the Muette de Particiy and 
asked how the acclimatised operas of Italian composers, of 
Rossini himself, compared with that work in point of dramatic 
style, or even of musical invention. Well, the passage in which 
I answered that question in favour of French music was sup- 
pressed by the editor, Ed. Monnais ; at that time General In- 
spector of all the Royal theatres in France, he replied to my 
protest by saying that he could not possibly pass a sentence in 
which Rossini was criticised for the benefit of Auber. It was in 
vain that I appealed to his patriotic heart, which surely would 
feel pleased to see the merit and significance of its compatriot 
thus vaunted by a German. The answer was, if I wanted to 
enter the field of politics there were plenty of pob'tical journals 
at my disposal for pitting Auber against Rossini: in a musiail 
paper such a thing could not possibly be permitted." Thus his 
very last contribution to a French journal was attended by the 
same misunderstanding as had dogged his footsteps everywhere 
in Paris. 

Yes, the Muette was no longer to the taste of the Parisians ; 
they gave it only as a ' scratch ' performance, to stop a gap : if 
Wagner really wanted to be amused by Auber, he was advised to 
go and hear the Domino noir^ or the Diamants de la cauronne. 
People, in fact, were annoyed at being reminded of the July 
Revolution, though they had gone through the ceremony of re- 
interring its victims to the strains of Berlioz' symphony in 
July 1840. Wagner had heard this July Symphony at the time, 
and in his final Paris news-letter (Feb. 5, 1842, to the Neue 
Zeitschrift) he speaks of having heard it once again, at a concert 
of Berlioz's that "systematically drove the audience out of its 



"DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER." 339 

skin. Whoever had not wholly left his skin through boredom, 
was obliged to at the end of his apotheosis in the July Symphony 
— for very joy; in this last movement there are things which 
nothing could surpass for grandeur and simplicity. For all that, 
Berlioz stands quite alone in Paris." 

Equally, or more alone stood Wagner. His disgust had 
reached its climax. His last words in the letter just-cited are : 
" How lucky it would be for us, to bid a last farewell to Paris. It 
has had a great epoch, which certainly has influenced us for good. 
But that's over now, and we must give up our belief in Paris. 
Presumably I shall not need to warn much longer." Such is his 
final verdict on the city to which he had come with soaring hopes, 
and where he had reaped nothing definite beyond a passion for 
his fatherland, since absence makes the heart grow fonder. He 
was about to return there with his quiver full : two operas com- 
pleted, one of them Germanic to the core ; in his head the plots 
for three additional German operas, two of which have since 
become the most generally admired of musical dramas through- 
out the world. Paris had had no band in .them, nor any one in 
Paris, as he seems to have now discovered ; for the inner history of 
Meyerbeer's advocacy of Rienzi and the Dutchman would appear 
to have just been revealed to him. We have noticed that not a 
word was said about Meyerbeer in our hero's review of French 
Opera {Gaz, Mus,); a remark in that news-letter of Feb. 5 surely 
explains the omission. Speaking of Hal6vy, he says: "He is 
fi-ank and honest ; no sly, deliberate fiJau like M." Considering 
that barely a year ago Wagner had privately begged Schumann 
not to let Meyerbeer be run down so much in the J\r(!ue Zeitschrift^ 
and that it was hardly a month since he had sent Meyerbeer a 
letter overflowing with gratitude, it is beyond conceivability that 
he should have written these words unless some crying proof of 
Meyerbeer's duplicity had recently come to his knowledge. The 
secret, perhaps, will never be known ; but in that remark and its 
publicity we have good reason for concluding that the same 
machinations which eventually deferred the production of the 
Hollander at Berlin had something to do with the endless dela3rs 
in the production of Rienzi at Dresden. 

As fate would have it, besides the Reine de Chypre and Zanetta^ 
Wagner had to pack the Huguenots and Robert le diable into his 
portmanteau in his preparations for departure. Degrading hack- 



340 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

work pursued him to the bitter end Money had been advanced 
by Schlesinger for another batch of 'arrangements/ and, while the 
advance enabled him to shake the dust of Paris from his feet, the 
badge of his former slavery must needs accompany him.* 

On Thursday the 7 th of April 1842, after more than two and a 
half years of residence, he left the French metropolis ; toward the 
end of his twenty-ninth year of life ; an altered man. " Children, 
" children ! " he cries back to his faithful friends, upon his return 
to Germany, " How your Paris haunts me ! That den of murderers 
where we, with our simple naive aims, were hunted to death in 
silence and unheeded." With a huge sigh of relief he crossed the 
frontier : " For the first time in my life I saw the Rhine : with 
hot tears in my eyes, poor artist, I swore eternal fealty to my 
German Fatherland." The direct route to Dresden took him 
through the Thuringian valley from which one sees the Wartburg 
towering aloft. "Unspeakably homelike and inspiring was the 
effect upon me of that castle, already hallowed in my mind " — ^by 
Luther or the Elisabeth of his own Tannhduser} 



* See a letter to Uhlig of 185a, in which he adds that he afterwards returned 
the iBbney, as that sort of work had become impossible to him in Germany. 



XII. 

DRESDEN. 

Arrmd in Dresden, — Summer at Teplitz. — Rehearsals and 
production of ^^ Rienzi/* — Excerpts at the Gewandhaus,—^^ The 
Flying Dutchman^ produced at Dresden, — Offer of the Kapell- 
meistership : hesitation about accepting. — Trial -performance^ 
Weber^s " Euryanthe,^^ — Trip to Berlin. — Wagner becomes 
Kapellmeister. 

/, lonely^ homeless waif^ suddenly found myself behmed^ 
admired^ eh I looked upon by many with amazement; and 
according to general notions this success weu to win me a 
life-long basis of solid social comfort^ through my uttexpected 
appointment to the post of Kapellmeister to the Royal Saxon 
Court-band. 

Richard Wagner. 

It was five years since Wagner had visited the scene af his 
earliest recollections. On that flying trip to Dresden in 1837 he 
had received the first incentive to write the opera for whose 
production he now set foot in it again. After so long a spell of < 
wandering, it seemed indeed like coming home, for a warm 
reception welcomed him. Schr5der-Devrient was absent on 
leave, but Tichatschek was a nost in himself, and Chorus-master 
Wilhelm Fischer sprang up to embrace him as soon as his name 
was announced. " I shall never forget that first kind deed," says 
the master seventeen years thereafter ; '* it was the first, the very 
first encouragement that had greeted the helplessly obscure, hard- 
pressed young artist on his path in life." 

The study of Rienzi being set down for July, when he had 
gone through the regular introductions in Dresden he set off in 
May for Teplitz, where Minna was to take a ' cure ' after all the 
exactions of Paris, and whence he himself made a few excursions 
to the surrounding Bohemian highlands.* Teplitz, which had 
once inspired the project of the ZJebesverbot, now became the 

* See Alois John's R. Wagner in den deutsch-bohmischen Badem, a 
channiog little pamphlet published at Teplitz in 1890. 

34 1 



342 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

birthplace of TannMuser, which had engrossed his mind during 
the last month or two in Paris. Before even Rienzi was set on 
the stage, he had completed the full scenic draft of his latest 
subject, and already made some jottings for its music. A sheet 
of paper, evidently dating from this summer outing, presents the 
first outline of musical themes and their destination, such as 
"Venusberg," "Pilgrims," "Finale of Second Act," "Opening of 
Third Act" etc. Another bears the solo for the goatherd's 
shawm, an entirely different setting from that eventually used. 
But jottings were as far as he could get for some time yet ; the 
change in his entire position was too great and absorbing to allow 
of his settling down to serious work. 

The stay at Teplitz was prolonged beyond his original inten- 
tion; but there was no earthly reason for hurrying back to 
Dresden. In a letter to Fischer dated "Zur Eiche: Schonau, 
near Teplitz, July 7, 1842," he asks: "Have Mad. Devrient and 
Herr Tichatschek returned to Dresden yet, and are the parts of 
my miserable opera distributed?" He does not wish to seem 
too pressing, and " it is fairly indifferent " to him whether Rienzi 
comes off a month sooner or later ; only, he is anxious that the 
rehearsals shall be in a forward state by the beginning of 
September, as Tichatschek has a fortnight's leave of absence in 
the latter half of that month. Fischer would appear to have 
been able to arrange this for him, as he returned to Dresden at 
the end of July for the commencement of rehearsing in earnest. 

The orchestra of the Saxon Court-opera consisted of from 60 to 
70 performers, a large body for that period, but with the 'strings ' 
somewhat over-balanced by the *wind.'* The violins were led 
by Konzertmeister Lipinski and his youthful colleague Franz 
Schubert ; the 'celli by the admirable botzauer. The foundation 
of the string-quartet was composed of 4 contrabassists, one of 
whom, according to Berlioz, was too old to play a note, and only 
just able to support the weight of his instrument.! Fiirstenau 



* Then a common fault at German theatres. Berlioz increased the number 
of strings for his orchestral concerts at Leipzig just about this date, and 
thereby roused the ire of local critics : " Four-and-twenty violins, instead of 
the sixteen that had hitherto sufficed for the Symphonies of Mozart and 
Beethoven ? What shameless presumption ! " ( Voyage musical. Letter 4). 

t " In Germany I have often seen examples of this misplaced reverence for 
grey hairs, leading Kapellmeisters to entrust musical functions to men whose 



DRESDEN. 343 

took first flute ; the oboist Hiebendahl, trumpeter Queisser, and 
horn-player Lewy, were all firstrate artists, unsurpassed on their 
respective instruments. The bass tuba not being represented in 
the regular band, a military player was imported when needed. — 
As to the Chorus, under " old Fischer," it was merely four-and- 
forty strong (13 sopranos, 9 contraltos, 12 tenors and 10 basses), 
though almost every voice in it was of exceptional quality and 
volume. The finales of the first three acts of Rienzi requiring 
several different groups of choristers, the garrison-choir founded 
by Fischer had to be drawn upon, as customary on such occasions ; 
but even this was not sufficient, in the composer's eyes, to supply 
the chorus in the Lateran, '* Erwacht ihr Schlafer, nah' und fern." 
In sketching this chorus he had counted on obtaining the services 
of the Kreuzschule boys, who in olden times had always sung the 
choruses in operas by Hasse and Naumann. Unfortunately 
Rector Grdbel (once Wagner's own headmaster) had objected to 
the proposal and Wagner, before leaving Paris, had been in 
correspondence with Fischer as to the best way out of the 
difficulty : the expedient finally adopted was that of making one 
portion of the choir steal off, sing the great a capella double-chorus 
behind the wings, and return during an organ postlude. 

To come to the soloists: Here the composer was fortunate 
indeed, with Joseph Tichatschek, the vocal wonder of his age, as 
Rienzi; Schr6der-Devrient, an artist down to her finger-tips, as 
Adriano; and for Irene his young friend of former days, 
Henriette Wiist, owner of an expressive and well-trained soprano. 
To these protagonists we must add Michael Wachter (Orsini), 
Wilhelm Dettmer (Colonna), the young Reinhold and Karl 
Risse (Baroncelli and Cecco), and one of the veterans from 
Dresden's Italian Opera days Gioachino Vestri (Cardinal) ; whilst 
all these were good, even at the rehearsals the silvery tones of 
the debutante Anna Thiele produced an almost ethereal effect in 
the chorus of Envoys of Peace. 

Many a paring and alteration had gone before ; but so soon as 
the actual rehearsals began, the young master discovered more 
plainly every day what a friend and artist his work had won him 
in Tichatschek. The leading singer's enthusiasm for his role, 
for the whole work, was caught by all the others to such an 

physical powers had long ceased to be equal to them" (ihid. Letter 5, 
beginning of 1843). 



344 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

unusual degree that the public itself began to prick up its ears at 
the rumours it heard of this opera of a totally unknown composer. 
A pavilion of the Zwinger next to Prof. Hiibner's studio (dose to 
the ancient Nymphenbad) had been set apart for the ensemble 
rehearsals at the pianoforte, which Reissiger gladly relinquished 
to the author. Among other recollections of these rehearsals 
printed years afterwards by the singer of Irene, we read of an 
exciting incident that marred the even tenour of the scene be- 
tween Adriano and Irene in the fifth act : Frau Schr6der-Devrient» 
hasty as ever, had been unable to overcome certain difficulties of 
modulation ; again and again the passage is gone through, till at 
last she crumples up her ' part ' and flings it in a towering passion 
at the composer's feet ; nothing but the united efforts of Wagn» 
and *^ Irene " can restore the angry woman to tranquillity. Such 
outbursts were by no means uncommon with the gifted artist, and 
the master would seem to have reckoned them as inevitable 
concomitants of a nature so impressionable; for he himself 
retained none but the pleasantest remembrances of these days of 
rehearsal It would have fallen out badly for the charming 
exponent of Irene, however, had sAe deemed fit to follow the 
example of the inimitable woman, — inimitable even in her whims 
and tantrums. 

It was quite a new element for Wagner, to be occupied with 
the final preparations for the production of a grand work of his 
own under conditions so entirely adequate as those presented 
by the Dresden Court-theatre in all the glory of its reconstruc- 
tion. How could he feel himself the same individual who had 
been struggling until now against the greatest odds for one small 
grain of recognition ? For the moment all his ideal plans were 
swallowed in the practical ; yet his pen could not consent to stay 
completely idle. It will be remembered that he had sent Scribe 
the draft for an operatic text founded on Kdnig's novel, J?ie hohe 
Braut^ before setting out for Paris in person. Nothing having 
come of it, it might serve him for a little compliment to Reissiger, 
the Dresden Kapellmeister, who had confided to his ear his private 
grievances in the matter of librettos. As Reissiger seemed anxious 
to retrieve his latest failure ^with AdkU de Foix)y and was already 
casting about for a likely subject, Wagner lost no time in turning 
his earlier draft into fluent verse. The diction etc. is more in the 
vein of the Dutchman than of its legitimate successor, TannhdMStr\ 



DRESDEN. 345 

it is purely and simply ''opera-verse," though good of its kind gnd 
characteristic. As to the general treatment, on the other hand, 
anyone who had read Kdnig's novel, admirable enough in its way, 
might well be astonished at the ease with which Wagner had con- 
verted a difiuse and semi-political subject into so concise and 
dramatic a text-book. Reissiger did very foolishly in not accepting 
it, perhaps from a false feeling of pride; but Wagner laid the 
book on one side without a moment's chagrin, reserving it for 
some more grateful applicant, and Johann Kittl later on became 
that lucky man. 

There had been no pause in the Eienzi rehearsals, bandsmen 
and singers outbidding each other in their diligence. As to the 
choruses, for more than half a year Fischer had practised the 
combined theatre and garrison choirs in their gigantic labour, and 
given them such a certainty and finish, such mastery of the finest 
shades, that this factor alone was enough to guarantee success. 
The preparations for the scenery, the historical costumes after 
Ferdinand Heine's tasteful drawings, and the imposing arrang- 
ments of Ballet-master Lepitre (especially as regards the panto- 
mime in the second act), were all so far advanced by the beginning 
of October, that a production about the middle of the month 
could be looked forward to without apprehension. The stage- 
rehearsals seem to have proceeded merrily enough : at one passage 
in the third act, on the Campo Vacchino, Adriano has to sit down 
"brooding" on a broken column; in the middle of what ought 
to be a highly tragic situation the Devrient suddenly called out to 
Wagner, "Very well; but what am I to hatch?" — sending the 
whole band into roars of laughter. Between the second and the 
third act there was a pause for lunch : a quarter of a century 
afterwards (amid the preliminaries for Die Meistersinger^X Munich) 
the master writes to F. Heine, begging him to "thank Mamma 
Heine for the delicate herrings and potatoes in the Campo 
vacchino" which she had sent him in this luncheon pause; a 
welcome refreshment after three hours of hard work. The trifling 
incident is worth recording as an instance of Wagner^s memory 
for little acts of kindness. 

At last the day of first public performance came round, the 
2oth of October 1842. The whole town was on tiptoe, as if 
some rare event were under way ; so much had been heard about 
the work from singers and bandsmen, that there was even a 



346 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

danger of its effect being already discounted. Nevertheless the 
result was a triumphant proof that the young composer had 
surpassed the very highest expectations. At 6 o'clock the opera 
began, under Reissiger's baton; Wagner seeking refuge in the 
obscurest comer of the auditorium. From the first long-held 
note of the trumpets in the overture, down to the closing scene, 
the attention of a densely-crowded house was riveted. Tichatschek 
was magnificent, in splendid voice, heroic in action, his by-play 
much assisted by a fine pair of flashing eyes ; not a note failed 
him, down to the last, though the Tribune's part was much more 
strongly instrumented then, than after its eventual revision by 
the composer. The Schrdder-Devrient was full of inspiration, 
particularly in the monologue (or aria) of Adriano in the third 
act, and in the great duet of the fifth act Henriette Wiist, with 
her pure soprano, did not fall behind in musical expression; 
indeed there were some who gave the palm to her as singer, to 
the Devrient as actress. The efforts of chorus-master Fischer 
were crowned with the most brilliant success. After the first, 
second and third acts the author and the singers of the principal 
rdles were tumultuously called before the curtain. But it was 
nearly lo at night before the third act, with its battle-hymns and 
victory over the conspiring Nobili, had reached its close, and 
Wagner began to fear the scandal of his opera being left unfinished 
because "too long"; for there were two more acts to follow, 
whereas the playbills had announced the hour of lo as carriage- 
time. 

The fourth act strikes a very different key to those preceding 
it. In place of a Te Deum, ** Vse, vae tibi maledicto 1" sounds 
from the church of the Lateran; Rienzi is abandoned by the 
populace; as the curtain falls he remains alone with his sister 
Irene, while the ban of excommunication sounds once more, in 
awe-inspiring pianissimo. The end of this act was received in 
silence: the highest tribute to its tragical effect, but scarcely a 
tonic to author and performers. One further act had yet to be 
got through — ^the fifth. It commenced at 1 1.30 ! But Tichatschek, 
on whom so much depended, was true as steel and fresh as dawn ; 
the scene between Irene and Adriano made a great impression ; 
and interest was maintained crescendo till the final catastrophe. 
Past midnight the curtain fell for the last time. Over six hours : 
no work at any European theatre had ever played so long. What 



DRESDEN, 347 

would be the upshot? — ^The audience rose as a man, and relieved 
its feelings by a perfect storm of calls for author and performers. 
Ota that thrice-memorable night the Dresden public, little wont to 
pass first verdict on a major work of art, raised Richard Wagner 
to the proud position of its adopted hero. It was an event 
unparalleled in the annals of its stage; the first performance 
of RUnzi an unquestioned victory. But amid the universal 
jubilation the silent testimony of old Wilhelm Fischer appealed 
the most to the young man: throughout the evening "our 
Fischer had grown more and more at ease ; as though in the fond 
consciousness that it was he who first had recognised me, and 
given the impetus to my success, he fixed his dear bright eyes on 
me in tender silence, as who should say : Yes I I knew it would 
turn out so" ^. W, III. 149). 

At 8 next morning Wagner rushed off to the bureau in the 
Sporergasse, to begin cutting and cutting. "I couldn't believe 
the Intendanz would give it again if I didn't," as he puts it 
some thirty years later. "After two o'clock I came again, to see 
if my cuts had been marked ; otherwise I felt I could not look a 
singer or a bandsman in the &ce again. Then they told me, 

* Herr Wagner, we can't have this cut out, nor that' I asked, 

* Why not ? ' — * Oh ! but Herr Tichatschek has been here, and said 
we mustn't cut it.' I laughed in my sleeve, ' Has Tichatschek 
gone over to thine enemies?' So I asked him about it that 
evening. Tears came into his eyes as he replied, ' I won't have 
any of my part cut out. It was heavenly.' " ♦ The same day he 
sends a short report to his intimates in Paris, the " Holy Council 
of Five," t namely Cacilie and her husband AvenariuS, Kietz, 
Anders and Lehrs. In all the fatigue and excitement of the day 
following such a night, he cannot forget the faithful few who had 
shewn their belief in his genius when he was an unknown alien in 
a foreign land : " Na ! dearest children. In all haste and prostra- 

* Taken down short-band by Dr Bierey at a banquet given to Wagner on 
Jan. 15, 1873, ^t tbe Belvedere in Dresden. Tbe composer's account is fiilly 
borne ont by the contemporary reporter in the Neue Zeitschrift (1842, II. No. 
36) : " I say it with fullest conviction : it were a shame to omit a single bar. 
I hear that the young composer contemplates many curtailments for the next 
performance ; bat it is significant, and flattering to Wagner, that the singers 
themselves are against any such shortening." 

t Compare with his LeUers to Heckel and the "Five Righteous " (1871 
onwards). 



348 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

tion I at least must send a line to tell you how it fell out yesterday." 
He recounts the enthusiasm of his work's reception, and how it 
had caused quite a revolution in the town : *'The day after to- 
morrow comes the second performance; every seat is already 
booked for the third. The rendering was entrancingly beautiful 
— Tichatschek, the Devrient — all — ^all in such perfection as never 
before. Triumph I Triumph ! you good, true, loving hearts ! Day 
has broken I On you all shall it shine 1 " 

The opera was repeated three times during the fortnight ending 
November 5, and always to a crowded house at increased prices ; 
the trains from Leipzig to Dresden were full of pilgrims to Rietai. 
With each performance the applause grew louder, and at each the 
author was * called ' repeatedly with the performers. The first had 
been witnessed by his Brockhaus sisters, Louise apd Ottilie, the 
latter with her husband Hermann. At the second he had the in- 
expressible joy of welcoming his mother, now 64 years old, to whom 
he had paid a brief visit at Leipzig shortly after his return to 
Germany. Sister Clara Wolfram also came, as he writes to Cacilie 
on November 6 : " She stayed twelve days with us, and made her- 
self and Minna and me very happy. An excellent dear creature, 
full of feeling, and without one spark of affectation.'' It is refresh- 
ing to catch a glimpse of that family life which Wagner loved so 
dearly, in the midst of all these public ovations. But gossip had 
already commenced to wag its tongue about his personal move- 
ments. From the third performance onwards Wagner had 
arranged with the stage-manager to cease responding in person 
to ' calls ' (most frequent after the second, third and fourth acts), 
so as to leave his singers in undisputed enjoyment of that honour \ 
a, rumour consequently spread like wildfire through the town, that 
he had posted back to Paris. Then, as he was a complete stranger 
to almost everybody in the place, people began to tell each other 
that his work could not possibly be that of a 'prentice hand; 
whatever could the name be, under which he had already com- 
posed grand operas and got them represented ? The fact of his 
being a fairly young-looking man only made the puzzle greater. 
At last they fancied they had hit the right nail on the head : he 
was a Leipziger, and had passed some time in Paris — so much was 
certain — then of course he must be a pupil of Meyerbeet^s. So 
it got about (sadly wide of the mark) that his rich brother-in-law 
F. Brockhaus had sent him to Paris for three years, to " study " 



DRESDEN. 349 

and to write J^ienzt, making him an allowance of loo thalers a 
month, and finally had got his opera produced in Dresden. Oh I 
the whole thing was clear as noonday, settled to the complete 
satisfaction of all the wiseacres. But how about his honorarium ? 
Another field for the wildest guesses. Some said he was to pocket 
all the takings of the first three nights, others that he had com- 
pounded for a mere two-hundred thalers. 

To come to facts, this latter was a point as to which the poor 
young man could scarcely be indifferent : down to the present he 
had reaped nothing from his work but its laurels. Not long ago 
he told us of the 30,000 fr. paid to Hal6vy for his Hetne de 
Ckypre: his own Rienzi had so far left him almost starving. 
After the third performance he received a letter from the General- 
Direction at last, magnanimously stating that, albeit the ordinary 
fee for an opera was simply 20 louis d'or, it felt bound to make 
an exception in his case, and accord him an honorarium of three- 
hundred thalers (;f 45) for his " beautiful and so admirable worL" 
At all events it was a banning; and the beginning promised 
a continuation, for the same Dresden authorities very soon 
conceived the laudable resolve of bringing out the Flying 
Dutchman too. Wagner naturally jumped at the offer, and 
immediately commenced negotiations with the Berlin people for 
return of his score, which had been lying idle in their hands for 
the best part of a year, and now had passed to those of that same 
Herr von Kiistner who at Munich had declared the book 
imsuitable for Germany. Other times, other manners : Kiistner 
had lately become Intendant at Berlin, and the news of Rienzfs 
success made him think twice before parting with an untried 
work of a composer who had suddenly acquired such kudos. 

While these negotiations were dragging on, there seemed a decent 
tho' fallacious prospect oi Rienzfs being taken up ere long by other 
German theatres. On November 26 certain fragments from the 
opera were performed at Leipzig, at a declamatory soiree in the 
Gewandhaus given by Sophie Schr6der, the aged mother of the 
Dresden artist. "Great Sophie Schr6der," Wagner calls her in 
1872, and speaks of her "supernatural genius" and "that 
transfiguring musical tone of voice which melted even the 
didactics of Schiller's poetry into unadulterated feelingJ' The 
most celebrated German tragedian of her day, despite her age she 
held her audience spell-bound by her recitation of Klopstock's 



350 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

Fruhlingsfeiery Burger's Lenore and Schiller's Glocke. Her 
daughter sang Adriano's aria, and Tichatschek the Prayer from 
the fifth act of Rienzi. But, whether due to a false modesty that 
restrained it from making too much fuss about the music of a 
native, or to parochial jealousy of success obtained in a neighbour- 
ing city where Mendelssohn was not the fetish, Leipzig was by no 
means effusive in its demonstrations. Public criticism, in fact, 
was far from laudatory. The Neue Zeitschrift noted " no particular 
eflTect," kindly setting it down to (its own?) ignorance of the 
context. The reporter of the Elegante recognised "noble 
struggling for heroic earnestness," but made a most unfortunate 
slip in calling '' the three pieces somewhat dry and barren," the 
poor critic in his ignorance including with the two Rienzi 
fragments a duet from Marschner's Templer undjudin 1 Finally, 
as a butterfly contribution to the history of this episode, we have 
a letter of Mendelssohn's dated Nov. 28, in which he talks of 
SchrOder-Devrient being " wilder and madder than ever," adding : 
" Eight days passed by her in any town are no small joke to her 
acquaintances. And Tichatschek, Wagner, D6hler, Miihlenfels — 
the whole past week was one continual racket" 

During this trip to Leipzig Wagner revived acquaintance not 
only with Mendelssohn and Schumann, but also with Laube, who 
was about to resume the editorship of the Zeitungjur die eleganU 
Welt^ of late in the hands of Gustav Kiihne. His interest in 
Wagner was as yet unabated, the radical difference in their views 
•of art not having yet come to the surface; so far, he knew 
nothing of the poet-composer of later date than the work that had 
just made him famous at Dresden. On November 11 he had 
written of his own accord to Regisseur Moritz at Stuttgart: 
'" Don't you think Wagner's Rienzi would be just the thing for 
you ? " He was looking round for interesting matter to open the 
'new year of his journal, something sparkling to celebrate his 
return to the editor's chair \ he had already secured H. Heine's 
Atta Trolly and now asked Wagner to furnish him material for a 
little history of his life as man and artist. So, notwithstanding 
the commencement of rehearsals for the Dutchman immediately 
after his return to Dresden (Nov. 29), Wagner set to work and 
wrote that Autobiographic Sketch so often referred to in the 
previous pages. It was merely intended as a summary for Laube 
to elaborate; but the latter was so charmed with its straight- 



DRESDEN. 351 

forwardness and easy style, that he declined to ''spoil the 
life-sketch " by altering a single syllable. All he did, was to 
write a short pre&tory note, explaining how for ten years he had 
known "this young musician who in two months has become so 
famous," and had "always hoped that most excellent modem 
music would issue from a personality so filled with the culture of 
our day." Laube's account of their meeting in Paris has already 
been given; we have only to add that the Sketch appeared in 
Nos. 5 and 6 of his journal, Feb. i and 8, 1843, accompanied by 
a lithograph from Kietz's drawing, — ^which remained the solitary 
portrait of Richard Wagner for close upon ten years. 

In spite of the extraordinary enthusiasm with which Eienzi had 
been received, there were only five repetitions down to the end of 
1842, making six performances in all. This was mainly due to 
the recent death of two of his colleagues having thrown so much 
work on to Reissiger's shoulders that he really felt too fatigued to 
give the opera oftener, albeit it had been cut down by an hour 
and a half, and now played no longer than from 6 to ^ past 10. 
The autumn of 1842 had carried off two conductors of the Court- 
band: Weber's former rival. Kapellmeister Francesco Morlachi 
had died at Innsbruck, Oct 28, on a journey to Italy for the 
benefit of his health ; barely a fortnight later (Nov. 14) he had 
been followed to the other side of the grave by his subordinate, 
the long-proved Musikdirektor, Joseph Ritter Rastrelli. Con- 
sequently, when from the sixth performance onwards (Dec 12) 
Richard Wagner took over the control of his own opera — by 
consent of Reissiger and the general management — breathing 
fresh life and vigour into band and singers, his appearance at the 
conductor's desk was generally interpreted as the harbinger of an 
official appointment. 

Meanwhile the Hollander rehearsals were proceeding apace. 
Wagner was not particularly exacting about the means for produc- 
ing this work; to him it seemed so much simpler, its scenic 
arrangements so much easier than those olEienzi. The title-role 
he had ''almost forced," to use his own words, on a singer 
(Michael Wachter) who had sufficient self-knowledge to feel 
himself unequal to the task, — ^though he had proved a very good 
Orsini, and shortly afterwards won the special praise of Berlioz 
for his fine baritone-singing in this very r61e of Vanderdecken (a 
difference in point of view). Daland was given to the exponent 



352 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

of Cecco in Rienzi^ Karl Risse ; Erik to Reinhold, the Baroncelli 
of the earlier opera; the small part of Mary to Frau Wachter, 
wife of the " Hollander." But what Wagner staked his hopes on, 
was the Senta of Frau Schrdder-Devrient ; and in the event it 
was almost entirely due to her dramatic genius that a very lame 
performance was saved from failure and turned into a seeming 
triumph. As to the others and their doings, Wagner writes to his 
old friend Fischer ten years later : " When I think of the unspeak- 
ably fatuous presentation of the Flying Dutchman the imaginative 
Dresden machinist Hanel set upon his splendid stage, I still am 
seized with a fit of rage. Herm Wachter's and Risse's brilliant 
efforts, too, are faithfully remembered by me." 

The first performance of the Flying Dutchman fell on Monday 
the 2nd of January 1843. ^^ would have been impossible to 
deduce from the manner of its reception that, with solitary 
exception of the "Senta" of Frau Devrient, the thing was a 
fiasco. According to outward appearances another victory had 
been scored, though the composer could not be certain whether 
the audience had gone behind the many flaws in representation — 
from which even Rienzi had not been altogether free— or was 
under a misunderstanding as to the nature of the work. The 
overture was received with applause. The first act seemed to 
have duly woken interest in what was to follow. The second act, 
mainly through the exertions of Schr(kler-Devrient, had an in- 
describable effect : as the Nette Zeitschrift for January 3 bears 
witness, " In this rdle the Devrient surpassed herself in originality ; 
the effect was extraordinary, the audience turned first hot, then 
cold, for intensity of emotion." At the close of that act a tempest 
of cheers stormed through the house ; composer and singers were 
compelled to obey the public's call, and appear on the stage. 
The third act, with its eerie choruses on the phantom ship, and 
the rapid development of the dramatic catastrophe, had no less 
demonstrative a reception. In less than a week two repetitions 
were given, the third performance falling on Sunday the 8th ; the 
work's success appeared established, as the public had now had 
time to make closer acquaintance with details naturally overlooked 
in the first general impression. 

On the day after the third performance Wagner writes to a 
friend in Berlin, Hofrath Joh. Ph. S. Schmidt, who had sent him 
a laudatory notice from Spener's journal and expressed the wish 



DRESDEN. 353 

to hear his own account of the affair. That account is in 
perfect harmony with contemporary printed reports: '^I had 
prepared myself for the public's not making friends with my work 
unto after several representations. The more pleasantly surprised 
was I, to be assured by the brilliant success of the very first 
performance that I had won its ear straight off. I declare that I 
am prouder of this success than of that with Rienzi, as in the 
latter opera I had called a tax larger number of outward means 
into play, and the whole work was more conformable to our 
present notions of Grand Opera." Before long he had reason to 
change his estimate of the public's attitude; but it needed the 
perspective of riper artistic experiences, to enable him to judge it 
correctly. At the time he wrote the above he could never have 
dreamt that, with no assignable cause, the opera would vanish so 
soon from the repertory of a theatre at which he himself was 
Kapellmeister, that thefiurtk performance would be the last for 
tTvo-and-iwenty yearsJ^ — ^Ten years later than the period at which 
we have arrived in his history, he writes to Fischer, '* That in all 
the six years of my Royal Kapellmeistership I was unable to revive 
this opera (with Mitterwurzer etc.) and bring it to honour, will be 
understood by nobody who doesn't know the sort of thing a 
Dresden Court-theatre is." 

It is highly probable that the initial success of the Dutchman 
was largely due to the popularity the young author had gained 
for himself by the splendour and brilliance of his Hienzi; but, 
with a public so completely unprepared, that very fact would 
militate against continued favotir. The contrast between the 
two works was too abrupt; the public's expectations had been 
addressed to something like Eienzi^ and here they found its 
opposite. Undoubtedly this was the experience of several of his 
personal friends, though their cooling-off was compensated in the 
long run by the accession of many a warm adherent, to whom the 
Hollander had been the first of his works to appeal. To the 
former class belongs his old comrade H. Laube : he had been 
delighted with Eienzu but from the date of the Dutchman's 
appearance his relations with Wagner became more and more 
distant The composer had invited him to one of the first 
performances : "^ I came, I saw, I heard," says Laube later, " but 

* 1865. Thereafter the Dutchman held its own at Dresden, as at other 
•German theatres. 

Z 



354 LIP^ OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

could not join the circle of enthusiasts that was already beginning 
to form, for I found everything in the opera spectrally pale. That 
did not count for much, as I am no musician ; but Wagner took 
arms against my opposition of his system, which he expoimded with 
much emphasis, though not to my conviction. Our dispute was 
not about musical questions, but on general aesthetic points, by 
means of which I attacked his fundamental principle : I stubbornly 
protested that he wished to raise only what he himself could to 
a universal law. Until late at night we paced up and down the 
Zwingerstrasse, arguing — he was a most expert and resourceful 
disputant." Poor Wagner! one involuntarily exclaims; to be 
rewarded for his friendly invitation by twopenny aiguments tid 
hominemt If any further proof were needed, that Laube was 
quite a second-rate person, it would be supplied by the cry, re- 
echoed since by every mediocrity, "Wagner would raise the 
particular to the general." As if that had not been the method 
of every great artist and discoverer since the days of Tubal Cain. 
From Laube's remarks we may incidentally gather that the first 
little band of true " Wagnerians " was springing into being, moved 
by the new ideal of Opera that had begun to materialise in the 
Dutchman, But the Dresden Press was unconverted, and its 
influence seems to have been determinant upon the fate of the 
new work, not only with the easily-scared Intendanz, but also 
with the nose-led public. Local critics complained of a dearth 
of pleasing, catchy melodies, and inveighed against the weight 
of orchestration — a charge now cropping up against Rienzi also ; 
the music, they said, would certainly invite the attentive hearer 
to repeated audience, but was too uniformly sombre, more learned 
than alluring, etc., etc. The artist himself kept silence, and left 
his youngest work unchampioned ; his friends were crestfallen, 
and all the more anxious to efface the impression of the Dutchman^ 
alike on themselves and on the public, by a whole-hearted resump- 
tion of Rienzi, Accordingly, ^o give the latter work without 
abridgement, in 1843 ^^ ^^ repeatedly distributed over two 
successive evenings : on the first night the first two acts were 
played, under the title of Rienzi s Grbsse\ on the second the 
three remaining acts, as RienzPs Fall, Thus singers and hearers 
kept fresh from beginning to end of the opera ; and the somewhat 
hazardous experiment, of asking the public to pay twice over for 
what it had received (with cuts) in once, was thoroughly success- 



DRESDEN. 355 

fill : on each of the pair of nights the house was always full. As 
for the author, he had passed through privations enough in Paris, 
and may be excused if he preferred to rest on his Rienzi oars in 
waiting for the opportunity of forging ahead ; the rapidity of his 
own development was recent of date, and he could scarcely 
expect the public to be prepared to respond to it at once. 

Meantime, in the same early days of January 1843 ^^ brought 
the first three performances of the Hollander^ negotiations for 
Richard Wagner's appointment as Elapellmeister had been making 
headway. Normally the Dresden Court-orchestra was presided 
over by two Kapellmeisters, supreme and equal in command, with 
a subordinate Musikdirektor to assist them : of these three officers, 
as already mentioned, two had lately died (Morlachi and Rastrelli), 
leaving to Reissiger the full burden and heat of the day. Now 
Wagner had won the confidence of bandsmen and singers alike 
at the rehearsals of his own two works, and also had relieved 
Reissiger of late in their conducting ; so that all eyes were turned 
to him as the presumable successor of Morlachi. Certainly there 
were a number of other candidates from all parts ; but von Liitti- 
chau had sense enough at least to see the advantage of attaching 
Wagner to his establishment ; besides the composer of Rienzi he 
had serious thoughts of nobody but Glaser, composer of the fairly 
popular Adkf^s Horst^ at that time engaged in Copenhagen. For 
a}l his anxiety to secure Wagner's services, however, the Intendant 
had a little scheme of his own \ he wished to slip him into the 
subordinate post of Musikdirektor, and thus keep the second 
Kapellmeistership open for some other big fish. Wagner, on his 
side, was none too anxious for the appointment, whether higher 
or lower : as he says in this regard in the CommunicaHany " My 
earliest experiences, then those of Paris, and lastly even those 
abready reaped at Dresden, had left me no longer in the dark as to 
the actual character of our public art-conditions, especially insofar 
as they proceed from our artistic institutions. My repugnance to 
any furUier concernment with them, than what was absolutely 
needful for the performance of my operas, had already acquired 
no little strength." To this effect he expressed himself to his 
more intimate friends. Most of them, accustomed to regard a 
court-appointment as the acme of ambition, very naturally could 
not understand him ; but Laube, of a more democratic turn of 
mind, appears to have sympathised with Wagner's scruples, for in 



356 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

the Ekgante of Jan. 4, 1843, we read these words (evidently written 
before the Dutchman came upon the scene), *' It sorely would be 
undesirable, to see productive faculty of this kind wasted on the 
drudgery of practice and rehearsals." However, the remembrance 
of his former straits, coupled with the assumption that at all events 
he would be able to do some good for art with the excellent artistic 
means at his disposal, soon conquered his avowed disinclination. 

At noon on January 5, the day after an outwardly successful 
second performance of the Dutchman^ he had his first official inter- 
view with von Liittichau, who managed to overcome most of his ob- 
jections. One point, however, seems to have been left a litde vague, 
concerning the old Dresden tradition, to which even Wd)er had 
had to conform, that the Kapellmeister should serve one year *oii 
trial ' prior to a definite contract Whether Wagner agreed to this 
condition by word of mouth, is not quite clear ; but on the self- 
same day he writes a letter to von Liittichau, setting fordi at length 
the reasons that prevent his consenting to such a trial year on any 
account, '' even if, as highly possible, it should destroy all present 
prospect of one of the most honourable of posts." " If Your 
Excellency will allow me to express my candid opinion widiout 
reserve," this letter adds, " I consider it my duty to declare that I 
have found the artistic discipline of the Royal Kapelle in a 
thoroughly unsatisfactory state just now ; whilst in the last few 
years, through acquaintance wiUi the achievements of the better 
Paris orchestras, I have acquired so high a notion of what can be 
done by forces so admirable as those to be found in the Royal 
Kapelle, that it would be against my whole nature — upon entering 
on my functions under whatsoever title — not to give effect to the 
views and experience thus acquired. To do this in the present 
condition of the Royal Kapelle, I should need, not merely to 
expound my views, but to adopt measures striking to the very root 
of its organisation, and to insist on their being carried out To 
be successfiil as regards this latter most important point, I require 
Authority, in the fullest sense of the word ; I need an uncondi- 
tional expression of the confidence reposed in me by higher 
quarters. Now, were I at first to enter a position toward the 
Royal Kapelle that gave it more or less the liberty and right to 
declare its more or less^biased opinion of me, I should simply be 
lamed and tethered in advance; in the very year of laying my 
foundations I should lose once and for all that proper attitude 



DRESDEN. 357 

without which no one, under present circumstances, could be of 
use to the institute over which Your Excellency presides." Lest 
such a demand should appear overweening, or be open to misin- 
terpretation, he qualifies it at the letter's end by " It would be 
impossible fot me to insist on a further fulfilment of the contract, 
should I myself become aware, or should Your Excellency find 
yourself forced to the conclusion, that I am not in a position to 
justify so great a confidence."* 

In every way an extraordinary document. Here we have a 
young artist, without a penny in the world, dictating unpre- 
cedented terms to the chief of the institution which may 
reasonably be expected to make him world-famed; more than 
that, already criticising its organisation, and proclaiming his 
intention of promptly introducing reforms. Only a Wagner 
could thus dare fortune. If he lost the Dresden appointment, 
there was no immediate prospect for him ; whilst behind him lay 
a load of debts and a shoal of eager creditors. Hardly had the 
news of his success with Rienzi crossed the frontiers of Saxony, 
than from Magdeburg, Kdnigsberg and Riga, rose a chorus of 
voices clamorous for payment, for all the world as if he had 
suddenly inherited the riches of Golconda. As early as November 
he had written sister Cacilie, "My old Magdeburg creditors are 
threatening me with prosecution, and I shall have to appease 
them as best I can"; whilst, among other autographs of this 
period that have since been rained upon a curious public, there 
is the complete draft of a letter touching the gradual repayment 
of a loan of a couple of hundred thalers with accruing interest. 
But perhaps the most illuminating is a letter written to contra- 
bassist Morath of the Magdeburg theatre on the day of the 
second performance of the Dutckmatty i.e. on the eve of that 
ultimatum to von Ltittichau. Wagner owed Morath money for 
copying out music — in all probability the parts for that un- 
fortunate performance of Das LUbesverbot — ^and now devotes a 
portion of the meagre honorarium for the Dutchman to settling 
this old score: "Dresden, 4th January 1843. ^7 <ic^ Herr 
Morath, I have kept you waiting long, and must confess that it 
has always pained me to the bottom of my heart whenever I 

* This sentence, merely meant to apply to ^^ first year of office, was em- 
ployed by LUttichau a few years later in a manner to which we shall have to 
refer in the next volume. 



35^ LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

thought of you and my total inability to pay you. My present 
better prospects have only been compassed by the greatest 
sacrifices in the world ; I have had to bear want and privations 
of all kinds, not to come to utter grief. Even now, for what 
concerns my outward circumstances, I am by no means at the 
goal; my takings are as yet so small, as scarcely to enter into 
consideration. However, God will help me on, and I will make 
a beginning with you; for you served me uprightly, and have 
always behaved to me with the greatest kindness. Moreover, not 
one of all my creditors is more in need of the money than 
yourself. So please accept from me the 35 thalers you asked for 
in your last letter. If ever I can serve you, it will be with the 
best of will. My heartiest thanks for your indulgence, and the 
assurance of my utmost esteem. Yours most sincerely, Richard 
Wagner." — While affording an outline of his situation, this letter 
forms a striking pendant to that addressed to Liittichau next 
day, and thus completes the picture of the master's character. 
Inflexible in his artistic demands, and fearless in his de- 
claration of them when treating with ''high quarters," he is 
ever grateful, thoughtful, appreciative, to those in a humbler 
position. 

For the first time in the annals of the Royal Court-theatre 
at Dresden the nominee's trial year was waived, but another 
formality had to be observed — that of a trial representation. To 
this he could have no serious objection, and he therefore chose 
Weber's Euryanthe : a doubly significant choice. Where Weber 
left ofif, in every sense, he wished to make a beginning ; and was 
he not about to occupy the very seat of the beloved model of his 
youth? The trial-performance took place on Tuesday the loth 
of January, two days after the third representation of the Hollander, 
It was not to lead to a definite appointment, nor had the 
negotiations with von Liittichau any binding force as yet; for the 
King himself had first to give the royal consent to his Intendant's 
proposals, and even the objections of the Bishop — who had a 
voice in the matter on account of the church duties of the 
Kapellmeister — had to be removed by a promise that the two 
Protestant conductors, Reissiger and Wagner, should have a 
Catholic ''Musikdirektor" as their assistant. 

Immediately after this wellnigh superfluous proof of the ability 
of a man who had already rehearsed and conducted his own 



DRESDEN. 359 

Operas at the theatre, Wagner appears to have gone to Berlin, 
where he had announced his visit in a letter of January 9. It 
was a matter of using his persuasive powers to induce the new 
Intendant there, Herr von Kiistner, to do his utmost to produce 
the Flying Dutchman as soon as possible. But, for all great 
Meyerbeer's original recommendation, and the formal acceptance 
of over a year ago, the Berlin management had no serious mind 
to give the opera just yet ; so that Wagner's flying visit was pro- 
ductive of nothing beyond a deeper insight into the hopeless state 
of art in the Prussian capital To Schumann he writes soon 
afterwards: "The world there lieth in wickedness, and I have 
come to the conclusion that nothing elevating for art will ever 
bloom there. The demoralisation comes from above; everything 
is half and half. It disgusted me." This reminds one of his final 
verdict on Paris, delivered into the same ears a twelvemonth 
before. In each case, however much the superficial may prate of 
his ai^uing firom the particular to the general, Wagner was a true 
prophet for at least the term of his own life. 

During Wagner's absence his old companion Schindelmeisser, 
half-brother to Heinrich Dom, had also conducted a trial- 
performance at Dresden, of Spontini's Vestalin. It is not quite 
clear whether Schindelmeisser was a rival candidate for the 
Kapellmeistership, or merely an aspirant to the subordinate post 
of Musikdirektor. In either case he was unsuccessful, on the 
one hand ; on the other, he remained the best of friends with 
Wagner, whose appointment was now at last decided. In con- 
sideration of our hero's many services already rendered to the 
theatre, Liittichau had recommended him for immediate entry on 
his new duties and emoluments as from February i, although 
the salary of the late occupant of the post was to be paid to his 
widow (Mme Morlachi), as an act of grace, down to the end of 
May. How he regarded the appointment at the time, may be 
gathered from the letter to Schumann jusbquoted — enclosed with 
the score of the Hollander on loan for a few days' perusal. 
"Much," says this letter of Jan. 27, 1843, "much as I held aloof 
at first from all competition for the Musikdirektor's post left 
vacant by Rastrelli's death, I could not maintain a stand against 
the unusual offers finally made me. I become Kapellmeister 
on full pay, just like Morlachi, and enjoy the additional favour 
of becoming it at once ; whereas every Kapellmeister before me, 



360 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

even Weber himself, had had to serve a probationary year as 
Musikdirektor at a lower salary." 

The position had practicaUy been forced on him, against his 
sound artistic instiqct Fate seems to have said, "You need 
schooling ; Paris was not enough, for there you only saw the Opoa 
from outside ; you now shall learn by sore experience what it is to 
work, even with the best and best-disposed of artists, for such a 
broil Your creatite genius will have to struggle to find a breath- 
ing-^pace amid the throng of routine duties ; your organising talent 
shall be driven to despair at the sullen opposition it will meet. 
But through it you must go ; and, if you only keep true to your- 
self^ you'll issue from the fire a marvel for all the ages." But Fate, 
being a lady, was not so tactless as to say this quite so audibly at 
once ; she coaxed him into thinking that the prospect, after all, 
was not so gloomy as he feai-ed : " It had been brought plainly 
enough before my own eyes that it was not Art such as I had 
learnt to know it, but a wholly difierent set of interests, merely 
cloaking themselves with an artistic semblance, that was ministered 
to in the daily traffic of our public art-affairs" — he tells us in the 
Communicatum ; ^'but I had not as yet thrust down to the funda- 
mental cause of this phenomenon, and therefore rather held it an 
accident, remediable by a little pains. . . . My recognition of the 
high opinion generally entertained of such a post, and finally the 
signal honour which my selection appeared- to represent in the 
eyes of my friends, ended by dazzling me also, making me behold 
an unwonted stroke of fortune in what was but too soon to be the 
source of gnawing pain. I became — in high glee !-- a K6niglicher 
Kapellmeister." 



APPENDICES. 

I. GENEALOGICAL TABLE.— II. FAMILY CHRONICLE, 
in. SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 



3«i 



I. GENEALOGICAL TABLE. 

(N.B. Collaterals are relegated to the *' Family chronicle.") 



Samuel Wagner (164 3-1 705), 
Schoolmaster at Thammenhain; first wife Barbara, who died 1701. 

I 

Emanuel Wagner (1664-1726), 

Schoolmaster at Colmen, later at Kiihren, married in 1688 
Anna Benewitz of Kiihren (1670-17 18). 

I 

Samuel Wagner (1703-1750), 

Organist, cantor and schoolmaster at Miiglenz, married 
1728 Anna Sophia Rdssig of Dahlen. 

I 

GOTTLOB FrIEDRICH WaGNER (1736-1795), 

Student of theology, then excise-officer at Leipzig; married 1769 
Johanna Sophia Eichel of Leipzig, who died 181 4. 

I 

Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner (1770-1813), 

Police-actuary at Leipzig, married Johanna Rosina Bertz 
(or Berthis) of Weissenfels (1779-1848). 

I 

Wilhelm Biohabd Wagner (1813-1883), 

Married 1836 Christine Wilhelmine Planer (1814-1866), secondly 

Cosima von Biilow, n^e Liszt (bom 1837). 

I 

Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner, 
Bom June 6, 1869. 



963 



II. FAMILY CHRONICLE, 1643-1813. 



1643. Samuel Wa^er (L), the earliest ascertainable progenitor 
of Richard Wagner ; judging^ by his Christian name, son 
of a Protestant village schoolmaster. 

1648. Westphalian Treaty of Peace, celebrated by Paul Gerhard 
in his " Dancklied." 

1656-S0. Johann Gearg 11. Elector of Saxony; a pieasure-iaver 
who expended sums the wasUd iand could ill afford^ on 
unlimited banquets^ jousts by torchlight^ Honrbaitingy Italian 
Opera^ illuminations^ masquerades and processions, 

1 66 1. New poHce-y marriage-^ household-^ craft-^ and sumptuary 
regulations for Saxony, Among others^ one decreeing that 
Divine Service shall be ^^ pursued with inner devotion^^ and 
" no converse be held with the Devil through crystal-gazing^^ 
no bullets be charmed^ etc^ etc, 

1663. Samuel Wagner becomes schoolmaster at Thammenhain, 
and marries his first wife Barbara (surname undiscoverable). 

1664. Emanuel Wagner bom in August; eldest son of Samuel. 
167 1. Elisabeth Wagner, Samuel's eldest daughter, bom in Sept. 
1676. Samuel Wagner (II.), second son of Samuel I., born 

Oct. 29. 

1679. Johanna Christiana Wagner, Samuel's second daughter, 
bom Dec. 27 (died Oct 26, 1683). 

1680. Plague in Saxony: warning-posts erected outside if^ected 

districts Nov. 23, among them Kuhren and Hohburg. 

1684. Emanuel Wagner becomes schoolmaster at Colmen 
(Kulm) near Thalwitz. 

1685. Joh. Sebastian Bach bom at Eisenach^ March 21. 

1686. Elisabeth Wagner, Samuel's eldest daughter, buried Sept. 
27 ''with a funeral sermon and valediction; fifteen years 
and a few weeks of age." 

z688. Samuel Wagner celebrates his Silver Wedding at Tham- 
menhain. 

3«4 



FAMILY CHRONICLE. 365 

Oct. 16, Bmamial WagtMr, 24 years old, schoolmaster at 
Colmen, marries Anna, daughter of the Kiihren school- 
master and taxgatherer Ernst Benewitz, the bans having 
thrice been published at Kiihren, Colmen and Tham- 
menhain. 

1690. Job. Heinrich Wagner, third (?) son of Samuel L and 
brother of Emanuel, bom Feb. 21 ; one of his god- 
parents is Ernst Benemtz, now filling at Thammenhain 
a similar office to that he held at Kiihreo. Job. Heinrich 
dies Jan. 18, 1691. 

1691-94. Johann Gtorg IV, Elector of Saxony. With him begins 
the 'mistress' rigime {Sify/la^ Grdfin von RochUti^ which 
already has disastrous effects on the public finances. 

1693. Samuel Wagnbr II., brother of Emanuel, and afterwards 
successor to his father's post, is mentioned in a Tham- 
menhain document as ''school-assistant" 

1697-1763. Folish-Scucon period: Elector Friedrich August L 
turns Catholic^ to remove the main objection to his elevation 
to the throne 0/ Poland, 

1698. Elector Fried, August /., known as the Strong^ mahes his 
ceremonial entry into Warsaw on Jan, 1$ as King August 
IL, of Poland, The attainment and mainUnanee of the 
Polish crown swallow endless sums of money. Prince Egon 
of Fiirstenbergy a Catholic^ is installed in Dresden as State- 
holder, 

1699. Saxon-Danish'jRussian alliance against Charles the Twelfth 
of Sweden, 

1700 (?). Anna Dorothea, eldest (?) daughter of Emanuel 
Wagner, bom at Colmen. 

1 701. Five-and-fortieth anniversary of the wedding of Samuel I. 
and Barbara Wagner. 

Oct. lo. Barbara, "wedded wife of Samuel Wagner, 
schoolmaster of this place, died in peace, and the following 
Wednesday [Oct 12] was interred with a funeral sermon 
and valediction." 

Friedrich August^ hard-pressed by Charles the Twelfth^ 
abandons Warsaw^ and retires with his court to Cracow, 

1702. Emanuel Wagner, hitherto at Colmen by Thalwitz, 
becomes schoolmaster at Ktihren. 

Introduction of the General-Excise in Scucony ; by which 



366 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

means the enormous sums required for the ostentation of the 
Polish crown^ the beautification of Dresden^ the maintenance 
of a costfy army etc,^ are more evenly levied, no longer falling 
entirely on the poorest classes. 

1703. Samuel Wagner I., just 60 years of age, marries in 
January his second wife, Anna, a young woman with an 
untraceable surname. 

Samuel Wagner m, eldest son of Emanuel Wagner, and 
afterwards head of the house, is bom. At this date there 
accordingly are three contemporaneous Samuel Wagners — 
grandfather, uncle and nephew; or father, brother and 
son. 

1704. Samuel Wagner II., brother of Emanuel, marries at the 
age of twenty-eight; he now is schoolmaster at Gross- 
Zschepa. 

Joh, Sebastian Bach organist at Anstadt 

1705. Sanrael Wagner L dies in the third year of his second 

marriage, after holding office for 43 years, and is buried 
at Thammenhain, March 25, "with a funeral sermon and 
valediction (text, John I. 2, ' If any man sinneth ' etc.).*' 
Samuel Wagner II. takes his father's place as schoolmaster 
and organist at Thammenhain. His eldest son, Hans 
Samuel (IV.) is bom in May ; so that there once more 
are three Samuel Wagners. 

Oct. 4. 2he Polish crown is bestowed by Charles the Twelfth 
on Stanislaus Leczinsky ; JFHedrich August seeks refuge 
with his ally Tsar Peter. 

1706. Hans Samuel (IV.) dies Jan. 14, aged three-quarters of a 
year; a second son of Samuel Wagner II. is christ^ied 
after him Hans Samuel (V.). 

Peace of Altranstddt. Charles the Twelfth invades 
Saxony^ and compels Fried. August to renounce the Polish 
throne. Saxony has to pcfy the keep of the Swedish army 
throughout the winter (400,000 rix-doUars in gold per 
montK). 
1709. Maria Sophia bom to Emanuel Wagner at Kiihren, March 
19. 

July 13, Hans Samuel W. (V.) dies, barely two years old. 
Sept. 8. Samuel Wagner II. (brother of Emanuel) dies at 
the age of 33. Consequently there remains but one bearor 



FAMILY CHRONICLE. 367 

of the Christian name, namely Samuel Wagner III., son of 

Emanuel and great-grandfather of Richard Wagner. 

The EUctor regains the Polish crawn, laying fresh intolerable 

burdens an his Saxon fatherland, 
1 7 13. Silver Wedding of Emanuel and Anna Wagner. 
1 7 18. Anna Wagner dies at Kiihren, aged 48. 

1722. Anna Dorothea Wagner, daughter of Emanuel^ married at 
Kiihren on April 21 to Master-Tailor Joh. Miiller of 
Benndorf near Altenburg. 

1723. Joh. Seb, Bach becomes cantor and organist of S, Thomas' 
church at Leipzig^ May 30. 

1726. Bmamiel Wagner dies at Kiihren, aged 62, after two-and- 
forty years of office. 

1727. Samuel Wagner m., aged 24, undergoes his singing-trial 
in church at Miiglenz, at service on S. John's Day. June 
28 and Aug. 14, decrees appointing Samuel III. firstly 
adjunct, then successor, to the Miiglenz cantor and 
schoolmaster Adam Geissler. 

1728. On February the loth Samuel m. marries Anna Sophia, 
orphan of Master-.Miller Christoph R5ssig. 
Dec. 16, Johanna Sophia, eldest daughter of Samuel 
Wagner III., bom at Miiglenz. 

1 731. Christina Eleonora, second daughter of Samuel Wagner, 
bom August 4 at Miiglenz. 

1732. Samuel Wagner's younger sister, Maria Sophia (daughter 
of Emanuel W.), married at Luppa Feb. 10, at the age 
of 23, to Electoral-Forester Joh. Christian Eberhardt 
Brother and sister now have a wedding-day in commoB, 

1733. Elector Friedrich August L dies Sept i, and is buried at 
Cracow^ Saxony merely receiving the heart of its prince in a 
siher capsule. 
His son^ Friedr, August IL {favourite^ Graf BrUht) is elected 

I King of Poland under the title of August III, 

I Nov. 15. Susanna Carolina, third daughter of Samuel 

I Wagner III., bom at Miiglenz. 

1736. Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, eldest son and fourth child of 
! Samuel III., bom Feb. 18 at Miiglenz. 

I 1738. Anna Elisabeth Wagner, fourth daughter (fifth child) of 

Samuel III., bom at Miiglenz Dec. 3. 

1 741. In April the child Anna Elisabeth dies. 



368 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

1749. DcHTOthea Elisabeth, fifth daughter (sixth child) of Samud 
Wagner, bom Feb. 4 at Moglenz. 

1744. In April the child Dorothea Elisabeth dies. 

1745. Samubl August, second son and seventh child of Samuel 
Wagner III., bom Aug. 13 at Muglenz. He is the sixth 
and iast ascertainable bearer of the name in the Wagner 
family, as altered influences of the age gave preference to 
German, above Biblical baptismal names. 

Frederick the Greafs victory at Kesselsdarf amdemns Saxony 
to /ay a million rthlr {rix-dollars) ingold^ beyond the heavy 
contributions already levied. 

1746. 77u aU'Powefful Graf Heinrick v. Bruhl becomes Prime 
Minister to Friedr. August JL^ and thus obtains control of 
the destinies of Saxony. Utmost extravc^nce of pomp cmd 
luxury at court contrc^ts with want and haooc thorough 
out the country. 

1750. Johann Sebastian Bach^ still cantor of & Thomaf churchy 

dies July 28 at Leipzig^ ^^ oppressed with cares^ lonely and 
forgotten^ leaving his family in poverty and deprivation/* 
Samuel Wagner in. dies Nov. 22 at Miiglenz, not quite 48 

years old, leaving a widow, three daughters and two sons, 

of whom GoTTLOB Friedrich is 14 years of age, Samuel 

August 5 years. 
1756. Aug 15, Frederick the Great invades Setxony with 67,000 

men. The Saxon army is hemmed in at Pima^ Dresden 

taheUf the treasury seixed. 

1759. OtotUob FMedrich Wagner inscribed a student of Theology 
at the Leipzig University, March 16. 

1760. A terrible year for Saxony ; culminating point {^ the Seven- 

Years War. July : Dresden besieged and bombarded^ whole 
quarters of the city falling to the flames. Friedrich August 
with Count Briihl in Poland, 

November $ to 4^ Frederick the Great takes up winter 
quarters at Leipzig. Bight tons of gold extorted by mal- 
treatment from the magistraUs and wellio-do tradesmen; 
coinage debased by Frederidis minting Jew. 

1762. Nov. Armistice^ Saxony remaining the winter-quarters for 
Prussians and Austrians. 

1763. Feb. 15, Peace of Hubertsburg. Scucony has lost over 100 
million rthlr. in contributions^ plunder and destruction by fire. 



FAMILY CHRONICLE. 369 

Oct, 5, Friedr, August IL dies ; Prince Xaver becomes 
regent for his nephew Friedrich August II L^ aged i^ years. 

1764, Intimacy of Gottlob Friedrich Wagner with the Leipzig 
schoolmaster Gottlob Friedrich Eichel and his dai^hter 
Johanna Sophia. 

1765. Baptism of the antenuptial son of Gottlob Friedrich in 

S. Thomas' church, March 23. 

Young Goethe inscribed a Law-student at Leipzig^ Oct, 19. 
The Leipzig theatre^ newly erected beside the Rannstadt Gate^ 
opened Oct. 6 with SchlegePs ''Hermann'' 

1767. Gottlob Friedrich Wagner becomes assistant excise- 
officer at the Rannstadter Thor. 

1768. Friedrich August IIL^ the fusty attaining his majority, 
ascends the Saxon throne, — Goethe leaves Leipzig, 

1769. Fourteenth to sixteenth Sundays after Trinity, banns of 

marriage between Gtottlob Friedrich Wagner and Johanna 
Sophia Eichel (see above) proclaimed in S. Thomas' 
church at Leipzig. 

September: the marriage takes place at Sch6nefeld, near 
Leipzig. 

1770. Karl Eriedrich Wilhehn Wagner (eldest son of Gottlob 
Friedrich, the love-child having died) bom June 18. 
Among his baptismal witnesses is the maternal grand- 
father, schoolmaster Eichel. 

Dec, 1 7, Beethoven bom, 

1773. Goeth^s ''Gotz von BerlichingenJ' — Gluck goes to Paris 
for the production of his '' IpMgenia inAulisJ* — Mozart, 16 
years of age, writes operas in the Italian manner, 

1774. Birth of Gottlob Heinrich Adolf, second son of Gottlob 
Friedrich Wagner. 

1778. Johanna Bertz (also spelt Berthis), eventually mother 

of Richard Wagner, born Sept. 19 at Weissenfels. 

Nov. 3, Johanna Christiane Friederike bom, third and 

last child of the marris^e of Gottlob Friedrich and 

Johanna Sophia Wagner. 
1780. LuDWiG Geyer, eventually stepfather of Richard Wagner, 

born Jan. 21 at Eisleben, where his father is practising as 

Actuary to the Overseer. 
1782. Friedrich Wagner, 12 years old, at the S. Thomas 

school 

2 A 



370 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, 

Sept 20 and 22,first two performances ofSckUU^s ^^ Robbers^ 
at Leipzigy creating an extraordinary sensation, 
1785. April 17, Schiller at Leipzig^ to meet the Komer circle. In 
September he follows Komer to Dresden. 

1 791. ^^ Magic' Flute ^* at Vienna, Mozart dies Dec, 5. 

1792. Adolf Wagner attends the Leipzig University, to study 
Theology ; Friedrich Wagner studies Law. 

Sept, France declared a Republic, Goethe accompanies the 
Allies into France ; disastrous retreat, 

1794. Silver Wedding of Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, Sept 

1795. <H»ttlob Friedrich Wagner dies March 21. His widow 

survives him nineteen years, dying Jan. 26, 18 14. 

1798. Friedrich Wagner, eldest son of the above, and vice- 
actuary at the Town Court of Justice, marries Johanna 
Bbrtz of Weissenfels, aged 19, on June the 2nd. 

1798-99. Bonaparte s Egyptian expedition, 

1799. Albert, Friedrich Wagner's first son, bom March 2. 

On his return from Egypty Napoleon overthrows the 
DirectoratCy and gets himself appointed First Consul of 
France, 

Dec, Schiller confirmed in his ''hopes of Opera'' by Gluck's 
Iphigenia: ''The music is so heavenly that even at re- 
hearsalSy in the bear-garden of singerSy it moved me to tears,^ 
1801. Pecu:e of Luneville: the left bank of the Rhine ceded to 
France, 

July 21, Karl Gustav, second son of Friedrich Wagner 
bom (died in infancy). 

Sept. 18. Friedrich Wagner and his wife attend the first 
Leipzig performance of the " Maid of Orleans," given in 
presence of the poet 

1803. Johanna Rosalie (Richard Wagner's eldest sister) bom 
March 4. 

The performance of" the Bride of Messina'' at Lauchstddt 
rouses indescribable enthusiasm, 

1804. Napoleon proclaimed Emperor of the Frenchy May 20. 

German journals print portraits of himy in regal state with 
purple mantle and insignia ! Beethoveny enragedy tears the 

dedication-page from the score of his Eroica. 

August 7, Karl Julius, Friedrich Wagner's third son, bom. 



FAMILY CHRONICLE. 37 1 

1805. Schiller's deaths May 9. 

Dec. 14, Louise Konstanz, Fr. Wagner^s second daughter, 
bora. 

1806. Germany at its lowest ebb. Rhine-league under Napoleon's 
protection ; Franz II, abdicates the German Imperial crown. 
Battle of Jena. Ruin of Prussia^ 

Dec. II, Napoleon makes separate peace and alliance with 
Saxony. Introduction of the Code Napoleon. 
Friedrich Wagner entrusted with the organisation of 
Leipzig police-matters. 

1807. Klara Wilhelmine, third daughter of Fried. Wagner, born 
Nov, 29. 

1 808. Dec. 22, Beethoven brings out his C minor and Pastoral 
Symphonies at an " Akademie " in Vienna. 

1809. Maria Theresia, fourth daughter of Fried. Wagner, born 
April I. 

Sept. 29, Geyer becomes a member of the Seconda troupe. 

1 810. Napoleon^ at the zenith of his glory ^ marries Marie Louise 
of Austria^ April 2 ; five Queens her trainrbearers. 

1 8x1. Wilhelmine Ottilie, fifth and last daughter of Fried. 
Wagner, born March 14, almost simultaneously with the 
"King of Rome." 
May. Napoleon at Dresden; brilliant fUes in his honour. 

1812. June 24, Napoleon crosses the river Niemen with 300,000 

men into Russia. 

Sept. s. Burning of Moscow. Napoleon abandons his deci- 
mated army. 

1813, May 22: Biohabd Wacoisb bora. 

Oct. 16-19, Battle of Liberation beneath the walls of Leipzig; 
Napoleon flees the city ; Friedrich August^ King of Saxony ^ 
taken prisoner. 
November 22, Friedrich Wagner dies. 



III. SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 

Pages 22.23. Adolf Wagnbr's "Two Epochs of Modern Poetry 
<pabd. 1806).— The introduction to this work disclaims any idea of following 
the poetic tendencies of two distinct nations through all their branchings, 
but proposes to concentrate attention on the origin of those tendencies : " For 
Poetry is the highest point of a nation's culture, at which assemble all its 
rays." In this way, Adolf thinks, the national stamp will not escape the 
single eye of the inquirer, who will recc^ise in it the unity that lies at 
bottom of all variety of forms, " the invisible sun from which they each derive 
their light." For this purpose three representative Italian poets are con- 
fronted with three German. The background for the first division of the 
work is furnished by a bird's-eye-view of the Middle Age$ and the divers 
movements of that time : Chivalry, Scholasticism (which Adolf calls *' a kind 
of Philosophic Chivalry "), and the conflict between Spiritual and Temporal 
powers. In discussing Dante he begins with the Lyric poet More manly and 
intellectual, than with the maudlin Troubadours, had been the cultivation of 
the noblest promptings of his heart : from the depths of Scholasticism, into 
which he had been led by his chosen master, Aristotle, his Love had shone 
back on him in protean form. " It all was traced by him to its first generator, 
to the sole true Being, as its fountain-head ; and thence grew up a world 
whose grandeur and magnificence the ancient bards had guessed at, and the 
holy writers of the Church depicted under every kind of image; so that 
everything was urging to the Ideal, and what was real was but an allegory of 
the Unending. In this wise Beatrice became to him the lofty figure whom 
all serve, through whom he saw all as through a medium, — she became to 
him an allegoric personage, his love towards her but the daughter of a higher, 
purer love ; and thus it passed into a mystic glamour, from which the spirit 
wholly given to the fount of Love shot glorious sparks that lighted the whole 
world." In the Dtvina Commedia Dante desired to limn the metamorphosis 
of the human mind until its perfecting in '* Christianism " ; r^arded thus, the 
profound purpose of the poem's trichotomy sprang to the eye. For everything, 
first fleeing from the eternal, next strives to establish its own individuality and 
assert it in conflict with others, till lastly, taken up once more into the Idea 
from which it issued, it shines in perfect peace. Here, then, is shewn the 
world, its re/Ux in art and science, and the return of both to their idea. The 
Inferno^ a series of terrible pictures executed with a boldness that stops at 
nothing, shews human nature bound to the earthly ; in the Purjgatarw^ realm of 
colours, where the scenery grows more inviting, man develops free action and 
creative force ; in the Paradtso all is radiant with purest light. In this sense 
the great Epic poet raised the particularities of his experience to the universal ; 
37« 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 373 

whereas Petrarch, whose whole life was fyric^ individualised the universal into 
the particular, made the infinite a halo for the finite. Petrarch still having 
treated Love firom its ideal aspect, it was Boccaccio who bent at last to its 
realistic side, painting alike the ardour of its pleasures and the torment of its 
pains ; in this relation, besides the Decameron^ Adolf gives special prominence 
to Fiammetta, in which the whole gamut of passion in a robust female heart 
is pursued through every semitone. Viewed thus, the spheres of these three 
poets combine to form a rounded whole : in Dante blends and is united what in 
Petrarch gravitates to the idealistic side, in Boccaccio to the realistic. Turning 
to the German poets, the author of the Two Epochs regards " the vanishing of 
religian " as the chief obstacle to the flourishing of poetry in our age. How- 
ever, even here the corresponding types are not to be denied. Like the life 
of the great Florentine, Adolf Wagner considers the life of Goethe a more 
than usually organic one ; so manifest and sharply drawn are all the segments 
of the circle he passed through, down to the splendid autumn that presents in 
IVilhelm Meister a "landscape in the evening sun." In contrast to the 
tianquil grandeur and clarity of Goethe and his works, Adolf sets Schiller's 
impetuous dash into the wheels of time, his philosophical method, his striving 
and wrestling after what floats down to Goethe so lovingly and of itself. In 
Goethe, Schiller and Wieland there returns in modem Germany, as Ideal, 
what in Italy had shewn itself at Dante's epoch as the Real. Goethe, like 
Dante, is the point of union for predecessors and successors ; in him the spirit 
of Poetry became more inward, announcing a new world, a world fAamun- 
traiion of forces hitkerio dispersed. 

The above gives but a very general idea of the wealth of original thought 
and observation in Adolf Wagner's remarkable book ; on the other hand it 
merely hints at many a one-sided view, such as that of calling Schiller a 
''philosophic" poet, in particular his Don Carlos a "granary of Kaotism." 
His nephew Richard Wagner went much deeper, especially in the ninth 
chapter of his German Art and German Policy (where Dm Carlos is appreciated 
at its genuine worth) and in the essay on Beethoven. 

The great poets of Italy are also dealt with in Adolfs brief but pregnant 
introduction (written in Italian) to his Pamasso itaUano, 1826. Here the 
/imr chief Italians are characterised as follows : Petrarch is the poet of a 
somewhat forced and stilted Platonism ; Tasso of the emotions ; Ariosto of 
the imagination (with Oriental influences) ; whilst Dante, uniter of the divine 
and human, is the poet of the intellect. Adolf Wagner's veneration for Goethe 
is evinced once more in the Pamasso, by a dedication to the " Principe dei 
poeti,"— which led to his receiving from the German poet a silver goblet 
(according to the Konversationslexikan der neuesten Zeit und Litteratur 1835, 
Sept., pp. 23oetseq.). 

P*g« 99> Adolf Wagnsr's bcarriags.— Since the death of his friend 
Apel and the removal of the widow and children of his brother Friedrich 
Wagner to Dresden, whilst Wendt had been summoned to Gottingen, Adolf 
had lived in greater and greater seclusion, scarcely leaving Leipzig save for 
tiny trips, and occupying all his time with literary work. Among his numerous 
translations of this period we may mention that of a work of William Coxe's, 
which appeared under the title Geschickie der Hauses Oesterreich von Rudolf 



374 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

van Hapsburg bis Leopold II, (Leipzig, Brockhaiis, 4 vols., 1812-17), and 
received the doubtful honour of being pirated in his lifetime ; also the Netu 
Reism der Engldnder (vols. I. and II., Leipzig 1814 et seq.); Benjamin 
FranklirCs nachgelassene Schriften (5 vols., Weimar 1817-19) ; William Shake- 
speare* 5 Leben (Leipzig 1824), a translation of Aug. Scottowe's work ; also 
Christoph Colombo und seine ErUdeckungen (Leipzig, Fleischer, 1825), from 
Spotorno's standard treatise, founded on the Codex diplomaticus ColumH pre- 
sented to the Republic of Genoa by Lorenzo Oderigoin 1670,— thb last transla- 
tion has a preface and Dotes displaying Adolf s indignation at the gross injustices 
that had embittered the last years of the great explorer. But even more than 
in his translations, A. Wagner distinguished himself in countless other learned 
works as one of the most eminent philologists of his day, especially in the 
department of modem tongues and their literature. Among these we have 
the twelfth edition of Bailey-Fahrenkrttger's Worterbuck der engiischenSpra^ke 
(2 vols., Jena, Frommann, 1823) a monument of comparative etymology; in 
July 1820 he writes, '* As my English dictionary holds roe fixed, I can scarcely 
take a trip this year." Further, his anonymously-published Glossary to E. 
Fleischer's edition of Shakespeare, where Nares indeed is drawn upon, bat 
with many corrections and critical and historical notes. Adolf s etymologic 
comparisons both in these works and in his Zum europaischen Sprachenban^ 
based on Murray, shew thoroughgoingness and great acumen. His Lekrbuch 
der italienischen Sprache (Leipzig 1819) also merits recognition, and received 
it at the time. 

Adolf s diligence and unassuming erudition won him many friends both at 
home and abroad, but he had little time for correspondence with them. 
Literary feuds he detested, yet was forced to take arms, upon occasion, in 
war with ignorance and self-conceit. One of his bugbears was the moral and 
literary incorporation of the reactionary spirit in the person of August von 
Kotzebue. He writes to his nephew Albert Wagner on Feb. 9, 1818, 
" Kotzebue is shewing the cloven hoof again, denouncing and maligning noble 
thinkers to the Russian court, publishing his sycophantic bulletins, and egging 
the police against the representatives of Liberty of the Press at Jena, Luden, 
Oken and Wieland, whose journals he endeavours to suppress by diplomatic 
trickery* Wretches of his sort know their business ; for in the atmosphere 
of freedom, as men upon too high a mountain, they necessarily must lose 
their breath. However, it is better that slavery, than that liberty shoald 
die ; and so it probably will happen, as the axe is everywhere laid at the 
root." 

Until his tardy marriage, Adolf for years had followed his silent calling in 
a back-room of the Thomfi-house (on the Market), sharing a set of apartments 
with the owner, Jeannette Thoma, and his sister Friederike. lliis had been 
one of his reasons for declining Albert's request that he should take charge 
of the boy Richard : '' Most women have to be wound and set, like clocks ; a 
process not quite so degrading to them as it might sound, and which would 
not be so requisite with another sort of bringing up, than that of our present 
century ; but rebus stantibus so it is, and even suits the good ones, provided 
they are good at heart." The Bayreuth master never forgot the occasional 
glimpses he had gained of this strange surrounding of his unde's: Aunt 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES, 375 

Friederike was tall and thin, Jeannette Thoma florid and stout, and tht two 
were eternally nagging on one subject after another; ''The piano must be 
tuned, ** says one, drawing from the other the snappy retort, "That's as much 
as to say that / must get it tuned," and so on. Poor Adolf himself once writes 
of a "tumult of wild women not to be quelled even by the love of a S. John, 
which I do not precisely feel." It need therefore be no surprise to us, how- 
ever great to the two dear ladies, that he got himself married at the age of 
fifty (in S. Thomas' church, Oct. i8, 1824) to Sophie, thirty-two-year sister 
of his comrade Wendt. It seems that he had been ' keeping company ' with 
this beautiful and intellectual woman for several years, much to the jealousy 
and alarm of his sister and Jeannette. Angry expostulations at last were raised 
by the ladies at home, and for a time the danger seemed overpast ; but the 
sly old fox had not changed his mind. One fine afternoon Herr Adolf sneaks 
out in his company clothes, and returns two hours later with a bride on his 
arm (as recounted by Richard Wagner at Bayreuth to Alexander. Ritter, of 
JFauU Hans renown). Nevertheless, as evidenced by one of his admirable 
letters to Albert, the middle-aged bridegroom did not forget his old com- 
panions, and visits to the Thoma House soon became regular and firequent 
institutions. 

PkLge no. Leipzig "Faust" fbrformances and their effect on young 
Richard. — ^The Faust'Oytttvae of 1839-40 was preceded in 1832 by seven 
settings for Goethe's drama (see J. van Santen-KolflTs article in the Bayreuiher 
Tasehenbuch 1894). The note-book containing them now reposes in the 
fiimily-archives at Wahnfiried, and bears the following title : 

SiBBBN KOMPOSITIONBN 

ru Goethe's "Faust," 

von Richard Wagnbr. 

Opus 5. 

Leipzig, 1832. 

The single pieces are as under :^ 

(i) Soldiers* Chorus, "Burgen mit hohen Zinnen." March measure B 
major J. 

(2) Rustics under the Linden, "Der Schafer putzte sich zum Tanz." 

Fast and lively, F major }. For tenor solo, soprano solo, and 
chorus. 

(3) Brandef's Song, '* Es war eine Ratt' im Kellemest" D major |. 

(4) Song of MephistopheUs, "Es war einmal ein Konig." With affecta- 

tion of pathos, G major f . 

(5) Song of MephistopheUs, "Was machst du mir vor Liebchen's ThUr." 

Moderately fast, E minor f . 

(6) Song of Gretchen, "Meine Ruh' ist hin." With passion, but not too 

quick; G minor f. 

(7) Melodrama for Gretchen, "Ach neige, du Schmerzensreiche." Not 

fast, but very agitated, G minor ^. 

It is a little surprising to find all these pieces written in the same measure. 



376 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

and the two for "Gretchen" also in the selftame key. Moreover, an opus- 
number is a rare event with Wagner. Op. i and 2 are beyond all doobt (see 
page 125 of this volume) ; op. 3 may possibly be represented by the Fantasia 
in F sharp minor, and op. 4 by the Concert-overture in D minor; which 
would range these Sewn Ccmpositians between the D minor and the C major 
overtures, Le. at quite the b^[inning of 1832. On the other hand, we hear 
of manuscript compositions that preceded ''Opus i"; so that we have 
nothing certain to rely upon, beyond the date of the title-page as given above. 
Considering the neatness of their caligraphy, this negligence in *' opns-ing " 
his musical works in itself suggests the future dramatist : we never hear of ao 
opus-number for an Agamemtum or Othello, 

As to the destination of these Seven Compositions, it would appear that they 
were really intended for the Faust performances at Leipzig, where sister 
Rosalie's '< Gretchen " had so lasting a success ; but the young author himself 
was too intent on his orchestral progress to trouble his head much about 
them. Years afterwards we find them mentioned in a letter from London to 
Fischer dated March 2, 1855, when the master begs for the despatch of a 
parcel of music left at Dresden under insufficient care. In the list of this 
music figure "Sieben Kompositionen zu Goethe's Faust," also "Les adieus 
de Maria Stuart " — the French title of which points to its composition about 
the same period as the next work on the list, <'Les deux Grenadien," ie. 
1839-40. 

Page 121. Thb Corps Saxonia.— It would have occupied too much space 
in the body of our narrative, to dwell upon that gay, uproarious stndent-liie 
whose novelty took Richard Wagner's fancy when just turned seventeen. To 
the special courtesy of a former archive-keeper of the Saxonia (subsequently 
Dr G. S., barrister at the Upper District Court in Dresden) we owe some 
interesting particulars of the constitution of the corps, also confirmation of 
the old Saxonia tradition that Wagner once belonged to it His name, how- 
ever, does not appear in the archives, for the good and sufficient reason that 
none but names of " Corpsburschen in the stricter sense " were ever registered. 
To explain this to the uninitiated, it will be necessary to describe the com- 
position of a "Corps" at German universities. The Corps consists of an 
inner and an outer circle, the inner circle being formed by what are called the 
Corpsburschen (the slang ''pal" would be about the best equivalent for 
"Bursch" in this sense). To be received into the actual Corps, or inner 
circle, the young student must first have served a time of preparation— a kind 
of mellowing-— during which he is called a ** Renonce." Upon admission to 
the inner Corps every Renonce becomes at first an *' active Corpsbnrsch " : 
as such, it is his duty to take part in all the meetings of the Corps, whether 
for business or pleasure, to fight when so commanded, etc., etc If the 
Corpsbursch passes to a higher grade in the university, he is at liberty to 
become " inactive," i.e. to abstain from any regular share in the doings of the 
Corps. Wagner did not remain at the university long enough to pass through 
his novitiate, and therefore never passed beyond the stages of a '^cnsser 
Fuchs " (? " fag ") and a " Renonce." 

The colours of the Corps Saxonia were dark-blue and white for the Renoocen ; 
dark-blue, light-blue and white for full members. Its house of call about this 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 377 

period was the Green Linden on the Peterssteinweg, outside the city ; here it 
spent its carousal-evenings {** Kneipabende ") every Wednesday and Saturday, 
occasionally enlivened by a fight, as on March ii, 1831, when a duel with 
sabres took place between the Halle-'* Saxon " OUenroth and the " Lusatian ** 
D^elow ; but its regular locality for fencing-bouts was Fischer's restaurant on 
the Burgstrasse. At the beginning of 1831 the Saxonia consisted of 17 Corps- 
burschen and a larger number of Renoncen. The Senior of the corps, down 
to the end of the summer term, was Adolf von Schonfeldt, bom 1809 at Posfeld 
(in the province of Sachsen) ; he died Jan. 3, 1886, a Prussian Landsrath at 
Lobnitz by Bitterfeld. The other " active " Corpsburschen were :-~Karl Alwill, 
Count of Solms-Tecklenburg, from Schloss Sachsenfeld (died 1876 at Dresden) ; 
Alexander von Seebach, from Hildburghausen, subsequently a Saxon Kammer- 
herr (died 186 1 at Gross-Fahnem by Gotha) ; Bemhard v. Bismarck-Schon- 
hausen, brother of the great statesman and Chancellor, (died a Prussian 
Privy-Councillor, or Geh. Regierungsrath, May 1893) ; Hermann MttUer of 
Schwartenburg (down to the beginning of the seventies a magistrate in 
Dresden) ; Karl Maximilian Ehregott Edler v. Planitz, ' from Auerbach ; 
Heinrich Adolf v. Leipciger, of Naumburg ; v. Meyer zu Knonow, a redoubt- 
able fighter ; Nake, ▼. Mantenffel, Meixner, Weinhold, and others. Singu- 
larly enough, Wagner's bitterest and most influential enemy of later years, 
eventually Prime Minister of Saxony, Karl Louis von Bbust, was also 
an "active" member. Among the "inactive" were Karl Emil Marscfaall 
▼. Bieberstein, of Wdssenfels, who died a retired Belgian lieutenant and 
frontier-inspector in 1858 (?) at Wahrsdorf by Schandau ; von Globig, and 
others. 

Ofcombatowith<<New-Pnissian"and "Lusatian "braves, with "MSrkem," 
" Bnischenschaftem," " Markomannen," " Hallische Thiiringem " and so on, 
we find no less than 55 from January 3 to August 26, 1 831, in which the most 
distinguished champion was " our Senior v. Schonfeldt," to whom fell more 
than a seventh portion of the carefully recorded duels. Next to him comes 
y. Meyer zu Knonow — March 5, twelve rounds ** without hat or stock " with 
the Lusatian Damm, when the latter got the worst of it with five gashes on 
the face — f then Nake, Weinhold, Meixner, Solms, and so forth. Most 
frequent among the enemy are the Lusatians Degelow, Stoker, Tischer, 
Henschel (whose mighty stature is particularly mentioned), and the New- 
Prussians Gebhard, Schindler, Kolz etc. Less formidable opponents were 
also met at times, as in the duel of March i : "At Fischer's restaurant to-day 
our Renonce Amthor fought ' Finch ' Lippert [a Finks is a student unattached 
to any corps]. Lippert was hit in all 12 rounds, but only twice with bloodshed. 
It was fine fun to see him dancing round the room, out of the way of Amthor*s 
thrusts." Another time one of the Lusatian warriors, " though he kept pretty 
close to the wind, was served by v. Bismarck on the forehead after twice 
having blood drawn from the arm," and so on, and so on. As to special 
festivities, we find mention of only two during this period in the Saxonia 
archives: a F^tckscmnimrs held June 9 at Kleinzschocher, preceded by "a 
solemn procession on wheek " ; and the anniversary feast on Sept. 4, celebrated 
in conjunction with the Renoncen by a midday banquet at Klassig's ooflfee- 
house,— the grand "general assembly of Landsmannschaften " to celebrate 



378 



LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 



the laying of the foundation-stone of the new Univeraty-buildings, Dec. 4, 
was certainly not attended by Wagner, who had already ceased to be a stadent. 

Page 199. Adolf Wagner's death. — ^To complete the history of this 
worthy, who had so much in common with his famous nephew, it remains to 
give a brief account of his last few years of life. Quiet and retired, he was 
occupied as ever with his literary work, but glad to see his nearer friends from 
time to time. In one of his striking private letters we read, " The whole 
world, from the stark and lifeless rock to the deepest vein of mind, is a 
reconciliation-institute " ; and again, " The older one grows, the more one 
economises men and relations." Thus it was a genuine pleasure to renew his 
intercourse with the Thom& household, once almost dropped, and *' to save 
one kindly human relation the more." He disliked large parties, but "the 
few friends and acquaintances I see, are pleased to come to me, and I am 
delighted that three parts of these innocent amusements should &11 to the 
honour of my house. I am no stranger to events in the world and dty ; I 
go to the theatre fairly often, though it cannot content me, so that I prefer 
reading a good play aloud to my friends ; which, I observe, is pleasanter alike 
for them and for myself." — Among his larger undertakings of this period we 
find a translation entitled '' Luigi Lanzi*s Geschichte der Malerei in Italien, 
vom Wiederaufleben der Kunst bis Ende des 18 Jahrhunderts " (3 vols., 
Leipzig 1830-3), with notes by J. G. v. Quandt ; also his invaluable, and the 
first ' collected,' edition of the original Italian writings of Giordano Bruno, 
which had become extremely rare. As to the importance of the enterprise 
last-named we have the testimony of George Henry Lewes, who remarks in 
his Life of Goethe (3rd. ed., 1875) "The works have been made accessible 
through the cheap and excellent edition collected by A. Wagner : Opere di 
Giordano Bruno, 2 vols. Leipzic : 1830. But I do not observe that, now they 
are accessible, many persons interest themselves enough in Bruno to read 
them." 

His bodily strength now commencing to fail, with the advent of maladies 
brought on by the sedentariness of his occupation, Adolf resumed his £avourite 
exercise of old, long walks, which he did not abandon until a year or so before 
his death. " For a year and a half, or more, I suffered from excruciating 
headaches ; neither the allopathic nor the homoeopathic doctors, for all their 
promises, helped me in the slightest. Spring came ; I tore myself from my 
work, said goodbye to thinking, and trudged for several miles a day,— 4md 
still am doing it in November, whenever the weather is not wet or foggy." 
Death he r^^arded with increasing composure : "There is an art of arts, that 
hospitably takes up all the rest into itself, purges, clarifies and hallows them ; 
it is the art of a blessed life, the art of receiving and dispensing the peace of 
God, or fiirthering the Kingdom of Heaven in oneself and others " ; and 
again, "What does not lie within the liberty or power of man to gain the 
seed of, by this art he seeks to fructify as much of it as has been shed on him, 
so that it may become his very own ; for all life is a reaction between shall 
and will, two opposites from whose friction results a neutral tertium quid. 
These things and their like the pious, and perhaps the easy-going, call divine : 
for my part Vm content to call and rate them human^ without disputing the 
divineness of their origin ; ideas^ or, as the profoundly human ancients called 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 379 

them, Gods suffering in Time ... As storms are indispensable for many of 
Nature's processes, so on everyone is laid no more than he needs and can 
bear ; only let us have ears to hear, and if in such cases redeeming love both 
human and divine encompasses us, let us bring it to birth in ourselves as 
well ! . . . However we may pose and strut, life means to sacrifice. The 
final sacrifice we have to bring is that of the five senses, as it were the 
viaticum or toll-fare on the road to Paradise. . . . We are all of us pcatvrts 
honteux^ who go b^ging for our death-penny. If we have garnered love 
enough, we go quietly to whence we came, and the earth distils new flowers 
and spring>times from us, heaven sublimates us to new palms." 

In Adolf s very last year of life, besides lesser works, we have his English 
edition of Burns, '* Burns, Robert, Complete Works, with selected notes of 
Allan Cunningham, a bibliographical and critical introduction, and a com- 
parative etymologic glossary to the Poet. By Adolf Wagner " {Leipxig^ 
Fr. Fleischer, 1835). He also had the good fortune to recover an excellent 
oil-portrait of himself in younger days, which had somehow found its way to 
Brttlau, or been left behind by him long since : " I had been uneasy at the 
thought of figuring at some marine-store dealer's." This is the portrait 
referred to in R. Wagner's Letters to Wesettdonck (Jan. 5, 1870), and after- 
wards promoted to a place of honour in the Wahnfried library (a second 
portrait, drawn in profile, shewing the features of maturer age, is faithfiiUy 
preserved by Siegfried Wagner). — His last summer (when Richard was 
Musikdirektor at Magdeburg) was spent by Adolf Wagner on the estate of 
his firiend Graf HohenthaL Here he peacefiilly departed this life, in 
which he had worked and struggled enough, " making place for the unaging 
young." 

Page 276. Heine, Meyerbeer and Wagner.— -It is quite possible that 
in conversation with Laube and Heine at this period Richard Wagner 
may have defended his equivocal *' patron" against their sallies, and that in 
perfectly good faith, — see his preface to Opera and Drama (185 1), where he 
speaks of having "once been so mistaken" with regard to Meyerbeer's 
personality. At the end of the nineteenth century it is a little diificult to 
realise the position occupied by the composer of the Huguenots in its middle 
third ; the semblance of notice and protection he had bestowed on Wagner 
would naturally be flattering to the young man's amour propre, and dispose 
him at least to give the almighty one the ' benefit of the doubt.' Even fix>m 
an aesthetic point of view, down to the composition of Rienti Wagner's path 
had rather been approaching that of Meyerbeer, at all events in appearance, 
than receding from it as with the last-named opera's successor, the Flying 
Dutchman* It therefore is with fiill sincerity that he wrote the penultimate 
paragraph of his article On German Music for the Gazette Musicale (July 
1840) : " It is more possible for the German, than for anyone else on foreign 
soil, to bring a national artistic epoch to its highest pitch and universal 
acceptation. Handel & Gluck have proved it to the fiill, and in our days 
another German, Meyerbeer, ofiers us a fresh example," etc, etc. (Prose 
IVorks, Vn. loi). Oddly enough, this passage — a considerable part of which 
is omitted from the reproduction in the GesammeUe Schriften — ^has been 
dng^ed finom its context and triumphantly published in more than one 



380 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

unfriendly journal, together with other fnigments that do not appear eren in 
the Gazette Mnsicale, and whose destination can only be remotely guessed at 
Possibly they were intended for a second article, more especially deiroted to 
Meyerbeer's operas ; possibly, on the other hand, they formed a continuation 
of the original manuscript oi the aboTe, and were omitted by the French 
editor on account of excessive length : in any case they were nev^r fmkUshid 
with the author's sanction, and we cannot attach to them the weight of 
' second thoughts.' Disconnected as th^ are, the reader may be interested to 
compare these fragments with Wagner's later utterances concerning Meyerbeer, 
and we therefore give their leading features : — ^After discusang the construction 
of the Huguenots y in which << the deliberation, nay, coldbloodedness in the 
planning and arrangement of the gigantic, almost oppressive extension of 
forms" is noted as "Meyerbeer's prindpal characteristic," Wagner deals 
with the conjuration-scene of the fourth act as follows : ''It is impoasiUe to 
conceive of anything higher in this direction ; we feel that the culminating- 
point, in its strictest sense, has here been reached ; and just as the greatest 
genius would fall to powder if it attempted not merely to outvie BeethoDefis 
Last Symphony ^ but to go sHU farther in the same direction^ so it seems 
impossible to try for any further progress in the direction led by Meyerbeer to 
its utmost limit . . We must abide by the opinion that this latest epoch of 
Dramatic Music has closed with Meyerbeer ; that after him, just as alter 
Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, the ideal for that particular period must 
be set down as attained, no more to be surpassed, — but that Time with its 
tireless creativity must needs bring forth a new direction^ in which as great 
things shall be done again as by those heroes." It will be seen that the 
difference between this view of 1840- 1 and that expressed in Opera ofuiDrama 
is largely one of perspective, since Wagner needed distance yet to recognise 
that Meyerbeer's music could never be truly regarded as the "ideal" of aitr 
period in art. 

Turning to another aspect of these extracts, it is characteristic of Ridiard 
Wagner not merely in 1S40, but for at least the twenty years surrounding that 
date, that he looked for " new departures " to issue from the " spirit of the 
age " ; he had not yet discovered that the spirit informing him was his own^ 
and foreign to the scribes and artists of his generation. It is a remarkable 
proof of the innate modesty of genius, that during the whole first half of his 
life he should have classed himself with Schumann, Hiller, Laube et at, 
as compeer and colleague belonging to " the age and its forms " ; whidk will 
explain his constantly deploring the unproductiveness of these his putative 
equals as something strangely unaccountable. So late as the end of 1851 we 
find a footnote to Part III. of Opera and Drama in which he says tiiat the 
realisement of the Perfect Drama " depends on conditions which do not lie 
within the will, or even the power of the Unit, but only in Community and 
in a mutual co-operation made possible thereby," yet bewails the fict that his 
own dramatic works are the only ones he can cite as illustrations of that 
" new direction " he is striving after. 

A third point in this connection is the somewhat startling circumstance that 
Wagner speaks of Meyerbeer as " a German " : he had not yet arrived at full 
perception of the fundamental diflference caused by race. In fiMt he classes 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 38 1 

Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine, too, in the ''German" category {P. IV. 
VIII. 147 and 1S9), and goes oat of his way to defend the latter from the 
attacks of his "compatriots" anent a certain horse-whipping. The strangest 
thing of all, however — or shall we say, the most characteristic ? — is that, while 
Wagner was sayii^ a good word for each of these Hebrews, they themselves 
were engaged in a triangular duel, most virulently waged by Heine. In a 
report from Paris dated April 20, 1841, Heine mingles sarcasm with his 
ostensible praise of Meyerbeer's music (Heine* s Werke XL, " Franzdsische 
Zustilnde," pp. 340-1); in a private letter of 1854 he shews his real hand, 
'' It is of the utmost need to me, not to withhold my Meyerbeeriana from 
the world, not to die like a muzzled dog. For dying men there are no terrors 
in the means at command of the great General Intendant of Music." Never- 
theless he did not write his souvenirs of Meyerbeer, but whispered them into 
the ear ; probably for similar reasons of consanguinity to those expressed in a 
letter of Feb. 11, 1846, to Ferdinand Lassalle : ''With regard to Mendelssohn, 
I readily comply with your wish ; not a syllable more shall be printed to his 
detriment, though I have a grudge against him for his mask of Christianity," 
and so on. O these children of Judah I 

Page 317. Projected Life of Beethoven.— The scheme of this work 
is detailed the most fiillyin Wagner's letter of May 7, 1841, to Theodor Hell 
(Hofrath Winkler) : " In his many years of erudite research into musical 
history Herr Anders, librarian of this place, has devoted special zeal to collecting 
the most exhaustive information about his Bonn compatriot, great Beethoven. 
This collection, which embraces many hitherto entirely-unknown data as to the 
XD2gXx^% family^history andyouth^ had already attained such proportions that 
Herr Anders was seriously thinking of carrjdng out his purpose of writing 
a grand comprehensive Life of Beethoven, when Schindler's recent book ap- 
peared. Not only has Herr Anders found that book quite poverty-stricken in 
comparison with the riches of his own collection, but every thoughtful reader 
has concurred in his opinion that it is very far from meeting the expectations 
entertained of a true biography. Moreover, apart from the clumsy patchwork 
of its composition, that book does not present the remotest approach to a lucid 
survey of the tone-poet's real artistic life, and its author mostly contents himself 
with a confused account of what he fancies he has perceived from his own 
cramped standpoint. Upon this all public voices are agreed, even those which 
greeted that book's appearance with loud acclaim, — that it really offers nothing 
but material. Nevertheless, the curiosity aroused by Schindler's work proves 
how great an interest a genuine and complete life-history would meet in the 
entire German public ; accordingly Herr Anders feels that the time has come 
at last for executing his long-cherished plan. Since, however, the extra- 
ordinarily engrossing nature of his appointment here leaves him hardly any 
time to spare, and on the other hand, as he admits, an easy, fluent style of 
composition is no light matter to him, he has proposed to me to place his 
ample stores at my disposal, discuss the whole thing with me, but leave to me 
the writing of the book itself. As Beethoven has been my study from of old, 
and as I believe myself not void of power to speak becomingly on so in- 
spiring a theme, I have accepted the proposal, and now communicate our 
conjoint plan :^Ottr biography of Beethoven is to be a book in two volumes^ 



382 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

each of thirty sheets of medium-sized type, and will gire an exact and drcam- 
stantial history of the artistic' and social life of the great master in readable, 
perhaps when occasion suggests, imaginative language. While avoiding all 
pedantic parade of learned quotations, our book is rather to resemble a grand 
artist's-romance than a barren recital of chronologically-ordered dates and 
anecdotes ; this notwithstanding, it shall contain nothing that will not bear the 
test of the minutest and most conscientious historical criticism. At the same 
time, and interwoven with the historic matter, our book is to furnish a compre- 
hensive appreciation of the great musical epoch that was made by Beethoven, and 
from his works has spread to all more recent music. This biography shall also 
be supplemented, among other things, by a complete list of Beethoven's 
compositions, chronologically arranged — as nowhere furnished hitherto— also 
by facsimiles etc — In brief, it is to be the amplest and completest work that it 
is conceivably possible to produce about Beethoven. 

<*Now, if Herr Arnold, whom we here have pre-eminently in view, should 
be moved by your most kind conveyance of these details to him to undertake 
the publication of the book sketched out, he could rely upon having the entire 
manuscript in course of this current year. To make short work of the business 
aspect — not an unimportant point, considering the distance — Herr Anders 
deems needful to state at once the conditions that ought to be settled for so 
large a work. The fee should be fixed at one-thousand thalers [;f 1 50] ; further, 
as Herr Anders' time will be severely taxed by the arrangement of his material, 
which natumlly is scattered through a hundred volumes and moreover will have 
to be supplemented by the procuring of this or the other book, he would 
require the pajrment of a fourth part of the fee in advance, though he is 
prepared to wait for it, if so desired, until the furnishing of a circumstantial 
plan. Beyond this, the publisher must consent to despatch to Herr Anders a 
complete set of the Leipziger Musikalische Zeitung ; which would probably 
not cost so very much, if done through the intermediary of the Avenaiius 
book-firm." 

Page 325. Salb of the " Flying Dutchman " draft to the Grand 
Op^RA.— A whole string of ridiculous fables has been fiutened to the twin- 
birth of that ill-matched pair, the Fliegender Hollander and the Vaisseau 
fantdme. In the first place we have the piquant tale of L^n Pillet taking 
5 Napoleons d'or out of his waistcoat-pocket and handing them to Wagner 
for his sketch, as told by E. Pasqu^ in Nord und Sud (1884) on the authority 
of a French journalist and playwright, H. Revoil, who claims to have been 
eye-witness of the transaction — though Liszt in his Ges, Schr, (IIP, p. 234) 
and Richard Pohl in his Richard Wagner (p. 144) give the correct and very 
different sum of five-hundred francs. Then we have the preposterous romance 
by Catttlle Mendez, that Wagner actually sold his dog for sake of attending 
a performance of the Vaisseau fantdme. Unfortunately for the inventor <^ 
this piece of folly, the first performance of the Vaisseau did not take place till 
Nov. 9, 1842, when Wagner had other fish to fry, for he was attending to 
the performances of his Rienxi at Dresden. Why on earth should he bother 
his head about a Paris perversion of the Flying Dutchman, when he was 
so soon to produce his own Hollander in Germany? And to sell his 
dog for it, to boot 1 Don't we remember how he makes his German 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 383 

Musician in Paris reply to the Englishman, " Not for the whole of Britain 
would I sell my friend"? — ^But it is needless to go farther into these 
cock-and-bull stories, the above specimens being fairly representative of 
the marvellous legends that still find credence with the unreasoning and 
ill-informed. 

Page 332. Mbysrbbbr and the "Dutchman's" acceptance at 
Berlin. — Wagner has so often been charged with ingratitude to Meyerbeer 
by those who obstinately shut their eyes to the tortuous policy of the Hebrew 
composer, that it is necessary again and again to accentuate the fact that he 
had absolutely nothing to be grateful for. Meyerbeer's Parisian recommenda- 
tions had been deliberately given in quarters where he knew they would have 
no result. As for Rienst^ it was almost by force that his letter to von 
LUttichau was extorted from him ; and surely, had he meant to do Wagner a 
kindness, we should have expected to hear of some congreUuiaiion on the 
Dresden success. The absence of any such mark of approval speaks volumes 
in itself. Then we come to Berlin and the official " acceptance " of the 
Dutchman which he threw to Wagner as a bone to a worrying dog. Nothing 
came of it for two or three years, in the very city where Meyerbeer was 
supreme at the Opera. Why ? Perhaps Ileinrich Laube's cognate experience 
may throw some light upon the shady question. 

Laube had written a play called "Struensee," and the Intendans had 
accepted it, adding the corollary that preparations were already on foot for its 
production. After months of waiting for further news, Laube inquired the 
cause of the delay ; then, as he himself records, " I learnt that the title 
' Struensee ' had roused the dead. Meyerbeer's brother, Michael Beer, had also 
written a drama Struensee ; it had now been dragged from oblivion, provided 
with music by the bigger brother, and pressingly recommended for production. 
Pressingly, did I say ? Most pressingly, and that from many hundred sides. 
Meyerbeer, almighty in Berlin, took pains to prove that his music was not 
merely incidental, but grand-opera music, with which my poor unmusical 
piece could not compare. It was to no purpose, that my piece had won a 
great success on many stages, whilst Michael Beer's had not ; to no purpose 
that KUstner, the Intendant, was for my piece, that he had accepted it before, 
that influential persons backed him up ;— everything was in vain, for Meyerbeer 
deployed b. farce majeure that even the Court-theatre Intendant could not 
resist. So it came to pass : Beer's piece was performed, and the joumab 
flowed over with praise. I had to resign myself, and simply b^^ged that my 
piece might also be given thereafter. But even that was met by untold 
difficulties, albeit the Intendant, several people in the entourage of the King, 
and finally the King himself, all wanted it It transpired that the principal 
actor had been won over for Beer's, and shrugged his shoulders at the mere 
idea of learning another ' Struensee.' KUstner was beside himself at the 
subterranean force that struck him powerless. Only after a long, long 
battle, did I conquer that actor; my piece was given, and had the most 
encouraging success. After a few representations, however, that actor fell 
ill^ and did not recover until administered the opportunity of playing in 
Beer's 'Struensee' again" (Heinrich Laube's Erinnerungen i8io-i&^, pp. 
388-9). 



384 LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER. 

A case like this a0brds a miniature of what Richard Wagner had to suffer on 
the grand scale with all his works in Berlin. When the Dutchman at last 
appeared there, although it reaped a fair success, it very soon vanished from 
the repertory. Rtenzi itself was never given till 1847 ; the newspaper critics 
had done everything in their power to undermine its chances, and Meyerbeer 
had scuttled out of town. Undeniable successes of Wagner's works were either 
ignored in French and German papers, or else the author's name was made 
unrecognisaVe and that of Meyerbeer rub'bed in — even in journals such as 
Schlesinger's Gazette, or the Stuttgart JSuropa, which had previously been 
friendly. A Dresden correspondent sends this notice to theJbumaidesIMda/s 
of October 1845 ' '*-^u Th^tre Royal de notre capitale on travaille active- 
ment k la mise en sc^ne d'un op^ra en cinq actes [sic], ayant pour titre 
* Tannhiluser ' et done la musique est de Mr. Robert [sic"] Wagner, ^^ve de 
Tillustre Meyerbeer" — as Georges Noufflard well remarks, "Sans doute nn 
ami de Wagner edt su qu'il ne s'appelait pas Robert et que ' Tannhiinser ' n*a 
que trois actes. On est done conduit k attribuer Tinsertion de ces corres- 
pondances au d^sir qu'avait Meyerbeer de faire croire qu'il faisait 6oole en 
Allemagne." A further contribution supplements the Meyerbeerian puff as 
follows : " La nouvelle oeuvre de M. Wagener [sic] a ^t^ aocueillie par notre 
public avec le plus grand enthousiasme. L'auteur a M appel^ sur la sobie 
apr^s chaque acte, et lorsque le spectacle a ^t^ fini, tons les membres de 
Korchestre et plus de deux cents jeunes gens se sont rendus processionellemcnt, 
chacun muni d'un flambeau, k la maison oil demeure M. Wagener et ils out 
ex^t^ sous les crois^ de ce jeune compositeur une s^r^nade compost de 
morceaux choisis dans ses ouvrages et dans ceux de M. Meyerbeer." The 
feble of a torch-light procession to the strains of this grotesque medley of 
music is just as obviously traceable to the tactics of Meyerbeer's international 
bureau, as is the constant falsification of Wagner's name and connection with 
the "illustre Meyerbeer." At the same time the Europa (A. Lewald's 
journal) serves up to its readers the exquisite hash, *' We hear from Paris that 
Wagner's new opera, Tannheuser [sic], was received with general approbation 
at Dresden on the 23rd of October. The composer is one of Meyerbeer's 
favourite pupils, and intends, like his master, to write for the French Opera." 
This is merely a precursor of the plan adopted by the leading musical journal 
of Berlin in 1850, when each weekly number was systematically strewn with 
paragraphs touching the great maestro's Prophite, but in the whole year (that 
of Lohengrin* s production at Weimar) Lohengrin is moitioned only five times, 
according to Tappert's minute examination, and that quite briefly ; twice with 
the unintelligible titles, Longrie and Longnin ; once without a word to indltate 
the composer ; then, to chronicle a gift-of-honour received by Lisst after the 
representation ; and lastly with a Mse assertion of the novelty's scant success. 
When it became impossible to keep the poet-composer any longer in the 
shade by disfiguring his name and calling him an iUve de Meyerbeer, the 
strategy was silence and suppression. The word was given by the " maestro " 
himself, the man who would have let his "favourite pupil" starve in Faris 
for all he cared. He quaked at the idea of Wagner, and endeavoured to 
persuade himself and others that no such person existed. His passionate 
adorer, the departed Blaze de Bury, tells us how the very name turned him 



SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES. 385 

pale: ''he conld never hear it spoken without betraying an unpleasant 
sensation; an inyolantary twitching of the face, or a hasty interjection, 
would reveal to one the true state of his feeling." In 1853 the Russian 
composer Alexander Szeroff was at Baden-Baden with Meyerbeer ; Lohengrin 
was to be performed at Wiesbaden ; Szeroff announced his intention of going 
to hear it *' N'y allez pas ! " said Meyerbeer hurriedly, " Ce serait du temps 
perdu." But Szeroff went, all the same, and discovered that the illustrious 
one had more reason to be concerned for his own laurels than for others' 
time. 



2 B 



INDEX TO VOLUME I. 



In this index figures denoting the tens and hundreds are not repeated for 
one and the same reference, excepting where the numerals run into a fresh 
line of type : thus 

French Opera, zii, 75-6, 84, 90, 4 will stand for 
French Opera, iii, 175-176, 184, 190, 194, and so on. 
References to footnotes will botrthe letter n after the numeral. 
N.B. In German names K and C are often interchangeable. 



Ahendteitung (Dresden), 56, 7, 911, 

63, (m^ 9o», 2, 8, io8«, lOff, 2, 3, 

I25«, 4i», 7i», 3, 200, 8, 303, 13, 

314, 6, 22, 7, 3a 
Academic Royale de Musique, 278. 

See Paris, Grand Op^ra. 
Achilles, 42, 84, 93* 
Ada and Arindal, 143, 5, 62, 94. 
Adam, Ad., 238 : FidkU Berger, z6pt i 

Postilion^ 248, 6311. 
Adieux de Maria Stuart, 376. 
ifischylus, giH, 
Agoult, Comtesse d', 22n. 
An>recht, Dr, 29. 

„ Sophie, 32. 
AlcestiSf 21. 
Alexander, Tsar, 48. 

„ the Great, 42. 
A^gmeine Musikalische Zeitungt 128, 

132, si«, 2, 3, 7 III, 214, 382. 
AUgemeine Musikzeitung^ 163, 218, 

27511, S^^* 
Allgemeine Zeiiungy Augsburg, 3 iff, 

73» 274, 6. 
Alt, Pastor (Eisleben), 74. 
Altenburg, 10, 106, 367. 
Altranstfidt Peace, 366. 
America, 104. 
Amthor, student, 377. 
Anders, E., 277, 97, 307, 17, 9, 47, 

381-2. 
Anstetten, Geh. Rath von, 64. 
Anti-Wagnerites, 243, 7, 88, 324, 

383. 
Anton, Prince (subsequently King) of 
Saxwiy, 31, 116. 



Apel, August, 23-5, 91, 128, 373. 

„ Gmdo Th., 128, 95. 

„ House, 15, 28, 3a 
Ardinghello, 175. 
Arendal (Norway), 268. 
Aria, Wagner's early, 102 ; ? the same, 

132; for the Vampfr, 166-7; ^ox 

Mary^ Max und Michel, 230-1. 
Arindid, see Ada. 
Ariosto, 100, 373. 
Aristotle, 372. 
Armitstead, Jas. , 256. 
Amau by Konigsberg, 264. 
Amdt, engraver, 41^. 
Arnold, pub., 317, 22, 82. 
Arrangements, etc., 126, 7, 258, 94, 

297. ZOO, I, 4, 6, 14, 28, 30, 9-40. 
Artem, 36. 
Artiste, 310. 
Aryans, o, 79. 

Attente, Wagner's, 283, 317. 
Auber, 17711, 84. 222, 3, 38. 79. 98, 

337-8 : Bal masqui, 171, 3 ; Dia- 

puMts and Domino noir, 27911, 338 ; 

Fra Diavolo, 158, 203, 4811, 60, 3^ ; 

Lestocq, 200, i ; Mofon, ill, 57-8, 

248/1 ; Muettede Portici, 111-3, 38, 

141, 58, 201, 8, 32, 3, 4811, 63#», 

338 ; Philtre, 192 ; Zanetta, 339. 
Auerbach's- House, 15. 
Augsbuig: theatre, 96, 157. See 

Allgemeine, 
August II. and III., Kings of Poland, 

see Friedrich August I. and II., 

Electors of Saxony. 
Augusta, Princess (SaxOi 66. 
Autograph - hawkers, 146-7. See 

Wagner Manuscripts. 



INDEX. 



387 



Avenarius, C&dtie, 79, 296, 326, 47, 
348, w, sceGcyer. 
Ed., 296, 326, 47, 82. 
„ Ferdinand, 3111, 42, 73, 
77», 8«, Son, 196, 326. 



B. 

Bach, J. Seb., 3, 4, 9, 148, 7i»» 6, 

241, 98* 364, 6, 7» 8. 
Baden-Baden, 315, 85. 
Bailey- Fahrenkrilger, 374. 
Balzac, 282». 
Banck, Carl, 207. 
Bandello, 26. 

Barenfamiliey GliUkliehe, 218, 38. 
BiLrmann, translator, 225. 
Barthel, Gottfried Karl, 30, 2. 
Basteiy Sax. Switz., 196. 
Baudius, Heinrich, 16. 
Bantzen, battle of, 48. 
Bavaria, Kings of, vii, 66, 184, 246. 
Bayreoth, v, 5, 21, 53, 70», io5», 29, 

133. 
„ Blditer, 8», 7611, I9I», 24491, 

246», 86«, 335i». 
„ Festblatter, 2S6M. 
„ Taschenbuch, 98, 375. 
Beck, Chr. Daniel, 18, 21, 3a 
Beer, Michael, 383. 
Bbbthovbn, 4, 5, z6, 27, 102, 22, 
"6, 33, 5, 7, 9, 40, I, 9»» 52. 
187, 9» 95. 215. 41. 2, 80-1, 8, 
298, 301,69:— 
Adelaide, 31a 
Biography projected by Wagner, 

317, 9, 22, 81-2. 
Egmont music, 102. 
Fidelia, 137, 41. 58, 98, 219, 6311, 

264^. 
Kmig Stephan Qyfstimt, 152. 
Memorial, 319, 2a 
Symphonies, 2i8, 102, 13 : Ertnca, 
135. 9» 370 ; C minor, 135, 6, 259, 
371 ; Pastoral, 105, 371 ; Seventh, 
135, 52 ; Ninth, 117, 89, 287, 380 
—in Paris, 280, 5 — ^Wagner's pfte. 
arrangement, 126, 7. 
Behr, Pastor von, 217. 
Belgiojoso, Princess, 27611. 
Belgium, 35, 113. 

Bellini, I77», 84, 95, 238, 41 : 
Capuleti (Romeo), 152, 73-6, 200, 
219. 31. 3, 9. 48«, 63«, 333»; 
Norma, 193, 201, 19-20, 2, 31, 
233-4. 9, 48«, 6311; Puritani, 22a 
Bern, Polish General, 131. 



Benewitz, Anna, 10, 363, 5. 
„ Ernst, 10, 365. 

Beresford, Jas., io$n. 

Berezina, 47. 

Berggeist mxisic, 195-6. 

Bergmann pfte., Riga, 239. 50. 

Berlin, 3, 96, 123, 33, 384; Court- 
theatre, 71, 86, 108, 58>f, 212, ^2, 
331-2, 49. 59. 83-4; Wagner in, 
212-3, 25, 359. 

Berlioz, 282-3, 303, ". 20, 2, 3, 39, 
351 : Concerts at Leipzig, 342ff ; 
July Symphony, 338-9 ; Romeo and 
Juliet Svm., 282 ; Sym, Fantas- 
tique, 283; Traits d'instrumenta- 
tion, 286; Voyage musical, 303, 
342«. 

Bertz (or Berthis), Johanna, mother 
of R. Wagner, 31, 363, 9. See 
Wagner, T. Rosina. 

Bethmann, H., 185, 6, 95, 201, 2, 5. 

Beust, Karl Louis von, 377. 

Bie, Dr O., 27511. 

Bieberstein, K. £. Marschall von, 377. 

Bierey, Dr (stenographer), 347». 
„ G. B. (conductor), 39, 68, 71, 
72. 

Bilse's band, Berlin, 133 

Birchpfeiffer, Charlotte von, 251. 

Bismarck-Schonhausen, Bemhard von, 

377. 
Blanc, L. G., ioo». 
Blanchard, Henri, 311. 
Blasewitz by Dresden, 78, 9. 
Blaze de Bury, 384. 
Bltlcher, 48, 52. 
Blum, K. (composer), 230. 
Boccaccio, 22, 373. 
Bodrowsky house, Riga, 239-40, 9, 

25S»- 
Bohemia, I4», 50, 138-42, 78, 303, 

341 ; horn-players, 248. 
Bohler (Frau Devrient), 65«, 98. 
Boieldieu, 17711, 279, 98: Dame 

blanche, ill, 200, 31, 48^, 6311; 

Jean de Paris, 157. 
Bois de Boulogne, 269. 
Bolderaa near Riga, 240-1. 
Bondini, Pasquale, 28. 
Bosard, Alois (actor), 23011. 
Bosenberg, actor, 58. 
Bosse, H. J., 94». 
Bottiger, C. W., 50». 

„ HofrathK. A., 57, 70, 93 J 

necrologue on Geyer, 36, 54, 7, 

63. 
Boulevard des Italiens, 273, 90. 
Boul(^ne-sur-mer, 266-9, cf.316. 



388 



INDEX. 



Bovet, Alfred, 243», 3i4#f, 23. 
Brackeli Harald v., 233, 57. 
Brandt, KaroUne (Weber's wife), 65. 
JBraut, Die hohe, 216-7, 22-3, 6, 52, 

(281), 344-5- 
Breitkopf u. H^el, 22, 125. 
Brentano, Clemens, 18. 
Breslau, 21, 39-40, 57, 68, ^on, I, 5, 

86, 95«, 6, 147, 208, 379. 
Brissler, F., 246^. 
Brix, 297, 307, i6«. 
Brocci's restaurant, 275. 
Brockhaus, F. A., 24, 51. 

„ Friedrich, 98, 107, 8, 14, 

115,92,211,7,315,48. 
„ Hermann, 205, z^n, 

,, Louise, 107, 2^, 211, 74, 

348. See Wagner. 
„ Ottilie, 205, 25», 348. See 

Wagner. 
„ Pub. firm, 296, 317, 74. 

Brtthl, GrafH. ▼., 367,8. 
„ street in Leipzig with house of 
R. W.'s birth, 14. 32, 42, 8, 52, 97, 
114. 
Brttmmer, I50f». 
Bruno Nolano, 378. 
Brunswick, 39, 109, 17. 
Bud&us, Idnna, 274^. 
Bull, Ole, 239, cf. 318. 
BtUow, Hans von, tZ&h, 
Bulwer Lytton, 225, 4412. 
Bttnau, Rudolf Yon, 11. 
Burger's Lenore^ 350. 
Burmeister, actor, 59. 
Bums, Robert, 379. 
Burschenschaft, 147, 98, 377. 
Bury, Blaze de, 384. 
Byron's Manjredy 25. 



Caesar, 42 : Annals^ 21. 
Cafi des Divans, 297. 

„ de Paris, 297. 
Calderon, 103, 7. 
Campe (Hoffmann &), 276. 
Campo Vacchino, 345. 
Canow, F., actor, 56. 
"Canto spianato," 21311, ^^' I7^- 
Carlsbad, 65, 302. 
Carlsruhe theatre, 247^. 
Camioal-song^ 223. 
Cassel theatre, 108, 29. 
Castil-Blaze, 323. 
Cerf, dir., 212. 
Chamberlain, H. S., 247, 33211. 



Chamisso, A. v., 25311. 
'' Champagne-mill, 265. 
Charles X., France, 22n. 

„ Xn., Sweden, 365, 6. 
Cherubim, I'j'jn, 282 : Deux Joumies^ 

94, 157. 8, 248«. 
Chopin, 178, 320, 2. 
Chnst, actor, 51, 7. 
" Cile," see Geyer (CJiciUe). 
Cleemann, Matthes, 3211. 
Code Napol^n, 40-1. 
Colmen (or Kulm) in Saxony, 10, 

363. 4, 5- 
Cologne, 35. 

Columbus, 374. See Overture. 
Omut^ 119, 52. 
Concerts Musard, 280. 

„ Vivienne, 28a 
Conscription, 166. 
Conservatoire, Paris, 280-1, 5, 9, 315, 

318. 56. 
Copenhagen, 205, 355. 
Cornelius Nepos, 79, ^, 
Cotta, pub., 317. 
Courland, 245, 63. 
Court-creed, 56, 74, 3I3» 58> 65. 

See German Courts. 
Covent Garden Op., 92. 
Coze, William, 373. 
Cracow, 365, 7. 
Creditors, 205, 36, 49, 54, 8«, 62, 90, 

295. 314, 7, 57, 8- 
Creuzer, G. F., Symboliky 93. 
Critical spite, loi, 3, 208, 24, 41, 

350, 4, 74. 81, 4. 
Cube, Oberfiskal v., 257. 
Cuts, 29, no, 343, 1, 5ii4- 
Cyriax, Julius, 3211, 266. 
Czemy, 127. 



D. 

Dahlen, 11, 363. 
Damm, student, 377. 
Dannreuther, £., 124, 95, 23811, 65. 
Dantan, sculptor, 304. 
Dante, 22, 100, 372-3. 
Darmstadt theatre, 108. 
Davoust, Marshal, 40. 
Degelow, student, 377. 
Delacroix, painter, 2821^. 
Delaroche, ,, 274, 7, 328-9. 
Della-Cruscans, the, 100. 
D&scenU de la CourtiHe^ 290. 
Dessoir (? Dessauer), Frau, 208. 
Dettmer, W., singer, 343. 
Devrient, Frau (nee Bohler), 65^, 98. 



INDEX. 



389 



Derrient, Frau Schr6der-| see S. 

Diabelli, 282». 

Didot's Bibliothique Grecque, 277. 

Dietsch, Pierre, 325^. 

Ddbbelin's troupe, 27, 39. 

Dogs, 81, 281 ; ** History of my," 81, 
196, 264. See Robber. 

Dohler, 350. 

Dohm, Minister von, 20. 

Doll and mantle, 254-511. 

Donizetti, 297, 338 ; Favorite^ 304. 

Dom, Heinrich, 108, ii, 2, 7-9, 26, 
128, 9, 77, 8, 95, 214-6, 27, 8, 36-7, 
241-2, 9-51. 7-9i 62-3, 4«: operas, 
108, 250-1, 63 ; overture, 109, 32. 

DorSy man enfant ^ 283, 317. 

Doms-Gras, Mme., 321. 

Dotzauer, 'cellist, 342. 

Dowson's Hindu Afythol,, i6iif. 

"Drach, Wilhelm.'*^2i3». 

Drama, evolution of Wagnerian, 53, 
149. 63. 8, 74-5» 84, 99, 235, 47, 
294, 325-7, 36, 7, 54, 80. 

Dreadnought, H.M.S., 266. 

Dresden, vii, 21, 37, 47, 52, 3, 5.7, 
66. 77, 96, 225-6, 341 j^., 65, 6, 
368; Court- theatre, 22, 8, 41, 2, 9- 
50, 5-8, 63-5, 8, 9, 75, 8, 86-7, 9, 
95, 103, 9«, 13, 33, 226, 44, 6», 
260, 93, 303-4, 6, 12, 5, 22, 4, 7, 31, 
332, 6, 44-9, 5i-3» 5, 9; Kapclle, 
342-3, 5«, 5-6, 8, 6a 

Dresd, Ansseigery 93^, 14011. 

Droits d'auteur, 217, 23, 89, 90, 323, 
325», 30, 49, 82. 

** Drum" overture, 11 7-8, 26. 

Duesber]^, 337. 

Dumanoir, playwright^ 290. 

Dumas, Alex., 282^. 

Dumersan, playwright, 284, 5, 9, 90. 

Dttna river, 227, 40; bridge, 227-8, 
66. 

DiinO'Ileiiung, 2$^n, 

Duprez, singer, 321. 

Durand, actor, 6^n^ Jon, 

Duroc, Grand Marshal, 48. 

Dustmann, Louise (Meyer), 129. 



E. 

Eberhardt,T. C, 367. 
„ House, 74. 
Eckermann, 92. 
Ecole des Beaux Arts, 328. 
Effon V. Fttrstenberg, 365. 
Eichberg, Oscar, 135, 9». 
Eichel, G. F., 7, 12, 27, 369. 



Eichel, Johanna Sophia, 7, 12-3, 30, 

363, 9. 
Einsiedel, von, 86, 116. 
Eisenach, 17111. 
Eisleben, 36, 7, 61, 7^-5, 369. 
Elbe, the, 64, 78, 9, 80. 
Elegante Welt, Ztg,f. d,y 24, 41, 148, 

151, 2, 71. 5, 273, 350-1, 6. 
Ende, President von, 1 14, 5. 
English, learning, 93, 4, 174, 266. 
Enssio, JConi^y 131, 41, cf. 334». 
Ephraim Itzif , 14-5. 
Erfurt, Spandau &c., 39. 
Erkel, banker, 115. 
Ernst, Mme., singer, 230, i. 
EssUlr, 28ff. 
Esterhazy, Prince, 42. 
Ettlinger, portrait painter, 6711. 
Eulenstein, Deacon, 51. 
Euripides, 21, 91^. 
Eurofa, iSon, 223-4, 52, 3, 4, 95, 

316-7, 22, 84. 
Euterpe concerts, 132, 50-1. 
Eutritzsch by Leipzig, 128. 
Excise, Saxon electoral, 13-4, 97, 

365-6. 



Falcon, DUe., singer, 217. 

Falk, Johannes, 20-1. 

Eantasie in F sharp minor, 126, 376. 

Faust overture, 285-f . 
„ Seven compositions, 375-6. 

Feen, Die, 142, 3, 53, 264^ : poem, 
160-4 f composition, 164-5, 7-9, 84 ; 
excerpts at Wurzburg, 168; over- 
ture at Magdeburg, 192 — Leipzig, 
197 f negot. with Leipzig theatre, 
170-3, 92-3, ao6, 7. 

Ferber, K. F., 16. 

"Ferdinand to felicity," 191. 

Feski (Sobolewski), 220. 

F^tis, 280, 3x7. 

Fichte, 18, 9, 21. 

Finck, H. T., v. 

Fink, G. W., 128, 3111, 52. 

Fischer, Wilhclm, 226, 3111, 313, 27, 
333, 6, 41-7, 52, 3, 76. 

Fischer's restaurant, Leipzig, 377. 

Fleming, Paul, 22711. 

Fleury, actor, Kon, 

Flotow's Naufragey 284. 

Flying Dutchman, 243, 65. See 
Hollander. 

Foucher, Paul, 325. 

Fouqu6, 66 ; Undine^ 22. 

Fourcaud, Cte. Louis, 286». 



390 



INDEX. 



Frankfurt a. Main, 12, 5, 249. 
„ „ d. Oder, 253. 
„ Zeitung, 24Dn, 
Franklin, Benj., 374. 
Franz II., Kaiser, 371. 
Frederick the Great, 4, 14, 39, 331, 

368. 
Freemasons' concerts, 191, 201. 
Frege, Capt., 116. 

„ DrWoldemar, 15111. 

„ Livia, isin. 
"Freigedank, Karl," 213*. 
FreimUlIer, tenor, 200, i, 2, 3, 5. 
Freimuthige, Berlin, 37», 40, 57. 
French language, 260, 3, 74, 7, 8, 85. 
French Opera, iii, 75-6, 84, 90,4, 

216, 9, 38, 79, 91, 8, 337-8. 
French predominance, 3-4, 35, 9, 42, 

49. 216, 53, 64, 78, 313-4, 29, 31, 4, 



339. 
•Fn 



'* Freudenfeuer, W.,** 2I3», 322. 
Friedrich I., Prussia, 214. 

„ II., Hohenstaufen, 334. 
Friedrich August I. Elector of Saxony, 



'nedric 



FnedrichAugust II. Elector of Saxony, 

367-9. 

Fnedrich August III. Elector of Sax- 
ony, 15, 31, 7«, 369, see next. 

Friedrich August I. King of Saxony, 
42, 7, 50if, 2, 6, 7, 64, 86», 371 ; 
portrait by Gcyer, 71. 

Fnedrich August II. King of Saxony, 
116, 303* 58. 

Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia, 39, 
47,8. 

Friedrich Wilhelm IV. of Prussia, 331, 

Friedrichstadt, Dresden, 48, 9. 
"Fuchs" (univ. slang), 121, 376, 7. 
Fugue, 124-5, ?2, 3, 76. 
Funck, Zachanas, I05». 
Funeral hymn (?), 257. 
Fttrstenau, flautist, 92, 342. 
FUrstenberg, Egon von, 365. 



Gambling-hells, Leipzig, 114, 22n, 
Gandharvas, 161. 

Gasperini, 184, 268, 72, 90, 303, 21. 
Gcuette Musicale, 286H, 9, 94, 5, 7, 
300-I, 3, 4» 8-10, I, 5, 6, 21, 7, 30, 



336-8, 79-80, 4. 
tebh ■ - 



Gebhard, student, 377. 

Geissler, Adam, 367. 

Genast, Edouard, 29/1, 40, 65». 



Georges, Mme«, actress, 50. 
Georgi, Kriegsrath, 57, 72. 
Gerhard, Livia, 151. 
„ Paul, 364. 
Gerhard's Garden, Leipzig, 13a 
Gerlach, F. E., 32. 
German Courts, 3-5, 8, 22, 8, 31, 9, 

42, 50, 6-7, 63.6, 86, 8, 355, 64-8. 
German language, 3, 4, 97, 131, 43- 
German Opera, 22, 53, 63-5, 90, 149. 

175-6, 7«, 206, 34, 48, 53, 330, 

342», 60. 
German Theatre, 4-5, 15, 26, 8-9, 33- 

34, 60-1, 70, 98, 103. 9-10^ 31. 99. 

204, 9, 16, 24, 9, 38, 42, 4, Sin, 

292, 329, 30, 55, 60, 78, 83. 
Gewandhans Concerts, 28, 31, 102, 

112, 25, 6, 30, 1-3, 42, 50-2, 97, 

207, 80, 349. 
Geyer, Ctfcilie, 3111, 55, 6, 61, 2, 77- 

81, 7, 9, 98, 9, 124, 8, 296. 
Geyer, goldsmith, 61, 74-5. 

„ Johanna, 55, see Wagner. 
Geyer, Ludwig, 36-43, 8, 50, i, 3-73, 

75i 7, 86, 255«, 369, 7* ; death, 

72 : BetAl. Kindsrmordj 67-71 ; 

DelUa, 58 ; EmUfest, 59 ; Madchen 

CMS der Fremde^ 59. 
Geyer, Richard (Wi^er thus called 

in boyhood), 76, 94. 
Ghosts, 77-8, 95. 
Gliiser, Franz, 212, 355. 
Gleich, J. A., 195. 
Gley, JuUe, 157. 
Globig, von, student, 377. 
Gluck, 172, 298, 379, 80 ; Iphigenia 

in Aulis^ 369, 70. 
Glyptothek, Munich, 66. 
Goethe, 4, 12, 5, 8, 22, 3, 4, 30, 3, 

100, I, 23, 204, 55, 369, 70, 3: 

CliwigOj 29 ; Egnumiy 64, 102 ; 

Faust^ 109-11, 208, 86-8, 305, 18, 

375 ; Gesckwtster, 29, 90, 2 ; G^tt 

u. BaJ., 65; Gotg, 3, 28, 369; 

Hollenfahrt Chr.y 92; IpkigaUe, 

25; Kunstlet^s ErdemocMen^ 68; 

Laune des Verliebten^ 98, 106 ; 

Mitschuldigen^ 29, 30 ; Tasso^ 304 ; 

Wm, Meister, 373. 
Goldoni's Locandura^ 141. 
Gollmann, Elise (wife of Albert, and 

mother of Johanna Wagner), 157, 9. 
Golther, Dr Wolfgang, 335^ 
Gosche, Prof. Rich., 3 in. 
Gottsched, 4. 

Gouin, Post-Sec., 268, 77. 
Gozzi, 22M, 5, 160- 1, 3, 4». 
Grttfe, bass singer, 200. 



INDEX. 



391 



Grand Opera, 203, 16, 25, 33, 44, 6, 
247, 52, 71, 8, 9, 91, 8, 336, 8, S3. 

Greek, 25, 84. 91. 235. 

Greenwich Hosp., 266. 

'' Grenadier," Gleim's " War-songs of 
a," 4. 

Grenadure^ Die Mden, 283, 4, 300f>, 
306, 76. 

Grenier, £., 27611. 

Gries, 18. 

Grimm brothers, 335f*. 

Grimma Gate, Leipz., 14, 13a 

Grobel, Rector, 7^ 343. 

Grosser Henriette, 214. 

Groves Diet,, 124, 95, 265. 

**GrttoeLinde,"377. 

Gnardasoni, Domenico, 2811. 

Gttbitz, 31. 

Guizot, 276. 

GUnther, Kar], 230, 3, 51^, 64M. 



H. 

Haase, Gottlieb, 32. 

Habeneck, 268, 72, 80, 2, 5. 

Hafiher, actor, 57. 

Hagen, Theodor, 276. 

Hahnbttchn, 224. 

Hal^vy, 282, 339: GuUarrerc^ 304, 

333; /f#jw, 220, 6, 7Si H.dt Ch., 

330, 6, 7, 8, 49. 
Halle, 201*, 147, 98. 

„ Gate, Leipz., 14, 97, 127. 
Hall^, Chas., 310, i. 
Hamburg theatre, 86, 108, 215. 
Handel, 176, 379, 80 ; Messiah, 301. 
H&nel, machinist, 352. 
Hanover, 117. 
Hanslick, 140. 
Hapsel (?), G. F. (clergyman who 

married Richard to Minna), 217. 
Harpocrates-lodge, 191. 
Hartwig, Wne., 32, 4, 53» S, 7. 8, 9, 

89. 
Harzen-Mllller, N. A., 27511. 
Hasse, 343. 
Hasslinger, pub., 2a 
Hanber, port, painter, 67*1. 
Hauptmann, Moritz, 12311. 
Hauser, Franz, 106, 24, 65, 6, 7, 8, 

171-2, 92, 7. 
Hausmann, Paris, 269. 
Haydn, 172, 298. 
Heckel, Letters to, 347^. 
Hegel, 150, 241. 
Heine, Ferd., 57, 313, 8, 27, 33, 6, 

345 ; wife, 345. 



Heine, Heinrich, 241, 75-7, 96, 303, 
314, 79, 81 ; wife, 275 : Atta Trolly 
350; Grenadiere, 283, 306, 7; 
SchnabeUwofski, 243, 96, 326. 

Heinefetter, Kathinka, 31a 

Heinrich von Oflerdlngen, 335. 

Heinse's AnUnghello^ 175. 

Heintz, Albert, 98. 

Hell, Theodor, <xn, 6, 141*1, 259, 
312. See also Winkler. 

Heller, Stephen, 28211. 

Hell wig, regisseur, 71. 

Henriot, French teacher, 259-60, 3. 

Henschel, student, 377. 

Herder, 227. 

Herlossohn, 119, 52. 

Hermann, Gottfried, 25. 

Herold, see Zampa, 

Herzeleide {Parsifat), 82. 

Hesse, 117. 

Hiebendahl, oboist, 343. 

Hiller, Ferd., 383. 

Himmel, F. H., 160. 

History and Lqgend, 5, 225, 333-4* 
336, 7. 

HiUig, Julius E., 104. 

Hochaeit Die, 142-7, 59, 60. 

Hofer, Dr K. G. A., 163ft. 

Hofer-house, Dresden, 89. 

Hoffmann, E. T. A., 40, im, 0, 104- 
105, 20, 60, 75, 7, 214, 328, 35 : 
FrL V. Scudery, 95; Goidefte Top/, 
53» 10511/ ^<»^*» ^l^ Kiifer, 95« ; 
Sangerkrieg and SerapiinsbrOder, 
105. 

Hofimann, Johann, singer etc., 248- 
249, 57-60, 2„3, 4it ; Katharina his 
wife, 249, 5I1 ^• 

Hofraths, 56. 

Hohburg, Saxony, 364. 

Hohe Braut, see B. 

Hohenstaufen, 334. 

Hohenthal, Graf, 199, 379. 
„ House, Leipz., 15. 

Holland, King of, 178. 

Hollander, Dbr Flxbgbnds, 243, 
265, 88, 304, 54» 79; draft for Gd. 
Opfra, 296, 9-300, 24-5, 82.5; 
SenU's Ballad, 28311, 96, 9, 326 ; 
poem, 325 ; music composed, 299, 
326-8, 9, 31 ; overture, 195, 28611, 
327, 8; submitted to King of 
Prussia, and Berlin, 331-2, 9, 49, 
359> 83, 4 ; accepted for Dresden, 
349 ; rehearsals and perf., 350-8. 

Holtei, Karl von, 108, 227-30, 2, ^, 
237, 8, 41, 3, 50, 7-9 ; wife Juhe 
(Holzbecher), 257, 318. 



392 



INDEX. 



Homer studies, 93. 

Hoop and Horseshoe inn, 265. 

Horn, Adam, 16. 

H6tel Dieu, Paris, 306. 

Hubertsburg Peace, 14, 368. 

HUbner, Prof., 344. 

Hlibsch, L., dir., 214. 

Hugo^ Victor, 28211, 3, 325M ; Notre 

Dame^ 251*1. 
Humann, Dominie, 80. 



I. 



Ifliand, 25, 34, 170, 207. 

Immermann, 122, 233^, 33411. 

Incantation-scene, W.'s, 220. 

Indian mythology, 161. 

Invalides chapel, Paris, 305. 

Isouard, 279. 

Italian singers etc., 3, 22, 8, 42, 9, 
56, 8, 63, 5, 86, 9, 90, i"» 3. 70, 
17I1 3«» 5-6, 7«, 84» 94, 219, 34, 8, 
279, 91, 30i» 5» 37-8. 



J. 



iadin, Meadon landlord, 321, 6. 
akobi, President, 20. 
ean Paul, 19, 20, 4, 53, 150, 77. 
ena, 18-21, 374; battle, 19, 39, 41, 
}37i- 
^me. King of Westphalia, Sl- 
ews, 40, 70ff, 97. IM, SOb 209, 76, 
277, 94. 380-1. 
Johann Georg II., Elector, 364. 
>» ». IV., „ 36s. 

John, Alois, 34IJV. 
JoinviUe, Prince de, 304. 
Joly, Author, 268, 7^, 84, 9. 
foumal des D4bat5^ 283, 303, II, 84. 
Tttdenhof, Dresden, 70^ 7, 87. 
Julius, Fr., actor, 59. 
July Revolution, 113-4, 29, 47, 338. 
July-Symphony, 338-9. 



K. 

Kalidisa's Urvasiy it^n. 
Kanne, J. Arnold, 19-20. 
Kant, Emanuel, 214, ^73. 
Kapuzinergasse, Wurxburg, 158. 
Karlowitz, von, 120. 
Katchen v. HeUhrmn^ Kleist's, 90, 2, 
141. 



Katsbach, battle of, 52. 

Keller, actor, 4911. 

Kellerhofen, port, painter, 6711. 

Kesselsdorf, battle of, 368. 

Kietz, Ernst, 62, 79, 80, 297, 307, I3. 

318, 28, 47; portrait of Wagner, 

277, 351 ; o^ Minna, 31611. 
Kilian, Saint, 160. 
Kind, Christoph, 32. 

„ F. (FrtischiUz), 32, 56. 
Kintschy's restaurant, 149. 
Kittl, Johann F., 142, 345. 
"Klavierschenke," Ldpz., 128. 
Kleist, C. Ewald von, 12. 

„ Heinrich von, see Katchen, 
Klepperbdn, grocer, 61. 
Klingemann, Aug., 109, 206. 
Klopstock: Fruhlingsfeier^z^o\ Mes- 

sias, 28. 
Kneschke, Dr E., iSm, 9711. 
Knevel's house, Magdeburg, 190. 
Knorr, Julius, 178. 
Kohler, E., tenor, 232-3, 48. 
Kok, student, 377. 
Konig's IToAe Braut, 2i6, 044, 5. 
Konigsberg in Prussia, 108, 31, 213- 

225, 62, 4, 357 ; concerts at, 220; 

theatre, 214-5, 9-22, 4-5. 
KonigstMdter theatre, Berlin, 96, 

15111, 202, 5, 12, 29. 
Konneritz, von, 69, 86«. 
KoHversatianslextkoHt Brock., 24. 
Komer, C. G. (Schiller's friend), 29, 

34. 370. 
Komer, K. G., 16, 20. 
„ Theodor, 66. 
Kosen by Naumburg, 198. 
AosMiusko text, 148-9, <3, 60, 238. 
Kotzebue, 34, 41, sin, 170, aoy, 

374- 
Kreuzkirche, Dresden, 94. 
Kreuzschule, „ 74, 6, 83, 6, 

90-4, loi, 49, 343. 
Krug, bass singer, 200, i. 

„ Univ. rector, 114, 6, 21. 
Kulm, Adelbert, 16 1». 
KUhne, Gustav, 350. 
KUhren, 10, 363-7. 
Kulm, see Colmen. 
Kunersdorf, battle of, 12. 
Kurisches Haff, 215. 
KUrschner, Josef, iiijf, 2511, 3111, 

295«. 
Kurz, Heinrich, 26, 128. 
Kttstner, Theod. von, dir., 107, 70, 

349, 59, 83. 
Ktistrin, capitulation, 39. 
Kyffhttuser, 36. 



INDEX. 



393 



Lacarri^re, 69, 100. 

Lamartine, 282^. 

Landstunn, 47, 8. 

Lang, Julius, 237. 

Lanzi, Luigi, 378. 

Lassalle, Ferd., 381. 

Latin, 3, 84. 

Laube, Heinrich, no, 47-9, 51, 2, 3, 
171, 3, 4, 98» 252«, 73-6, 95, 6, 302, 
309, 13» 4> 7, SO'i, 3-4, 5, 79, &>, 3 : 
Dasjunge Europa, 148, 9, 75, 9, 
207 ; Das neue Jahrhundert^ 147 ; 
Strumsee^ 383. 

Laube, Iduna, 27411, 5. 

Lauchstildt, 34, 186-7, 25211, 370. 

Leczinsky, Stanislaus, 366. 

Legend, 5, 74, 84, 161, 243, 65, 321, 

^ 325, 33, 5, 7. 

Lehmann, Marie (Lowe), 129. 
„ Lily and Marie, 129. 

Lehrs, F. Sic^ried, 277, 96, 7, 335, 
347. 

Leipzig, 7, i3-5» 21, 42, So» i, 69, 97, 
loi, 30-2, 9, 43, 8, 9, 51, 3, 6s, 8, 
170, 7, 85, 97, 9, 206-7, 9, 3i5«, 
342», 8, 9-50, 69-71 ; Battle of, 7, 
50, 2-3, 71 ; Conseryatorium, 121 ; 
Emeute, 113-7, 20-1,9. 

Leipzig Theatre, 15, 27-32, 4, 40-1, 
9, 55, 6s, 8, 90, 6, 8, 107-13, 7, 
31, 2, i5i», 3, 6s, 9-74, 86, 92-3, 
206-8, 331, 69, 70, 6, 8. 

Leipzig University, 12, 8, 29, 30, 7, 
114, 6, 9-23, 30, 209, 368, 70, 6-8. 

Leipdger, H. A. von, 377. 

"Leitmotiv," 145, 68, iaSs. 

Lembert, 51. 

Lepitre, iMillet -master, 345. 

Lessing, 4, 28, 331 : Emilia Gaiotti^ 
55, 95 y Minna von Bamhelm^ 48. 

Levasseur, singer, 2i7ff. 

Lewald, August, I49«, 217, 23-4, 
252-3, 95, 316, 7, 84- 

Lewes, George Henry, 378. 

Lewy, horn-player, 343. 

Lichtenstein, Princess, Sophie Lowe, 
310. 

Liebestnahl der Apostely 1 2311. 

LiBBBSVERBOT, DaS, 264^, 9 1, 34 1 : 

text, 179, 94, 8, 203, 7— French 
trans]., 222, 3, 85, 9, 90; music, 
184-5, 9, 93, 4, 5, 202, 6, 7— 
Carnival -song pubd., 223; Magde- 
burg perf., 202-4, 6, 357 ; Leipzig 
negotutions, 206-7 % offered for 
Berlin, 212 ; Paris, 223, 84, 9-90. 



Limbach, Frl., singer, 200, I, 5. 
Lindenau, von, 116. 
Lindner, Prof., 75. 
Linke'sches Bad, Dresden, 64, 80. 
Lipinski, Karl, 260, 342.' 
Lippert ( = Levi), student, 377. 
Lisit, Franz, Ii8«, 301, 3, 22, 82, 4 ; 
Wagner's first meeting, 302-3, 20; 
Correspondence with, 288, 302, 20. 
Literary Works, Wagner's \— 
Artist and Publicity, 309, 10, 6. 
Autobiographic Sketch, 83, loi, 37, 

268, 79, 325, 50-1. 
Dramatic Song {dtzSi), 218-9. 
End in Paris, 256, 71, 83, 90-1, 6, 

309-10, 6, 83. 
Freischiitz articles, 314, 21, 3, 36«. 
German Music, 1 59, 300, 8, 79. 

Opera, 175, 83, 218. 
HalivysR. de Ch,, 314, 30, 3, 6-8. 
Happy evening, 309, 27. 
News-letters, 5o«, 239, 303, 14, 6, 

320, 2, 7-8, 38, 9. 
(Opera and Drama, 19IM, 4, 234M, 

279, 379, 80.) 
Overture, On the, 308, 10, I. 
Paris. Amusements, 228, 78, 81, 4, 
290. 317. 
„ Fatalities, 266, 97, 305, 17, 20, 

322. 
Pasticcio, 178, 9 in, 218. 
Pastoral play, early, Z05. 
Pergoles/s Stabat, 301. 
Pilgrimage to Beethoven, 102, 26, 

137, 41, 303, 9, 16. 
Rossini's Stabat, 330. 
School poem, 91. 
Tragedy, youthful, 94-6, loi, 2. 
Virtuoso and Artist, 301, 8. 
Livonian (Lithuanian) "mode," 253- 

254. 
Lobmann, Franz, 228-9, 32, 3, 50, %n, 

260-1, 4#f. 
Lodge-concerts, 191, 201. 
Logier's Method, 102. 
Lohengrin, 161, 7711, 335, 84; 

anticipated theme, 221. 
Lohn-Siegel, A., 1 1 in. 
London, 158^, 205, 45»; Wagner in, 

265-7 ; Weber in, 92. 
Lortzin^, A., im. 
Loschwitz by Dresden, 78-81. 
"Louis," 128, 277. 
Louis Philippe, 306. 
Louvre, the, 269, 74. 
Lowe, Marie, 129. 

„ Sophie, 310, I. 
Ldwenberg, Silesia, 52. 



394 



INDEX. 



Lucas, E. T. L., 335. 
Luden, Heinrich, 374. 
Ludwig I., Bavaria, 66. 

„ II., „ vii, 186. 
Lally, 298. 

Luaeville Peace, 35, 37a 
Luther, 8, 36, 74, 271, 91, 340; 

Catechism, zi, 94. 
Lttttichau, von, 303, 13, 5, 22, 4, 49, 

^ 354-9. 83. ^ 
Lutz, Johann G., lyt, 

„ Maria C, lyt. 
Lutzau, Carl von, 232, 49. 
LUtzen, batUe of, 48. 
Ltttzow corps, 47. 
Lvoff (or Lwo£^, Alex., 301. 



M. 

Macdonald, General, 52. 

Magdeburg, 190-1, 200-1, 5-7, 17, 
357; theatre, 38, 128, 85, 90-6, 
200.4, 12, 357. 

Mahlmann, 24. 

Manfred, 334 ; Byron's, 25. 

Manteuffel, von, 377. 

Mantle and doll, 254-5». 

Marbach, Dr O., 209-11. 

„ Rosalie, see Wagner. 

Marburg University, loi. 

Marcolini Palace, Dresden, 49, 50. 

Maria Stuart^ Les adieux de^ 376. 

Marie Louise of Austria, 371. 

Mars, Mme., actress, 50M. 

Marschner, 161, 84 : Feuerbraut^ 206 ; 
Hans Heiling^ 166 ; Tempter u, 
/udin, III, 350; Vdmfyr, 166-7. 

Mary, Max u, Michel, ana for, 230-1. 

Marseillaise, 306. 

Masaniello, see Auber*s Muette, 

Matthfii, Konzertmeister, 102, 18, 97. 

Max, Prince of Sax., 31. 
,, Joseph of Bav., 66. 

Meek, K. J. G. von, 231. 

Mehlig, F., tenor, 264. 

M^hul, 279 ; Joseph, 247-8, 60, %n, 

Meissen School, 43, 8, 53, 5. 

Meissner, Roy. Commiss., 120. 

Meister, The, 33511. 

Mbistersingbr, Die, ii, 218, 345. 

Meixner (or Meichsner), 377. 

Memel, 215. 

Mendelssohn, Felix, 142, 7iir, 97-8, 
21311, 98, 331. 50> 81; Cairn sea 
etc, overture, 259 ; {Ruy Bias over- 
ture at Sophie Schroder's soir^, 
350). 



Mendez, Catulle, 382. 

Mercadante, 333. 

Mercur, DetUtcker, ao. 

Mettdon near Paris, 321-7, 31. 

Meyer-Dnstmann, Louise, 129. 

Meyer za Knonow, von, 377. 

Meyerbeer, 223, 47, 68-9, 72, 3, 6, 
284. 5. 94, 5» 6» 7, 300, 6, 15-6, 31- 
332, 7, 9. 48, 59, 79-81. 3-5: 
Huguenots, 216-7, 77, 339, 80; 
Prophite, 384; Robert le diabU, 
158, 9, 259, 63, 310, 39— Liizt's 
Fantasia on, 301, 20; StruenseCj 
383. 

Mieksch, singing-master, 68, 9011, 
1091S. 

Mignonm, Wagner's, 283, 317, 

Mileschauer by Teplitz, 179. 

Miltiades, 42. 

Mitau, 245, 8if, 60-3, 4#f. 

Mitford, Mary Russell, 245^. 

Mitterwurzer, Anton, 353. 

Mockem, battle o^ 48. 

Moet (et Chandon), 307. 

Mohl, Joh. H. Louise, 51. 

Moli^re's birthplace, 269. 

Moller, Abraham, 264. 

Monnais, Edouard, 316, 38. 

Mont de Pi^t^, 314. 

Morath, contrabassist, 357. ' 

Moritz, Elector, i C. 
„ K. Phil., 84. 
,, Prague actor, 92. 
„ Stuttgart regis., 35a 

Moritzstrasse, Dresden, 55, 7. 

Morlachi, Francesco, 63-5, 86, 351, 
355,9; widow, 359. 

Moscow, burning of, 47, 371. 

Mosevius, 71. 

Mozart, 22, 33, 125, 33, 5, 9-40, 64, 
172, 298, 301, 18, 69, 70, 80: 
Don GitnKmni, 89, 96, 10911, 233, 
248^, 6311— in Paris, 279, 301 ; 
Entfiihrung, 68, 26411 1 Figoro, 491V, 
140, 233, 48*1, 60, 3«; Idomeneo^ 
III; Requiem, 102, 305, 6 ; VU- 
lanella rapita, 152 ; ZamberfBfte^ 68, 
89, 239, 48«, 63«, 37a 

Mtiglenz, II, 2, 363, 7-8. 

Mtthlenfels, 350. 

Milller, Chr. Gottlieb, 106, 32. 
,, Chr. Hermann, 377. 
„ Johann, 10, 367. 
,, Max, Oxford Essays* 1611K. 
,, Volkmar, 160. 

MUllner, JCdnig Yptrd, 58. 

Munich, vi, 20, 66, 331, 45, 9 

Murray, etymol., 374. 



INDEX. 



395 



Musenalmanach, Deutscher^ 253. 
Musikalisches IVochmblatt, 143, 88», 

22211, 75«, 31511. 

" Musse club, Riga, 229, 37. 
Musset, Alfred de, 27611. 

N. 

Nake, student, 377. 

Napoleon I., 35, 9-42, 7-52, 171, 370- 

371 ; re-interment, 304-5 ; Code^ 

40-I, 371. 
Nares (Shakespeare), 374. 
Naumann, composer, 343. 
Nelson, Lord, 266. 
Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik^ 178, 9I«, 

193, 200, 6, I2», 5, 20, 38«, 41, 

254, 306, II, 30, 8, 9, 47«, 5o» 2- 
New Yearns cantata^ 136, 93, 5, 213. 
Nicander, 277. 
Nikolai hymn, 233, 41, 63. 
Nikolai-schule, Leipc, loi, 10, 7, 28, 

149. 
Nohl, Ludwig, 23811. 
Nord und SUd^ 270, 382. 
Norway, 8«, 265, 99. 
Notre Dame, Paris, 269. 
NoufBard, Georges, 384. 
Nourrit, singer, 21 7». 
Nova Zembla, 94. 
Novice of Palermo f 1 79, 203, 85. 
Nuremlierg, 198-9. 

O. 

Ochsenheimer, actor, 34, 41M. 

Oderigo, Lorenzo, 374. 

Odyssey, 84, 93, 195. 

(Edipus, 21, 5, 84. 

Oeser, painter, 15. 

Oesterlein, Nicolaus, 28611. 

Oken, Lorenz, 374. 

Ole Bull, 239, cf: 318. 

Ollenroth, student, 377. 

Opitz, actor, 41. 

Oppian, 277. 

Opus-number, 126, 375-6. 

Oratorio, 176, 21311. 

Orchestration, 117-8, 53, 6^, 72, 6, 
184, 90, 5. 204* 34, 42, 98, 3", 2, 
346, 54. 

Orlandi, confectioner, 70. 

Ortlcpp, Ernst, 149, 52, 3, 252Jf. 

Ostrolenka, 131. 

Overtures, Wagner's : — B, "big 
drum," 1 17-8, 26; C, fugue, 127, 
131-31 5o» 376 ; D minor, 126, 7, 
13I1376; G?/«w^MJ, 195— at Leipzig, 



197, Riga, 241-2, Paris, 289, 310-2, 
330 ; Enxio, 131 ; Fat^t, 285-9, 
310; "Political," 117--? same as 
Polonia, 131, 225 (?) ; Rule Brit- 
annia^ 218, 20, 5, 41. 
Oxford, 205. 

„ Essays^ 161M. 

P. 

Pachta, Count, 65. 

Pacini, 323. 

Paer: Camilla, 158; Sargino^ 49», 

152. 
Paganini, 283. 
PaUis Royal, 269, 91. 
Palazzesi, Matilda, 133. 
Palermo, 183. 
Palestrina, 298. 
Paris, 113, 205 : project, 216, 22-3, 

251-3* 8, 62, 4, 8-9; Wagner in, 

269-340, 8, 56— suburbs, 321-7. 
Paris : Grand Op^ra, 15811, 226, 68, 

272, 3. 8-9» 83, 93, 6, 9, 321, 3, 5, 

338» 84. 

Op^a Comique, 201, 22, 3, 79, 

323. 
Renaissance th., 273, 84, 9-90. 
Th^&tre Frai^ais, 49, 329. 

„ des Italiens, 219, 79, 301, 

305- 
„ des Vari^t^s, 284, 90. 
Pamasso Italiano, Adolf Wagner's, 

100- 1, 373. 
Parsifal, v, 82, 94, 142, 256, 8311. 
Paskewitsch, Genl., 129. 
Pasqu^, E., 270, 382. 
Pauli, actor, 7011. 
Paulinum, Leipz., 116. 
Pecht, Friedrich, 57#i, 274, 7, 8, 90, 

291, 7-9, 303, 7, 9, ", 5, 27. 
Pergolese, 298 ; Stabat Mater, 301. 
Perkunos, 221-2. 
Persian!, Inez ^ C, 310. 

„ singer, 279, 301, 5. 
Peter the Great, 7 in, 366. 
Peters, music-pubr., 126. 
Peter's Gate, Leipzig, 14, 99, 132, 50, 

377. 
Petrarch, 22, 100, 373. 
Pfordten, H. y. der, 2441s;. 
Philology, 18, 25, 84, 91, 3, loi, 374. 
Pichhot, Leipzig, 97, 126, 7. 
PikuUos, 221. 
Pilati (and Flotow), 284. 
Pillau, 264. 

Pillet, L6on, 296, 9-300, 23.5, 82. 
PiUnitz, 71. 



396 



INDEX. 



Pima, I4#f, 368, 

Planer, Amalie, 231, 3, 6, 9-40, i, 

24811, 9-50, 60, 3. 
Planer, Gotthilf, 217. 

„ Natalie, 25511. 

„ Wilhelmine (Minna), 194, 363. 

See Wagner. 
Planitz, Edler von, 377. 
Planen'scher Grund, 80. 
Pleissenburg, Castle, 14, 
Pleyel's sonatas, 117. 
Pogrell, Louise, 242. 
Pohl, Richard, v, 382. 
Pohlenz, Angast, 132, 51, 97. 
Poles, 129-31, 47, 9; Saxon period, 

365-8 ; Ortlepp*s PoUnlieder, 149. 
PoUedro, Konzertmeister, 86. 
Pollert, actor, 200, 4. 

„ Karoline, 200-5, 39> 41* ^• 
PoUmaist in Dy pfte. duet, 125. 
Polyidosy Apel's, 24-5, 91. 
Poniatowsky, 130. 
Potrimpos, 221. 
Praeger, Ferdinand, 73, 4, 82, 4, 5, 

I22«, 8, 266, 77, 95«. 
Prague, 138-42 ; Conservatorinm, 

138-9, 42 ; theatre, 28«, 65, 92, 5, 

96, 108, 29, 41 — Don Giovanni 

1T87, 233. 
Prolss, J., 24011. 

„ Rob., 303«, i6». 
PrussU, 4, 39, 42, 7, 198, 214, 368, 

371. 

Puget, Loisa, 284. 
Puru-ravas, 161, 311. 
Pusch, Paul David, 32. 

Q. 
Quandt, 100. 

„ T. G. von, 378. 
Quartet, Wagner's early, 102. 
Queen of Saxony, 71 : portrait by 

Geyer, 66. 
Queisser, trumpeter, 343. 

R. 

RannsUidter Thor, Leipzig, 14, 27, 

S2» 97» 130, 369. 
Rastrelli, J. R., 351, 5, 9. 
Raupach's i&i»si<7, 1 31. 
Raymund's dramas^ 138. 
Rechberg, Counts, 67. 
Reclam, 67«, 87«, i77«. 
Redem, Count, 331, 2. 
Reimann, Dlle., 208. 
„ Dr H., 163, 4. 



Reinhold, tenor, 343, 52. 

Reinicke, Joh. Geoig, 16. 

Reisser, Johann, 1311. 

Reissiger, Gottlieb, 88, 108, 4IM, 260, 
313, 22, 7, 44.6, 51, 5, 8 ; AiUle de 
Foix, 327, 32, 3», 44. 

Reithmeyer sisters, 230, 3. 

Rellstab, Ludwig, 213 

Repnin, Prince, 52, 511. 

Ressource-club, Riga, 237. 

Reuss, Eduard, 24411, 6-7, 94. 

Revoil, Henri, 382. 

"Revolutionary," 113, 7, 29, 47, 9, 
255-6, 71, 5. 300, I, 3, 56, 6a 

Revtu BUue, 276^. 

Rhine, the, 35, 340, 7a 
„ Leaipie, 39, 42, 371. 

Richter's wine-snades, 190. 

RiENZI, 144, 73, 353, 79 : first con- 
ception, 225.6; text, I44> 345-7, 
260, 313 ; composition begun, 247- 
248 ; work at act i., 239, 49, 52, 8 ; 
transl. into French, 252, 9-60, 
263 ; act ii. completnl, 260 ; work 
at Boulogne, 260; composition in 
Paris, 277, 83, 93-4, 6, 9, 300 ; score 
completed and sent to Dresden, 
303-4* 6, 13, 5-6, 22; accepted, 
324> 7, 39 ; cast and mounting, 
322, 33, 51 ; rehearsals, 336, 41-5 J 
performance, 345-9, 51, 2, 83; 
excerpts at Leipzig; 349-50 ; divided 
into R,*s Grisse and R:s FaU^ 354 5 
at Berlin, 384. 

Ries, Ferd., 319. 

Riga, 93, 211, 4, 2511, 7-62, 91, 318, 
357; theatre, 70«, 214-6, 28-36, 
238-9,45, 7-51, 7-6o,3-4«; Wagner's 
concerts, 241-2, 9, 59; suburbs, 
239-40, 3» 50, 4 ; ZuscMauer, 23i«, 
233», 4, 5i«, 9- 

Ring, 244 ; motive, 221. 

Ringelhardt,F. S., 170-1, 3, 92, 206-8. 

Risse, K., basso, 343, 52. 

Ritter, Alex., 375. 

Robber, dog, 256, 65, 9, 86, 91, 382. 

Podin du b&isy 323. 

Rochlitz, Fried., 15a 

„ Sibylla Countess, 365. 

Ronsard's Mignonne^ 283. 

Rose, R., 94ff. 

(Roser, Wurzburg, 146-7.) 

Rossbach, battle, 4. 

Rossig, Anna S., 11, 363, 7. 
„ Christoph, ii, 367. 

Rossini, 299, 338 : Barbi^e^ ^100^ 45, 
248^, 6311; Centrentola^ 89, 305; 
GatoM hdray 58 ; Otello^ 157, 26311 ; 



INDEX. 



397 



Stabai Mater^ 330 ; Tantredi^ 58, 
158; 7>//, 1 12-3, 301. 
Rothschild, 328. 
Rott, actor, 109. 
Rousseau, J. J., 272-3. 
Rubens, 274. 
Rubini, 279, 301, 5, 21. 
Rudolph, M., 23 Iff. 
Rudolstadt, 186, 7, 97. 
Rue Bergtbre, 280. 
„ du Helder, 290, 306, 7, 12, 4. 
II Jacob, 327. 
„ Lepelletier, 275. 
,, S. Honor^, 270. 
„ de la Tonnellerie, 269-70, 2, 85, 

29a 
Rule Britannia^ see Overt 
Russia, 8«, 47, "9, 214, 54, 371, 4 ; 
calendar, 228 ; passport and frontier 
difficulties, 262-4 



S. Helena, 304. 

S. Kilian, 160. 

S. Petersburg, 248, 60. 

Salle S, Honor6, 310, 3a 
„ Vivienne, 2&. 

Sfltlom^, regis., 289. 

Sandrini, Signora, 58. 

Sandwike, Norway, 265. 

Sangerkrieg auf Wartburg^ 105, 297, 
335. 

Sanicn-Kolff, J. van, 28611, 375. 

Soraunin^ Die^ 334, 6. 

Sassaroli, singer, 58. 

Saxonia corps, 115, 21, 376-8. 

Scheffer, Ar^, 28211. 

Schelling, 18, 94, 149, 252^. 

Sch(epeler), Riga consul, 256. 

Scheuerlin, Georg, 253ff. 

Schiller, 4-5, 12, 8, 21, 2, 3, 8, 9, 33, 
35i 70» 349i 701 3; A. Wagner^s 
acquaintance, 18 ; death, 38, 371 : 
Bride of Messtna, 4, 5, 25, 35, 8, 
2S9i 370; I>on Carlos, 4, 29, 33, 
65, 373 ; ^i^scoj 29, 41 ; ^adale u. 
JJebe^ 29, 32, 95 ; Lay of the Bell, 
341 > 350; ^<^^ of Orleans, 34, 
241, 370 ; MaHa Stuart, 259, 376 ; 
Robbers, 5, 28, 230», 370; Tell, 
38, 1 12-3 ; Turanebtj 22n ; IVallen- 
stetn, 28, 33, 41, 95- 

Schindelmeisser, Louis, 108, 28, 22511, 

227, 3^ 7, 359- 
Schindler, Anton, 319, 81. 
„ DUe., 200, I. 
„ student, 377. 



Schirmer, actress, 70ff. 

Schlackenburg, Teplitz, 179. 

Schlegel, Elias, Hermann, 15, 369. 
„ August Wilhelm and Fried- 
rich von, 18 ; Ion, 25. 

Schlesier, Gustav* (93-4), 149, 252. 

Schlesinger, Maurice, 268, 72, 94, 7, 
300, 2, 4, 14, 23, 30, 6, 40; 
concerts, 310. 

Schmale, Wilhelm, 193. 

Schmidt, F., tenor, (195), 25811. 
„ HofrathJ. P. S., 352. 
„ Mme., actress, 222. > 

Schneider, Frau Dr, 79. 

„ F., of Dessau, 176. 

' * Schneiderherbeige, " 1 50. 

Schnorr, Julius, painter, 66. 

Schoffel, J. Henriette, 51. 

Schonefeld near Leipzig, 7, 12, 3, 
209,369. 

Schonfeldt, Adolf von, Senior of 
Saxonia corps, 121, 377. 

School, 8-9, 61, 83. See Kreuzschule ; 
Nikolai; Thomana. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 33, 51, 105 

"3i 235, 87. 
Schopperitz, Vincent, 52». 
Schott s, music-pub., 127. 
Schreiber, tenor, 200, i, 4. 
Schroder, actor, 170. 

Sophie, 34, 96, 349. 
Schroder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 90, 

137, 74, 6, 82, 94, 8-9, 219, 36, 66, 

293» 313, 4I1 2, 505 as Adriano, 

343-6, 8 ; as Senta, 352. 
Schubert, Franz, 283, 31a 
„ „ Dresden, 342. 

F. L., I5i«. 
Schuberth, Louis, 214, 5, 20, 2, 5. 
Schulze, Ernst, 24. 

„ H. K. Elias, 32. 
Schumann, Clara, 152, 78. 

„ Robert, 108, 28, 77-8, 91, 

I93» 207, 12, 3, 306, 50, 9, 80; 

sonata, 224. See also Neue Zt, 
Schumannites, 178^. 
Schunke, Ludwig, 178. 
Schwab, Gustav, 253». 
SchwartzhUupterhaus, Riga, 241-2, 

251, 6, 9. 
Schwederski, Riga, 257. 
Scipio, 42. 

Scottowe, Augustin, 374, 
Scribe, Eugene, 216-7, 22-3, 6, 52, 

281, 97, 344 ; Une chaSne, 329. 
Seconda, Franz, 28, 40^ \n, 9, ^on,. 

55«. 
Seconda, Joseph, 28, 49, 5o». 



398 



INDEX. 



Seoonda troupe, 30, 2, 40, i, 7-50^ 

55. 7. 371. 

Seebach, Alex, von, 377. 

Semper, Gottfried, SJn, 293. 

Senn tod Pilsach, 42. 

Servais, Franz, 220, 318. 

Seume, 199. 

Seven- Years War, 14, 368. 

Seybold, translator, 21. 

Shakespeare, 26, 93, 4, 100, 74, 374 ; 
Poets' Comer, 266: Hamlet, 41, 
95; Jul. Casar, 107, 9; King 
Lear, 95, no, 230; Measure for 
M,, 182-3, 203 ; Merck, of Venue, 
95, io8jf ; Othello, 64 ; Romeo, 

93, 3. 174- 
Siberia, 214, 54. 
Sicilian Vespers, 183. 
Siegert's milit. band, 232, 48. 
Siegfried, 82, 4. 
Silesia, 39, 48, 52. 
Sillig, Dr (Wagner's teacher), 84. 
Singspiel, 5, 17711, 203. 
Sintenis, J. G., 16. 
Smart, Sir George, iJZn, 
"Smoms,"l2i. 
Sobolewski, £., 220, 4. 
Soho, 265-6. 
Solbrig, reciter, 100, 32. 
Solid's Secret, 64. 

Solms-Tecklenburg, K. A. v., 377. 
Sonata in B flat, Wagner's early, 125- 

126 (? sam^ 102). 
Sontag, Henriette, 108. 
Sophocles, 21, 5, 84, 9I». 
Sound, The, 265. 
Spandau, 39. 
Spader, Minna, 24. 
Specht, A., critic, 310. 
Sfener'scke Zeitung, 352. 

■Jul., 94». 
^essonda, 200, I, 26, 41, 



perber, Karl Jul., 94«i. 
M>hr, 129 : Jes 
26311. 



Spohr, 



Spontini, 71, 139, 73«, Jn, 212; 
Cortez, 213 ; Numtahal overt., 132; 
Olympia, 71 ; VestaU, 50^, in, 

359. 
Spotomo, 374. 
Stanislaus Leczinsky, 366. 
Steffens, 18. 

Ste^;mayer, Ludwig, 172, 207. 
Stem, actor, d^n. 
Stem, Daniel (Comtesse d'AgouIt), 

22«. 

Stettin, capitulation, 39. 
Stieler, portr. painter, 6611. 
Stoker, student, 377. 
Stotteritz, Leipz., 50. 



Strassbuig, 159; dealer, I47». 

Strauss, fob. : potpourris on Zampa, 
in ; Waltzes, 138, 50, 28211. 

Stuttgart, 253, 95, 35a 

Swinburne, Chas. Alg., 182. 

Symphony in C, 131, 4-7, 87, 93, 7. 
198 ; perfd. at Prague, 138-9, Leip- 
zig, 150-4. 

Symphony in £ (fragmentary sketch), 

Szeroff, Alex., 385. 



Tahna, actor, 5a 
Tamann, schoolfellow, 9411. 
Tamburini, 279. 
Tanmn6aum song, 253-4. 
Tannhiluser, io», 105, 207, 335-6. 
Tannhauser, 144, 83, 297, 337. 40. 

384; first|5cenic and musical sketches, 

342 ; theme from LiebesTferbot, 185. 
Tappert, Wilhelm, v, 126, 33, 9, 43, 

I59» 67, 87, 9, 222«, 3i5«, 84. 
Tasso, too, 373. 
Tauwitz, Eduard, 258ff. 
Teicher, Joh. Fried., I3i«. 
Teplitz, 50-2, 178, 341-2. 
Thalberg, 301. 
Thalwitz, 10, 364, 5. 
Thammenhain near Wurzen, 9, 10, 

363-6. 
Thau House, Riga, 229. 
Thering, actor, ^m, 
Thiele, Anna, sopr., 343. 
Thiers, 304. 
Thirty- Years War, 10. 
Thomft, Andreas Fried., 30. 

„ Jeannette, 30, 2, 51, 69, 76, 

374-5- 
„ House, Leiprig, 30-1, 8, 51, 
52, 69, 99, 374. 8. 
Thomas-Church, Leipz., 13, 51, 367- 

369. 75- 
,, -Gate, Leipz., 15a 
„ -School, „ 12,8,28,9,101, 

117.9,23.369. 
Thuringia, 9, 36, 340. 
Tichatschek, 293, 313, 41-50. 
Tieck, Ludwig, 21, 4, 6, 56, 7, 69, 
^. 7. 103, 9-10 ; Tannkduser, 105, 

335- 
Tilsit, 253 ; Peace, 42. 
Timbuctoo, 94. 
Tischer, student, 377. 
Tomaschek, Wenzel, 140-2. 
Topfer, Jos. Gottfr., 32. 
Trafalgar, battle, 266. 



INDEX. 



399 



TrSger, Adolf, 32, 51, 69, 100. 
Tragheimer church, Konigsberg 
(where Wagner was married), 217. 
Tristan u. Is., ^Syt. 
Tischoppe, von, 198. 

U. 

Ubrich, singer, 112. 

Uhlig, Theodor, 277, 86, 34011. 

Ulibicheff, 317. 

Undine, Fouqa^'s, 22. 

Unstmt river, 36. 

UrvasI, 161. 

V. 

Vaisseau fant^me^ 325^1, 82. 

Valentino, Paris oond., 311, 30. 

„ H., pseudonym of Wag- 
ner's, 21 3», 330. 

Vampyr, aria for, 167. 

Varnhagen v. Ense, 213. 

Veronese, Paolo, 274. 

Vestri, Gioachino, 343. 

Vienna, 21, 86, 137-8, 249, ^71. 

Vieuxtemps, Henri, 239, 318. 

Vvpsft de, 28211. 

Voigt, cutler, 70, 7. 

Volbling, Adolf, 16. 

Voltaire, 3. 

Voss, Job. Heinr., 92, 3^. 
„ Leopold, 148. 

W. 

Wachter, Michael, 343, S^i >• 

„ Frau, 352. 
Wagnbr— the name, 8, 1411, 166. 

Adolf, " Uncle," 14, 6-26, 8, 9, 30, 
32, 9», 5^ 9-60, 9, 75-6, 9i» 2, 
98-101, 3.4, 5«. 17, 369. 70, 2- 
375, 8-9 ; marriage, 99, 373-5 J 
death, 199, 379 ; portraits, 379. 

Albert, 30, 3, 4, 9», 43, 8, 53, 4, 
55» 61, 8, 70, 5, 7, 85, 6, 96, 9. 
154, 7-9, 65-7, 99, 370, 4, 5. 

Anna (Benewitz), 363, 5, 7. 

Anna Sophia (Rossig), 11, 363, 7. 

Barbara, 10, 363, 4, 5. 

Clara (mrd. Wolfram), 33, 61, 9, 
70«, 7, 89-90, 6, 128, 348, 71. 

Cosima (Liszt), 2211, 363. 

Emanuel, 10, 411, 363-7. 

Francisca (mrd. Ritter), 157. 

Friederike, "Aunt," 16, 30, 69, 

Fnednch (K. F. W.)-Richard's 



lather, 16, 27-38, 40.3, 51, 2, 9, 
60, 363, 9-7' ; death, 53, 371. 

Gustav, 33, 37a 

Gottlob Fnednch, 7, 11 -6, 30, 363, 
367-70. 

Tohann Gottlieb (unrelated), I4«. 

Tohanna (mrd. Jachmann), 157. 

Johaima Sophia (Eichel), 7, 13, 6, 
30, 363. 9 > death, 54. 

Johanna Rosina (Richard's mother), 
3», 43, 52, 3, 60, 1, 9, 71-82, 6, 
87, 97, 9, 106, 24, 48, 51, 70, 94, 
207, 9, II, 348, 63. 9, 70 ; second 
marriage, 54-5, 60. 

Julius, 33, 43, ", 74, 370. 

Louise (mrd. F. Brockhaus), 33, 43, 
53, 5, 8, 9, 75, 7, 9S«, 6, 8-9, 
107, 371. See also B. 

Miniia( Wilhehnine Planer, Richard's 
first wife), 146, 7», 94-6, 200, 13- 
2i8, 22, 4-5, 31, 6-7, 40-1, 50b 
254-5, 9, 64-9, 74, 86, 95, 7, 307, 
31 1-2, 28, 32, 41, 8 ; portrait, 316. 

Ottilie(mrd. H. Brockhaus), 33, 61, 

77,98,128,48,205,371. SeeB. 

Wacnflr, Bloliard (Wilhelm R.), 5, 9, 

17, 22», 9, 56, 64«, 105, 28 :— 

Birth, 7, 14, 3211, 3, 48, 371 ; bap- 
tism, 50, I ; removal to Dresden, 
55 5 as child, vii, 33, 52-4, 61-2, 
68-70, 3-82 ; at Eisleben, 73-5 ; at 
Kreuzschule, 76-7, 83-6, 90-4, 9, 
loi ; boyish theatriads, 87, 9 ; 
confirmation, 94 ; return to Leip- 
zig) loi ; ''becomes musician," 
28, 102, 4, 6, 9, 17, 23, 34-5 ; be- 
trothal, 194, 6; marriage, 217. 
See Table of Contents. 

Climbing, &c, 69, 85, 91, 128, 196, 
240. 

as Conductor, 186, 90, 201, 3, 20, 
231, 2-3, 5-6, 41, 2, SI, 351, 5, 
358. 

and Dogs, 81, 196, 256. See Robber. 

and Flowers, 81. 

General Characteristics, 7-8, 16, 26, 
33, 82, 92, 113, 22, 34, 49, 85, 
216, 8, 42-5, 50, 3, 5-6, 68, 71, 
;, 78, 80, ' 



273-5, 



309, 12, 24, 41;, 54, 7-8, 380. 
Health, 54, 61, 8, 77, 84, 



286. 



6, 91, 5, 7-9, 307, 
^380. 
254,641*, 



Manuscripts hawked, 146-7, 218, 
2311*, 49», 63», 85, 94, 304, 5«, 
314, 37-8, 57, 79. 

Memory, 9I«, 160, 90, 302*, 45. 

at Pianoforte, 72, 88-9, 126, 9, 226«, 
249, 50, 78. 98, 9, 325-6. 



400 



INDEX. 



and "Sport," 142. 

and Thief, 254-5. 

Weeping, 78, 87» 286-7, 94. 
Wagnbr, Rosalie, 33, 43, 53, 5, 8-9, 

68, 71, 2, 7, 86, 90, 2, 5, 107-10, 

112, 28, 31, 4h 6, 8, 5iif, 65-6, 

168, 71, 207-11, 370, 6; death, 

211. 

Samuel (varions), 9-1 1, 363-8. 

Siegfried (son of Richaid), 363, 79- 

Sophie (Wendt), 99, 375- 

Thercsc, 33, 55, 371- 

Wilhelmine, see Minna. 
Wagner- Museum, I7i», 28611. 
Wagner-Sodety, London, 32^, 265, 

Wagnerians, 24311, 7 » «tfly» 353-4- 

Wahl, Christina Elis., 27. 

Wahnfried, 15, 166, 207, 11, 375, 9. 

Walther v. d. Vogelweide, i6a 

War of liberation, 43, 7, 52, 6, 371. 

Warsaw, 47, «9, S^S- 

Wartburg, 105, 297, 335, 40. 

Weber, Dionys, 138-40, 2. 

,, Karl Maria von, 5, 811, 22, 40, 
57» 63-5. 6, 71, S» 86, 7, 90, 103, 
104, 61, 73i», 7«, 84* 298, 301, 
356, 8, 60; death, 92: Ewyanthe^ 
St 75. 219, 304, 58; FrHsckiUz, 
5, 68, 87-9, 104, 58, 23i> 9, 48», 
26311— first Pcrf* Berlin, 71, 86, 
Dresden, 75, 86-7, Paris, 321, 3; 
Jubilee cantata, 86^; LiU%aw*s 
fagdt 86; Oberm, 92, 158, 241, 
263; Prenosa, 87, 90, 8, 259, 
263^ ; Silvcauiy 86i«, 98. 

Weber, v., Karoline (Brandt), 65, 323. 
„ Max Maria, 57, 323. 

Wegeler, F. G., 319. 

Weigl : Adrian v, Ostade^ 64 ; Schwei- 
zerfamilie^ 22, 198-9, 239, 48^, 
263». 

Weimar, 19, 21, 341*, 40, 67*1, 701, 
109, 384. 

Weinhold, student, 377. 

Weinlig, Chariotte, 12311. 

„ Chr. Theodor, 123-6, 33, 46. 

Weisscnfels, 31, 363, 9, 77. 

Wendt, Amadeus, i7>f,23-4, 99, 373, 

375- 
Wendt, Sophia (mrd. Ad. Wagner), 

99, 375- 
Werner, Zachanas, 222. 
Werthes, translator, 22». 
Westminster Abbey, 266. 
Westphalia, Peace, 364. 
Wieck, Friedrich, 177, 8. 

„ Klara, 152. See Schumann. 



Wieland, C. M., 15, 8, 20, 2, 373, 4. 
IVieland der Schmied, 79, 84. 
Wiesand, Dr W., 32, 51. 
Wiesbaden, Lohe^rin^ 385. 
Wild, tenor, 141. 
Willig, E. (pseadonym of Geyer's), 

59. 
Wilhelm, Duke, Bav., 6711. 
Winckelmann, 4, I in. 
Winkler, Geoig F., 56. 

„ Hofirath, 312-3, 4, 6, 7, 22, 

323, 7, 33, 81. Sec also HelL 
Winter, P. von, Unierbroch, Opferfest^ 

263. 
Wissendorff, Henri de Wissuknok, 

222ff. 

Wittgenstein, Genl, 48. 

Wohlbrttck, Gottfried, 65. 
W. A., 25a 

Wohrmann's Park, Riga, 23a 

Wolff, Eugen, 2761*. 

„ Pius Alex., actor, 6511, 70ff. 

Wolfram, singer (afterwards trades- 
man at Chemnitz), 128. 

Wolfram, Clara (Wagner), 128, 348. 

Wollner, 2 in. 

Woltersdorf, A., 222. 

Wolzogen, Alfred von, 9091. 

„ Hans von, 511, 8n, 8711, 8, 
142, 77«, &», 96. 

Wrede, Prince, 67». 

„ tenor, 233, 42, 8ff, 64^ 

Wurzbach, A. von, 121. 

Wurzbuig, 146, 54-69 : Marien- 
kapelle, 160 ; Music-union, 154, 9, 
168. 

Wurzen, 9, 11. 

Wtist, Henriette, 109, 32, 343, 4, 6. 

X. 

Xaver, Prince-regent, Sax., 369. 



Yelva (Hell and Reissiger), 14 in. 
Ygurd, JCdnig, Milliner, 58. 



Zachartas, E. M., 9411. 

Zampa, 137, 8, 41, 58, 203, 31, 481*, 

263«. 
Ztg.f. d eleg. fVeU, see Elegante. 
Ziegelbastei, Breslau, 21. 
Ziegelrode by Artem, 37«. 
Ziegler*s jParteienwutA, 57. 
Zurich, 318 ; theatre offer, 166. 



''■'■ should be returr 
nor before the iM 3 2044 



HWil 

44 039 714 881 





390 



INDEX. 



Frankfiirt a. Main, 12, 5, 249. 
„ „ d. Oder, 253. 
„ Zeitung^ 240». 
Franklin, Benj., 374. 
Franz II., Kaiser, 371. 
Frederick the Great, 4, 14, 39, 331, 

368. 
Freemasons' concerts, 191, 201. 
Frege, Capt., 116. 

,, Dr Woldemar, I5iff. 

„ Livia, I5i«. 
" Freigedank, Karl," 21311. 
Freimilller, tenor, 200, i, 2, 3, 5. 
FreimiUhigBy Berlin, 37«, 40, 57. 
French language, 260, 3, 74, 7, 8, 85. 
French Opera, 11 1, 75-6, 84, 90,4, 

216, 9, 38, 79, 91, 8, 337-8. 
French predominance, 3-4, 35, 9, 42, 

49, 216, 53, 64, 78, 313-4, 29, 31, 4, 

339. 
'< Freudenfeuer, W.," 2i3«, 322. 
Friedrich I., Prussia, 214. 

„ II., Hohenstaufen, 334. 
Friedrich August I. Elector of Saxony, 



Fiicdric" 



richAugust II. Elector of Saxony, 

367-9. 

Fnedrich August III. Elector of Sax- 
ony, 15, 31, 7«, 369, see next. 

Friedrich August I. King of Saxony, 
42, 7. 5o»» 2, 6, 7, 64, 8611, 371 ; 
portrait by Geyer, 71. 

Fnedrich August II. King of Saxony, 
"6, 303, 58. 

Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia, 39, 
47»8. 

Friedrich Wilhelm IV. of Prussia, 331, 



Friedrichstadt, Dresden, 48, 9. 
"Fuchs" (univ. slang), 121, 376, 7. 
Fugue, 124.5, 32, 3, 76. 
Funck, Zacharias, 105111. 
Funeral hymn (?), 257. 
Fttrstenau, flautist, 92, 342. 
FUrstenberg, Egon von, 365. 



G. 

Gambling*hells, Leipzig, 114, 22M. 
Gandharyas, 161. 

Gasperini, 184, 268, 72, 90, 303, 21. 
Gcuette MusicaUy 286», 9, 94, 5, 7, 

300-1, 3, 4» 8-10, I, 5, 6, 21, 7, 30, 

336-8, 79-80, 4. 
Gebhard, student, 377. 
Geissler, Adam, 367. 
Genatt, Edouard, 29#i, 40, 6511. 



Georges, Mme., actress, 50. 
Georgi, Kriegsrath, 57, 72. 
Gerhard, Livia, 151. 
„ Paul, 364. 
Gerhard's Garden, Leipzig, 130. 
Gerlach, F. E., 32. 
German CourU, 3-5, 8, 22, 8, 31, 9, 

42, 50, 6-7, 636, 86, 8, 355, 64-8. 
German language, 3, 4, 97, 131, 43* 
German Opera, 22, 53, 63-5, 90, 149. 

175-6, 7«, 206, 34, 48, 53, 330, 

342«, 60. 
German Theatre, 4-5, 15, 26, 8-9, 33- 

34, 60-1, 70, 98, 103, 9-10, 31. 99, 

204, 9, 16, 24, 9» 38, 42, 4. 5i«, 

292, 329, 30, 55. 60. 78, 83. 
Gewandhaus Concerts, 28, 31, 102, 

112, 25, 6, 30, 1-3, 42, 502, 97, 

207, 80, 349. 
Geyer, Cficilie, 3I«, 55, 6, 61, 2, 77- 

81, 7, 9. 98, 9, 124, 8, 296. 
Geyer, goldsmith, 61, 74-5. 

„ Johanna, 55, see Wagner. 
Geyer, Ludwig, 36-43, 8, 50, i, 3-73, 

75. 7, 86, 255if, 369, 71 ; death, 

72 : Bethl. Kindermord^ 67-71 ; 

Delila, 58 ; Emtefest, 59 ; Mddcken 

aus der Fremde^ 59. 
Geyer, Richard (Wagner thus called 

in boyhood), 76, 94. 
Ghosts, 77-8, 95. 
Gljiser, Franz, 212, 355. 
Gleich, J. A., 195. 
Gley, JuUe, 157. 
Globig, von, student, 377. 
Gluck, 172, 298, 379, 80; Ipkigenia 

in AuliSy 369, 70. 
Glyptothek, Munich, 66. 
Goethe, 4, 12, 5. 8. 22, 3, 4, 30, 3, 

100, I, 23, 204, 55. 369, 70. 3 = 

ClavigOt 29 ; Egmotit, 64, 102 ; 

Faust, 109-11, 208, 86-8, 305, i8» 

375 ; GeschwistiTt 29, 90, 2 ; Gatt 

u. Baj\, 65; Giflz, 3, 28, 369; 

Hdllenfahrt Chr,^ 92; Ipkigemie^ 

25 ; KunstUt^s ErdcnwaUen^ 68 ; 

Laune des VerliebUnj 98, 106 ; 

Mitschuldigen, 29, 30 ; Tasso, 304 ; 

Wm, Master, 373. 
Goldoni's Locandiera, 141. 
Gollmann, Elise (wife of Albert, and 

mother of Johanna Wagner), I57» 9u 
Golther, Dr Wolfgang, 335*. 
Gosche, Prof. Rich., 3ii». 
Gottsched, 4. 

Gouin, Post-Sec., 268, 77. 
Gozzi, 22», 5, 160- 1, 3, 4it. 
Grttfe, bass singer, 200.