superiority of numbers that they swiftly gave up all thought of resistance and took flight. The net result was that he ended up infinitely worse in debt.
For want of any other work, and desperately in need of money, Wagner returned to Magdeburg the following season; on the way he stopped overnight in the medieval city of Nuremberg, where – somehow inevitably – he got caught up in a riot: it suddenly raged across the town, and equally suddenly dispersed, so that he and his brother-in-law were able to stroll arm in arm through the moonlit streets, quietly laughing; that, too, logged itself in his voluminous memory for future use, until, thirty years later, it turned up in Act II of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. During his second season in Magdeburg he strengthened the repertory, the orchestra and the chorus, importing Prussian army singers and players. As a reward for all this, they let him put on the now-completed Ban on Love as a benefit. It’s a busy, witty, bubbly, interminable score, drenched in southern sunshine. Rehearsals proceeded well enough, with Wagner inspiring the ill-prepared singers to some semblance of accuracy and lightness of touch, but when they actually started performing in the theatre, in front of an audience, vainly trying to keep abreast of the complex action and listen out for their musical cues, the whole thing collapsed into musical and dramatic mayhem. The revolutionary content of his opera, Wagner drily remarked, was lost on both authorities and audience, since what they saw on stage was completely unintelligible.
Inexplicably even to him, the reviews were deemed rather good, enough to warrant a second performance, but word of mouth had done its deadly work. He peered out into the auditorium and saw just two people in the stalls: his wealthy patroness, a certain Mme Gottschalk, and a Polish Jew dressed in full traditional garb. No one else. As Wagner made his way to the podium there was a piercing scream from behind the curtain: the prima donna’s husband, believing that the very handsome second tenor had seduced her, had punched him in the face, which was now covered in blood. The prima donna noisily remonstrated with her husband, who then punched her too, at which point she went into convulsions. The rest of the company joined in, some on the husband’s side, some on the wife’s; at the end of this fracas, so many people were injured that the diminutive stage manager had to go before the curtain to announce that, due to circumstances beyond his control, the performance would not be taking place; the four people in the auditorium (two more had by then slipped into the circle) didn’t seem to mind at all.
Thus Wagner’s career in Magdeburg collapsed into farce. His hopes of a fortune from the benefit were dashed. His creditors nailed a summons to his door, and, as if in disgust, his brown poodle, which he loved deeply, ran away. The following day, looking out of the window of a friend’s house, where they were hiding from the creditors, he and Minna saw a man fling himself into the river Elbe; then, a few days later, in accord with the odd aura of violence which always seemed to accompany him, Wagner found himself in a large and appreciative crowd witnessing the punishment of a soldier who had murdered his sweetheart. The luckless man was strapped to a wheel and crushed under it, breaking every bone in his body, which was then twisted, still breathing, through the spokes of the wheel.
Time, Wagner couldn’t help feeling, to leave. Minna was already in far-off Königsberg, working in the theatre there; Wagner darkly suspected her of being involved with another man. He got there as fast as carriage could take him and proposed to her. She accepted, but as they hurtled towards matrimony, Wagner found the whole thing increasingly unreal. They fought furiously all the way to the church and continued in the sacristy until the pastor came in, at which point they pretended that everything was going marvellously; that sent them into fits of giggles, from which they found it difficult to recover as they entered the church. The congregation consisted entirely of actors and singers from the theatre, dressed up to the nines; there was not a single real friend among them. The heartless frivolity of the event chilled Wagner, he said. The pastor, at least, took it seriously – maybe rather too seriously, delivering a severe sermon in which he warned them of dark days ahead. There was, he said, a glimmer of hope: they would be helped by an unknown friend. Wagner perked up at this: who was this mysterious benefactor, he wanted to know. To his considerable disappointment, it turned out to be Jesus. During the wedding ceremony itself, he was so dazed that Minna had to nudge him to put his ring on the book. At that moment, he reports, he knew he had made a monumental mistake, and that his life was now divided into two currents: one faced the sun and carried him on like a dreamer; the other held his nature captive, prey to some nameless fear. He noted the exact time at which this thought came to him: ‘It was eleven o’clock on the morning of the 24th November 1836 and I was twenty-three and a half years old.’
His forebodings were quickly confirmed. Neither as an artist nor as a woman was Minna his ideal, he knew that. She had no real talent for acting, and little interest in it; she was no Schröder-Devrient, not an artist, in any sense. All she wanted out of the theatre was to make a comfortable living. She had learned how to ingratiate herself with managements, deploying some fairly intense flirting, while keeping within the limits of respectability – just. She was physically attractive to Wagner, and her down-to-earth practicality and realism were useful. Her domesticity and comfortableness were the exact antipode of his own constantly striving nature and thus the perfect complement to him, but the temperamental gap jarred. In My Life, Wagner analyses all this with more than half a mind on the woman to whom he was dictating it, but it was very close to what he felt. His harsh analysis of Minna is typical of the way his brain worked, its maggoty, obsessive, unrelenting nature, even though the letters he and Minna sent each other tell a different story. ‘Dear Minna,’ he wrote a full seven years into their relationship, long past the first flush of lust, ‘we absolutely ought never to be parted for long; that I feel afresh once more, both deeply and sincerely. What you are to me, a whole capital of 70,000 cannot replace.’ She was not his muse; but he loved the sensual and domestic comforts she extended to him. For many years those comforts persuaded him to return to her; when they were together they often quarrelled; just as often, they experienced real companionship. But was companionship what a man like Wagner needed? In his analysis of Minna, he was, as so often, interrogating himself: what did he want from a woman? His relationship with them was always vexed. He seemed to be looking, not for a particular woman, but for women as archetypes, an unpromising basis for a relationship.
From the moment they were married, he and Minna fought; when they did, Wagner, it goes without saying, expressed himself with savage, vicious, brutal eloquence, making her weep bitterly; he would then apologise abjectly, treating her with an exaggerated tenderness, whose strained insincerity led to further and yet more savage outbursts; and so the cycle went on. After a year of this, Minna ran away, taking Nathalie with her. Wagner tracked Minna down to her parents’ house in Dresden; they resumed their married life. Then she bolted a second time, this time in company with an admirer. Wagner went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, while he waited to take up a new appointment in the distant then-Russian city of Riga, hired to provide the sizeable German community there with the art of which they had been starved. Meanwhile he put all his emotional energy into his next opera, Rienzi: the Last of the Tribunes, drawn from the recently published runaway best-seller of the same name by Dickens’s great friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The hero, a Coriolanus-like Roman tribune who is first acclaimed by the people, then despised and finally burnt to death by them, was the sort of man Wagner could readily identify with, but in reality he was drawn to the subject for one reason and one reason only: he thought it would give him a hit. He planned the opera, his third to be completed, on the grandest possible scale; disgusted with the inadequacy and parochialism of German provincial opera houses, he had no intention whatever of letting it be performed anywhere but on the largest stages in Europe. Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of grand opera, generating one smash hit after another, was his model; Paris, Meyerbeer’s base, his destination.
He meanwhile set off for Riga, to open its grand and well-equipped new theatre. With the giant score of Rienzi more than half complete, he made the long and perilous journey to the Baltic. He was pleased with what he found. The Riga audience had sophisticated expectations of its opera, and were prepared to pay for it; Wagner was able to do much better work there than he had elsewhere. The theatre itself was distinctly state of the art, and he remembered its provisions
