world and the next. I assure you that even in hell I shall be muttering it.’ He signed himself off as ‘your subject, forever bound to you, body and soul’. Later, when things hadn’t moved forward as quickly as he might have hoped, he wrote: ‘My head and my heart are no longer my own – they are already your property, my Master … I realise that I shall have to be your slave in mind and body … I shall be a faithful and honest slave.’ This shameless effusion evidently worked. Even Wagner, who assumed that it was the responsibility of everyone he ever met to advance his career, was astounded at Meyerbeer’s kindness. And of course he never forgave him for it. One of Meyerbeer’s first and greatest successes had been Robert le Diable. Had he lived to see the wholesale destruction of his reputation and legacy that Wagner was to engineer, he might have reflected that in Boulogne, he had met Richard le Diable, his nemesis.
From Boulogne, the Wagners made for Paris, the epicentre of the operatic world. This was the old Paris of 1839, Louis Philippe’s Paris: the Paris of a thousand little alleys and passages, before Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, swept the old streets away. The Wagners stayed in an apartment in the house where Molière had been born, and soon formed a lively circle of acquaintance. Among them was Franz Liszt, whom he had met in Berlin, just two years older than Wagner, but an international superstar, a pianist of superhuman brilliance, who was just beginning to compose music himself. Wagner was at first resentful of Liszt’s celebrity status, but quickly acknowledged the charm, the originality, and the generosity of the man. He is the only individual of comparable power with whom he maintained a relationship that could in any way be described as an equal one.
But Wagner’s Meyerbeer-brokered meeting at the Opéra came to nothing. He wrote a number of entirely conventional songs for various singers as calling cards; he managed to get a rehearsal of his Columbus overture, but not a performance. He and Minna lived from hand to mouth; so dire was their situation that when one day Wagner’s faithful four-footed friend Robber loped off and never came back again they were actually relieved: it was one less mouth to feed. A little later Wagner’s old associate, the poet-novelist-critic Laube, newly released from the Prussian jail in which he had been incarcerated for his inflammatory writings against the Saxon government, blew into town and managed to persuade a rich friend to provide the composer with a six-month stipend, which provided some relief. Nothing fundamentally shifted in Wagner’s fortunes, however; he started to dream about going to live in America – in Maryland, about whose charms he entertained some imaginative notions. Money was again short. Still toiling over Rienzi, he started sketching a one-act curtain-raiser as a potboiler. He had come across his subject while browsing through the sardonic stories in Heine’s collection The Memoirs of Herr Schnabelewopski, in one of which the hero sees a dramatised version of the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. As Wagner wrote, he found himself fiercely gripped by the material, which engaged him at a deep level; Heine, for whom the story is a mere backdrop to a seduction, concludes the episode with the words: ‘The moral of the play is that women should never marry a Flying Dutchman, while we men may learn from it that through women one can go down and perish – under agreeable circumstances!’ Wagner felt none of Heine’s cynicism. He took the legend very seriously – and very personally – indeed. To him, the story of a man doomed to travel the world restlessly until he was redeemed by the love of a woman who entirely believes in him – who trusts him absolutely – stirred him profoundly. He wrote the libretto in a blaze of inspiration.
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