at her wedding procession; the frenzied man later climbs up into her bedroom; she struggles with the madman, hurling him down into the courtyard where every bone in his body is broken. At his funeral, the young woman throws herself at the coffin; she sinks, dying, onto his lifeless body. Love and death intertwined: Wagner started as he meant to go on.
The first person to whom he showed the libretto was his elder sister Rosalie. His various delinquencies had taken a terrible toll on his relationship with his family; Rosalie – ten years his senior – was the one through whom he hoped to repair it. He had an intense affection for her, revering her exquisite taste, her cultivated circle of acquaintance, her sweetness and depth of soul; a successful actress, she was also the chief breadwinner of the family – though, he casually remarks in his autobiography, she had no talent. He harboured the most powerful feelings for her, feelings, he said, which could vie with the noblest form of friendship between man and woman. ‘I really am a spoilt child, because I fret every moment I am away from you!’ he wrote to her. ‘I hope, my Rosalie, that we two shall spend much time together in this world. Would you like that? … You will always be my angel, my one and only Rosalie!’ She had neither husband nor lover; Wagner made it his task to bring joy into her life, principally by making a name for himself. So when he handed her The Wedding, it was a present heavily burdened with hope and significance. She didn’t like it. Couldn’t he, she asked him, write something a little more conventional? Hearing this, Wagner there and then, in front of her very eyes, tore up the precious manuscript, declaring that he would write something that did please her.
He had not yet turned twenty, but the certainty, the intensity, the ruthlessness so characteristic of him are all fully present in this action. He was to offer further proof of his uncommon strength of mind when Rosalie later introduced him to the admired poet, critic and theatre director Heinrich Laube. Wagner was mightily impressed by the sardonic, Byronic young star; this impression was heightened by the glowing review Laube gave the young composer’s Symphony in C. Not long after, Laube offered Wagner a libretto he had originally written for Giacomo Meyerbeer, then the most successful, most admired, opera composer of the age. Without a moment’s hesitation, Wagner turned it down. With absolute confidence, the twenty-year-old boy rejected a libretto written by one of the most important hommes de lettres of the day. Wagner knew what a libretto needed to be, and he was pretty sure this was not it. Laube had not written a libretto at all, Wagner felt: he had written a chunk of poetry. As such, it was no use to him. He now began work on his next opera by writing the text himself, as he would henceforth do for everything he ever wrote. This one – The Fairies, specially designed to please Rosalie, and convince his family that he was not a dangerous revolutionary – would be set in the Fairy Kingdom, and be composed (with more than a nod towards Weber, whom he continued to revere) in the then popular High German Romantic manner of Heinrich Marschner, composer of the current smash hit The Vampire. Wagner cordially despised Marschner, but he wanted to find out how he did what he did. And if the piece turned out to be a smash hit, so much the better. His libretto was adapted from The Serpent Lady, a dramatic fable by the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi most famous for the plays The Stag King and Turandot; he had been introduced to it by his scholarly uncle Adolf, his father’s antiquarian brother, who had translated the play. Wagner’s adaptation was loose: the title role is dropped in the opera and the names of the central characters are changed to Ada and Arindal, the bridal couple, as it happens, in The Wedding, which suggests that he had not utterly dismissed the earlier work from his mind. Ada is half-woman, half-fairy; Arindal a young mortal king who loves her. After overcoming a hundred obstacles of increasing impossibility, they marry and live happily ever after in Fairyland, not a resolution to be found in any other work of Wagner’s. He was writing it for his family, after all.
Wagner had by now realised that as well as mastering the art of composition he needed to learn his craft in a practical context, so when he was offered a job as chorus master and general factotum at the opera house in the small Bavarian town of Würzburg he accepted it with alacrity, brushing the dust of Leipzig University off his feet without so much as a backward glance. He owed the job to the good offices of his eldest brother, Albert, who was a tenor in the company. The job in Würzburg was the beginning of a prolonged provincial apprenticeship in the course of which Wagner acquired a remarkable variety of compositional skills that in the fullness of time he would cunningly deploy in his own work. The bulk of the repertory at Würzburg consisted of bel canto operas, principally those of Bellini and Donizetti, and Wagner was immediately pitched into preparing the chorus for them; from time to time he was called on to orchestrate – sometimes even to compose – interpolated arias for the operas. He took the work seriously – he was there to learn, after all – but despite his new sense of responsibility and his growing ambition, his former wildness was still liable to break out: one afternoon in a beer garden, he found himself irresistibly drawn into a brawl, taking great pleasure in landing a vicious blow on a totally unknown man to whose face he had taken an instant dislike. It was in Würzburg that he first discovered his powers of seduction, triumphantly snatching a young woman away for a night of love while her hapless fiancé was playing the oboe in the band at a country wedding, for all the world as if he were Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a character – voluptuous, arrogant, fantastical, visionary – with whom he had much in common. Short, oddly disproportionate and prone to an unsightly skin condition, he had never thought of himself as good-looking, but in Würzburg he discovered that he had a certain charisma that women found attractive; he also learnt that he could impress his male companions with his flights of verbal bedazzlement – when, that is, he wasn’t bewildering them. Ideas, opinions, impersonations, cascaded out of him, unless he was being moodily silent, which was frequently the case.
It was in Würzburg that he composed The Fairies. He brought the finished score home to Leipzig, where he sang and played it for the family, pounding away at the piano, belting out all the parts. His skills as an executant were so dismally lacking, he said, that it was only when he had worked himself, like Hoffmann’s Kreisler, into a state of absolute ecstasy that it was possible for him to do justice to anything. Fortunately, a state of absolute ecstasy came very naturally to him. For the rest of his life, he performed his operas for friends and family, always at full tilt. This particular performance had a special intensity about it: the entire thing, and the piece itself, were for Rosalie. It was meant, he said, to provoke some sort of declaration of love from her, and she knew it. When it was over, she gave him a kiss; was it a kiss of real emotion, or just affectionate regard? He never knew, he said. As a result of his performance, she used her influence to secure him the promise of a production of the piece, in Leipzig, for the following year.
Back in Würzburg, unstimulated by his duties, he gave himself over to reading, which threw him into a state of more or less continuous intellectual turmoil, a condition which persisted to the day he died. Driven by the autodidact’s desperate desire to catch up, he read greedily and indiscriminately, snatching at everything that came his way – history, philosophy, poetry, novels. Laube, whose libretto the very young Wagner had so airily rejected, was writing a sensational novel in three parts, Young Europe, which became a rallying cry for a new generation of Germans, sick of being weighed down by the burden of the past. Wagner devoured the book, along with the still-popular Ardinghello, Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse’s sexually charged novel from thirty years earlier, which had contrasted the oppressive joylessness of German life with the voluptuous naturalness of the Mediterranean. Eagerly embracing the cause of free love and rejecting the tyranny of authority, Wagner determined to translate the literary revolution into a musical one and throw off the heaviness and tedium of German opera. He saw Schröder-Devrient again, this time in Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi; the daring, romantic youthfulness of her Romeo, he said, drove him nearly mad with excitement – her performance made all the German operas he had seen (apart, of course, from Fidelio) seem feeble, stuffy, undramatic.
For the first, but by no means the last, time, Wagner took to print to express himself, in a little essay called ‘On German Opera’, in which he tore into the fairy opera Euryanthe by his former hero Weber:
What splitting
