became bankrupt punctually every three months—a
fact which explains Meyerbeer’s readiness to
help him in that quarter. In desperation he seized
the chance of earning a little money by writing the
music for a vaudeville production,
La Descente
de la Courtille; but here again his luck was out:
a more practised hand took the job from him. He
composed what he considered simple songs adapted to
the Parisian taste, and they were found too complicated
and difficult to sing. To earn mere bread he
arranged the more popular numbers of popular operas
for all sorts of instruments and combinations of instruments,
and in one of his notes we find him bewailing the
sad truth that even this work was coming to an end
for a time. However, he wrote on for Schlesinger’s
Gazette Musicale; for Lewald’s
Europa
(German) and the Dresden
Abendzeitung—though
the work for the second two did not commence till
later on. This toil perhaps brought him bread:
it did nothing more; Minna had to pawn her trifles
of jewellery; there seemed not a ray of hope gleaming
on the horizon. The performance of his old
Columbus
overture did him a precious deal of good—especially
as at the second performance—at a German
concert arranged by Schlesinger—the brass
were so frightfully out of tune that people could
not make out what it was the composer would be at.
It is needless to tell the ten times told miserable
tale in further detail at this time of day; and I
will now confine myself to the few facts that bear
upon the fuller life that soon was to open before him.
IV
A new opera-house had been a-building in Dresden,
a royal court theatre; and a chance in Paris being
denied to Rienzi, Wagner, staggering along
under the burden of his crushing woes, thought perhaps
his grand spectacular work would be the very thing
to suit the Dresdeners about the time of the opening.
True, there remained three acts to compose and orchestrate—but
what was that to a Richard Wagner! Only one other
composer has achieved such astounding feats.
Mozart, amidst multitudinous worries, sat down and
wrote his three glorious symphonies “as easily
as most men write a letter.” Wagner was
born to achieve the impossible: he had already
done it in getting to Paris at all; and now, as a
sheer speculation, on the very off-chance of a Saxon
court theatre accepting a work by a Saxon composer,
harassed by creditors, despondent under repeated disappointments,
drudging hours a day at hack-labour, he went to work
and composed and instrumentated the last three acts
of the most brilliant opera that had been written
up to that date—1841. On February 15
of that year he began; on November 19 he ruled the
last double-bar and wrote finis. That done, he
dispatched the complete score and a copy of the words
to Dresden, with a letter to von Luettichau, the intendant.
Again the delays seemed interminable; his letters,