Wagner Writes from Paris

Book excerpt: "At the age of twenty-six Richard Wagner gave up his as yet undistinguished musical career in Germany and traveled to Paris, then the musical center of Europe, in order to make his fortune with a grand opera, Rienzi. It was a mad undertaking. The operatic Paris of the early 1840's was a rat race in which an impecunious, unknown German stood no chance. Wagner barely managed to survive by means of journalism and musical hackwork. But he did composer his first masterpiece, The Flying Dutchman. And from the mercenary, sensation-loving French capital, Wagner looked back to his homeland, the country of Mozart and Beethoven, as the inspiration of the ideals of artistic depth and purity which were to dominate his later life. The writings presented in this book present Wagner in a new and unexpected light. They strikingly convey what he thought, felt, and suffered as a young man, before bitterness and frustration took their toll. In later years Wagner's pen was employed mainly to project himself upon a recalcitrant world as the creator of a new and greater art. Here, his style is unpretentious, his mind still open, his voice still gay. These early writings convey the fascination of Wagner's personality--an impassioned idealist, a penetrating thinker, a shrewd observer, warmhearted, courageous, and brimming over with high spirits, poetry, and humor. They also vividly re-create the life of Paris in the pleasure-loving age that followed Napoleon and gave a dramatic insight into the revolutionary ideas which Wagner was triumphantly to vindicate in his later music. This selection of the best pieces which Wagner wrote for French and German periodicals, newly translated and edited by two of the leading Wagner specialists in England today, rescues some superb writing from undeserved neglect. And it provides a self-revealing and witty portrait of a great composer before he became famous." --Jacket.