This seems to be the sort of mistake that abounds in Mein Leben. Dates are off here and there. Sometimes Wagner misremembers names. Occasionally events are out of order. But save for those discretionary omissions and a sense of occasion that are the prerogative of any autobiographer, I don’t find examples of rank lies or outright prevarication. Indeed, Wagner expends considerable energy and narrative ingenuity to achieve the proper tone and feel for complexes of occurrences that even the most exhaustive memoirist would have had to abridge in order to remain readable.
In his account of the calamities in Dresden in the spring of 1849, Wagner describes his actions of early May — the decisive period — with dates and days of the week. Researchers have ascertained he was off as much as two days in some of the early events and a steady day off in his account of what occurred on May 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. Biographers have since tried to document this period in Wagner’s life day by day and, in some cases, hour by hour. The import of these times is easy enough to understand simply by the cataclysmic devastation they encompassed:
On Palm Sunday of spring 1849, Second Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner conducted a triumphant concert of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Dresden Royal Opera House, to a sold-out audience in a benefit performance for the orchestra’s pension fund, recreating for the second time his triumphant Palm Sunday concert of 1846, when he first performed the same work for the skeptical Dresden public. In ’46, through careful placement of articles on the difficult symphony in local papers, an imaginatively written program for the concert, and meticulous rehearsals for the orchestra (and an intelligent rearrangement of the usual orchestra placement into a form we are all familiar with today but which in 1846 was novel) and the chorus of three hundred, Wagner achieved a great success with what had been considered till then a difficult and inaccessible work, which had, when it had been conducted by First Kapellmeister Reissiger a few years before, left the Dresden audience bewildered and unenthusiastic.
By mid-May, some six weeks after this third Palm Sunday benefit performance of the Ninth, which, over three years (missing only 1848), Wagner had made into a Dresden tradition, thousands of men, many of them miners, were dead in the Dresden streets. The Dresden Opera House, where the concert had taken place, had been burned to the ground and was now a charred foundation. And Richard Wagner was in flight from Germany, under an assumed name (“Professor Werder”) and with a false passport, for Paris and finally Zurich.
Three of his friends, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakúnin, the head of the Dresden Provisional Government, Otto Heubner, and the publisher of the radical newspaper, Die Volksblätter (which Wagner himself had edited for a while and written for extensively), August Röckel, had already been arrested, to be sentenced to life imprisonment or death for treason.
Wagner had ridden with Bakúnin and Heubner to Freiberg. A newspaper editor from Rochlitz named Semming, with them in the coach, years later gave this account:
Conversation… was out of the question: before us, around us, behind us, was nothing but a crowd of armed men in great agitation. But all the din, all the shouting and rattling of arms, was drowned by the flaming talk of Wagner. Never have I seen a man so excited… “War!” he kept shouting. This was all he had on his lips and his mind: he poured out such a flood of words that it is impossible for me now to remember it all… The paroxysm lasted perhaps more than half an hour: and so overwhelmed was I by the storm of words of this man sitting next to me — shall I call him Wotan or Siegried? — that I could not address a single word to him. This scene remains with me as one of the most thrilling of my memories of those terrible, stormy days.
Soldiers had climbed on the back of the coach, and the vehicle was loaded down. The coachman complained that the carriage had very delicate springs and was likely to break under the weight; he begged people to dismount, and at one point even broke out sobbing. Bakúnin thought this viciously funny. (“The tears of the philistine,” he whispered to Wagner, “are the nectar of the gods,” and continued by telling how, earlier, when he’d had to order trees along the Maximilians-Allee in Dresden cut down, so as not to provide shelter for the Prussian invaders, the people who lived on the street had complained volubly of the fate of their “bee-yoo-ti-ful trees.”) But finally Wagner and Heubner dismounted and continued together on foot, while Bakúnin stayed in the coach. While they were walking, some messengers from a group of soldiers the two men spotted on a hill extended an invitation to Heubner to come to Chemnitz and set up his provisional government there. (Wagner was on his way to Chemnitz because his wife had already gone there to be with brother-in-law Brockhaus, and Wagner was going to rejoin her.) When they reached Heubner’s Freiberg home, Wagner ate with Bakúnin, Heubner, and Heubner’s family, and rested there a while. The exhausted Bakúnin went to sleep sitting on the living room couch, his huge, bearded head falling on Wagner’s shoulder.
As Wagner recounts in Mein Leben, it was only a mix-up, due to a delayed mailcoach from Freiberg to Chemnitz, on May 9th, that prevented Wagner from ending up again in the same carriage with Heubner and the Russian, who had already ridden on to Chemnitz; when they announced themselves come to set up the provisional government, they were arrested at their inn.
The invitation from the soldiers to establish the new government there had been a lure and trap set by the opposition officers.
In the course of Wagner’s flight, on May 10th, he stopped to attend a rehearsal of Tannhäuser his friend Liszt was conducting in Weimar. From there, on the 14th, he wrote to his wife Minna of revolution:
[P]eople of our sort are not destined for this terrible task. We are revolutionaries only in order to build on fresh soil; it is re-creation that attracts us, not destruction, which is why we are not the people whom fate requires. These will arise from the very lowest dregs of society; we and our hearts can have nothing in common with them. You see? Thus do I bid farewell to revolution…
I think it’s to Wagner’s credit that, while he did send the above to Minna, he neither quotes it in Mein Leben nor does he express any similar sentiment there. By 1865 he was willing to take responsibility for what he had done — at least for what of it he was willing to admit to. But despite any personal regrets he had at the time, by the 19th of May a Wanted notice appeared in the Dresdner Anzeiger:
Warrant. The Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner, of this place, being somewhat more closely described below, is wanted for questioning on account of his material participation in the rebellious activities that took place in this city, but has not so far been found… Wagner is 37 or 38 years old [Actually he was three days shy of 36], of medium height, has brown hair and a high forehead.