Siegfrieds Tod was finished, and — along with fifty-odd pages of a sketch of another drama based on the life of Jesus, in which Jesus is presented as a property-despising revolutionary — was read to an otherwise sympathetic group of republicans, though it did not get much sympathy from Bakúnin, who was among the hearers.
No doubt the Kapellmeister’s political interests were also causing rifts at home. It’s highly possible that at this time Wagner also wrote an article that may have been an early version of “Das Judentum in der Musik,” of which Minna was to write two years later, “you defame [d] an entire race.” Minna would not read it — or, at least, was highly unhappy with it. The article was not published — at least in that form. But from that time on, Minna later chided her husband, Wagner would neither show her nor play for her any more of his creative works. While our reconstruction of the reasons for his behavior towards her is largely supposition, we do know that at some point in the midst of all this, at least momentarily, Wagner decided to break with her: there is a journal entry to that effect from this date. But apparently he decided not to act on it.
The general rehearsals for the annual Palm Sunday benefit concert were opened to those of the Dresden public who could not afford the expensive tickets to the actual performance.
Wagner recounts:
The general rehearsal had been attended, in secret and without the knowledge of the police, by Michael Bakúnin; after it was all over he came up to me unabashedly in the orchestra in order to call out to me that, if all music were lost in the coming world-conflagration, we should risk our own lives to preserve this symphony.
If, of all people, Bakúnin could declare such a grand and noble musical work as the Ninth worth preserving, then it might also be worth writing such a work, especially if it dramatized the way in which world civilization, both the noble and the base in their intricate relation, came to destroy itself to make way for the new order. Some vision of that task was what I feel Wagner, in the year covering ’48 and ’49, was forming for the Ring. But the new order was, at least as far as we can tell from what Wagner had been proclaiming for most of a year now, basically the old order with free elections, trial by jury, and a much stronger parliament.
Röckel had temporarily fled; so Wagner took over the Volksblätter editorship. On May 3, 1849, writes Wagner,
…the appearance of the crowds streaming through our streets made clear enough that what everybody undoubtedly wanted was going to happen, for all petitions to obtain recognition of the German constitution, the main bone of contention, had been rejected by the government with a firmness it had heretofore failed to show.
Wagner attended a particularly unruly Vaterlands-Verein meeting the next morning. The workers at the meeting were angry and talked of arms and preparation for invasion, while the more theoretically- inclined middle-class members seemed indecisive. When it was decided to end the meeting, Wagner’s impression was one of “utter chaos.”
He goes on:
I departed with the painter Kaufman, a young artist whose work I had observed in the Dresden art exhibition, where he had shown a series of drawings illustrating the “History of the Human Spirit.” I had seen the King of Saxony pause in front of those drawings, which represented the torture of a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition, and had noticed him turn away from this abstruse subject, shaking his head in disapproval. I was on my way home in conversation with this man, whose pale and troubled countenance reflected his realization of the coming events, when, just as we reached the Postplatz in the vicinity of the recently erected fountain designed by Semper, the bells in the nearby tower of St. Ann’s Church suddenly began to clash out the signal for revolt. “My God, it has begun!” my companion shouted, and vanished from my side forthwith… I never saw him again… It was a very sunny afternoon… The whole square before me seemed bathed in a dark yellow, almost brown light, similar to a color I had once experienced at Magdeburg during a solar eclipse. My most pronounced sensation was one of great, almost extravagant well-being.
Wagner’s first act was to run to the nearby house of the tenor Tichatschek and requisition the singer’s sporting guns from his wife. (Tichatschek was out.) Leaving her a receipt for them, he went to park them at the Vaterlands-Verein headquarters. He claimed he was afraid that the general rabble in the street might rush in and seize them — or that the excitable tenor might do something silly with them. At any rate, this is another claim often taken by his later biographers to be disingenuous. And when the warrant was issued for him later, it was listed as among his crimes.
Then Wagner went out to explore what was happening in the city — and at some point wrote out an order for the powder to be packed into those grenades.
About fifty years after the fact, that indefatigable English collector of Wagneriana, Mrs. Burrell, transcribed an eyewitness report from a daughter of one of Wagner’s Dresden friends, who recalled the first day of violence in the city, when, as a young girl, she sat watching and listening from her third story window, as first a young miner, then an older one, harangued the crowd, which later marched off looking for arms. After the first shots, a bit later she saw the corpse of the older of the two miners wheeled by her house in an open van, surrounded by the people, the body half naked now and lying on its belly, displaying a bloody back wound — the first casualty, or one of the first, in a list that was to swell, over the next days, to thousands. Wagner’s favorite soprano at the Dresden opera, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, saw them pass from her second floor window in the same block of flats and shrieked out, “Rächt Euch an der Reaction!” (“Revenge yourselves upon the reactionaries!”) which, misinterpreted by the people, started a round of merchandise looting from the ground floor apothecary, which was used as a barricade in a nearby street.
Wagner also encountered the soprano. Either it was earlier that day, or possibly the account above comes from a day later. At any rate, Wagner writes:
I now descended again into the streets to see what was going on in the city, apart from the clangor of the tocsin and the yellowish solar eclipse. I first reached the old market square and noticed a group there in the midst of which someone was making an animated speech. To my almost delighted astonishment, I beheld Frau Schröder-Devrient, who had just come back from Berlin, and was standing in front of a hotel evincing tremendous excitement at the news immediately communicated to her that the populace had already been fired upon. She had just seen an attempted revolt crushed by force of arms in Berlin, and she now was highly indignant to see the same thing happening in what she regarded as her peaceful Dresden… I met her again the following day at the home of my old friend, Heine [the recently dismissed set-designer for Lohengrin], where she had taken refuge; there she once again implored me, inasmuch as she attributed to me the requisite sang-froid, to make every effort to stop the senseless and murderous struggle.
Shots had been fired; men had been killed; there were barricades in the streets; and Wagner was at the city hall in the thick of meetings and conversations and arguments. The King by now had quit Dresden proper, for Konigstein on the Elbe. Saxon royalist troops were in the city; but Prussians had been called in.