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PART II (1842-1850) － 47

Highly gifted as Marschner was, there can be no doubt that the decline of his genius was due partly to a tendency which even in the ageing master himself, as he frankly admitted, was effecting an important and most salutary change. In later years I met him once more in Paris at the time of my memorable production of Tannhäuser. I did not feel inclined to renew the old relations, for, to tell the truth, I wanted to spare myself the unpleasantness of witnessing the consequences of his change of views, of which we had seen the beginning in Dresden. I learned that he was in a state of almost helpless childishness, and that he was in the hands of a young and ambitious woman, who was trying to make a last attempt at conquering Paris for him. Among other puff paragraphs calculated to spread Marschner’s glory, I read one which said that the Parisians must not believe that I (Wagner) was representative of German art; no—if only Marschner were given a hearing, it would be discovered that he was beyond a doubt better suited to the French taste than I could ever be. Marschner died before his wife had succeeded in establishing this point.

Ferdinand Hiller, on the other hand, who was in Dresden, behaved in a very charming and friendly manner, particularly at this time. Meyerbeer also stayed in the same town from time to time; precisely why, nobody knew. Once he had rented a little house for the summer near the Pirnaischer Schlag, and under a pretty tree in the garden of this place he had had a small piano installed, whereon, in this idyllic retreat, he worked at his Feldlager in Schlesien. He lived in great retirement, and I saw very little of him. Ferdinand Hiller, on the contrary, took a commanding position in the Dresden musical world in so far as this was not already monopolised by the royal orchestra and its masters, and for many years he worked hard for its success. Having a little private capital, he established himself comfortably amongst us, and was soon known as a delightful host, who kept a pleasant house, which, thanks to his wife’s influence, was frequented by a numerous Polish colony. Frau Hiller was indeed an exceptional Jewish woman of Polish origin, and she was perhaps all the more exceptional seeing that she, in company with her husband, had been baptized a Protestant in Italy. Hiller began his career in Dresden with the production of his opera, Der Traum in der Christnacht. Since the unheard-of fact that Rienzi had been able to rouse the Dresden public to lasting enthusiasm, many an opera composer had felt himself drawn towards our ‘Florence on the Elbe,’ of which Laube once said that as soon as one entered it one felt bound to apologise because one found so many good things there which one promptly forgot the moment one departed.

The composer of Der Traum in der Christnacht looked upon this work as a peculiarly ‘German composition.’ Hiller had set to music a gruesome play by Raupach, Der Muller und sein Kind (‘The Miller and his Child’), in which father and daughter, within but a short space of time, both die of consumption. He declared that he had conceived the dialogue and the music of this opera in what he called the ‘popular style,’ but this work met with the same fate as that which, according to Liszt, befell all his compositions. In spite of his undoubted musical merits, which even Rossini acknowledged, and whether he gave them in French in Paris or in Italian in Italy, it was his sad experience always to see his operas fail. In Germany he had tried the Mendelssohnian style, and had succeeded in composing an oratorio called Die Zerstorung Jerusalems, which luckily was not taken notice of by the moody theatre-going public, and which consequently received the unassailable reputation of being ‘a solid German work.’ He also took Mendelssohn’s place as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts when the latter was called to Berlin in the capacity of general director. Hiller’s evil fortune still pursued him, however, and he was unable to retain his position, everybody being given to understand that it was because his wife was not sufficiently acknowledged as concert prima-donna. Mendelssohn returned and made Hiller leave, and Hiller boasted of having quarrelled with him.