The next day, Wagner, who had been editing the Volksblätter himself for the past few weeks, had the paper’s printer run off handbills to win over the royalist soldiers. The boys who put up the bills (“Are You With Us Against Foreign Troops?”) inadvertently pasted them up on the rebels’ side of the barricades where the Saxon soldiers couldn’t see them. So Wagner had another 200 printed up, carried them through the barricades, and handed them out among the King’s soldiers himself.
Mein Leben tells the story of the handbills; but it does not go into the details of their incorrect placement or what Wagner did about it.
On the following night, with a Döbeln schoolmaster and a Reichenbach professor, Wagner stood watch atop the 300-foot Kreuzkirche Tower, where, under fire from the royalist soldiers, bullets splattered against the back wall now and again through the night. Between discussions of the Christian philosophy of life, the men observed and wrote down the movements of the royalist troops, tying the messages to rocks and tossing them over into the square below to be run to General Heubner and Bakúnin at the city hall, who were trying to maintain some organizational efficiency among the volunteer rebels.
On the floor of the tower, Wagner finally slept. Just before daylight, he records:
I was awakened by the song of the nightingale wafting up from the Shutze garden close beneath us; a sacred calm and tranquility lay over the city and the broad expanse of its surroundings I could see from my vantage point: toward dawn a light fog settled on the outskirts: penetrating through it we suddenly heard, from the area of the Tharandt road, the music of the Marseillaise clearly and distinctly; as the source of the sound came closer, the mists dispersed and the blood-red rising sun glittered upon the guns of a long column marching into the city. It was impossible to resist the impression of this unfolding sight; suddenly that element I had long missed in the German people, the absence of any evidence of which had contributed in no small part to the mood which had dominated me until then, now pressed in upon me in the freshest and most palpable colors; these were no fewer than several thousand well-armed and organized men from the Erzgebirge, mostly miners, who had arrived to help in the defence of Dresden. Soon we saw them march into the old market square, outside the city hall and, after a jubilant greeting by the people, encamp there to rest after their march. Similar contingents kept arriving throughout the day.
One can only remember here the miners in the opening paragraph of the “Prose Sketch.”
Sometime before noon, someone spotted flames springing up from the old Dresden Opera House.
Always a firetrap, it had been torched by the insurgents while the fire could be controlled, to prevent its going up accidentally in the bombardment, where it might destroy the whole neighborhood. Wagner had come to loathe his Kapellmeister job. The Ninth Symphony aside, his attempts at theater reform had been stymied at every turn. And there was the canceled Lohengrin premiere…
Wagner sent down from the tower for wine and snuff in honor of the theater’s destruction; they arrived with a message from Minna to please return home. And the lookout tower was now filling up with armed men, sent there to fire upon the approach to the old market square as soon as the expected attack on it from the Kreuzgasse began. At last Wagner descended from his outpost and philosophical eyrie.
At the Marcolini, he found his apartment full of his wife’s excited friends, including Röckel’s wife, who was particularly upset. Two of his young nieces had arrived. Their exuberant mood over the shooting and excitement even infected Minna, who was much relieved to see her husband back safe. Downstairs, the sculptor Hänel had wanted to shut up the whole palace “so that no revolutionaries might get in,” which had angered the women. Now everyone enjoyed making fun of his terror.
The next day, when Wagner was passing St. Ann’s church, a member of the Communal Guard called out to him, “Herr Kapellmeister, the spark of divine joy — ” quoting from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”—“has certainly ignited everything; the rotten building has burned to the ground.”
“Obviously this enthusiast had attended the last performance of the Ninth” Wagner comments wryly in his journal. (The “Ode” is, of course, the choral text for the Ninth’s final movement.) Later, when he had a moment to note the conflagration, Wagner (again in his journal) wrote: “Opera house now burned down; strangely contented.”
After meeting with Bakúnin, Wagner got Minna and Natalie (and the parrot and the dog) off to Chemnitz, after taking a last walk along where he had done much of his thinking, talking with friends, and composing, while the sounds of gunfire rattled through the melancholy spring morning. Leaving Minna and her little “sister” with his own married sister, Klara, he returned to Dresden on May 8th (Wagner writes May gth):
… the only safe way to advance was through shattered buildings, making my way toward the city hall on the old market place. It was already evening; what I saw offered a truly horrible picture, for I was passing through those parts of the city where everyone was prepared for house-to-house fighting. The unceasing roar of big and small arms fire made the other sounds of the armed men calling to one another from barricade to barricade, or from one shattered house to another, seem merely an uncanny murmur. Torches burned here and there, and pale exhausted figures lay about close to the guardposts, while stern challenges met the unarmed intruder.
At the city hall, everyone was exhausted. People’s voices croaked or were hoarse. The old city council clerks stood around, cutting up sausages and spreading butter on slices of bread, while others distributed provisions to the hungry.
Heubner alone seemed to have retained his energy, though his eyes flickered with an “unearthly fire”; he had not really slept for seven nights. He was glad to see Wagner, and the two men conversed.
Bakúnin… received me on one of the mattresses which had been spread out in the city hall council chamber, a cigar in his mouth and at his side a very young Galician Pole, by the name of Haimberger, a young violinist whom he had referred to me recently for recommendation to Lipinsky for further training on his instrument… Bakúnin had made a place for him on the mattress, and gave him a vigorous slap on the back whenever he twitched at the sound of a heavy cannonfire. “You’re a long way from your violin here,” he called out to him. “You should have stayed with it, musician.”
Bakúnin brought Wagner up to date. No one had seen the recently returned Röckel since the previous evening. He had probably been caught. Wagner told of the troops he’d seen between Chemnitz and Dresden, including several thousand reinforcements. Bakúnin and Heubner sent Wagner off to drum up more vehicles for the rebels, along with Wagner’s old friend Marschall von Bieberstein, which the two men did, going to Freiberg and, after various adventures and some success, returning.
The retreat from Dresden had already begun before Wagner quite reached the city. Someone pointed out the coach carrying “the provisional government,” and Wagner flagged it down to join Heubner, Bakúnin, and the Rochlitz editor (remember Wagner’s arguments for war) in the overloaded carriage on the trip to Erzgebirge — which is where we started our story in the previous section.
All that lay ahead was the dismounting, the trap, the missed coach, the arrest of Heubner and Bakúnin — and Wagner’s flight.