me it was neglected. But
Dresden reinforced it as only a court-ridden town can, a town whose
inhabitants were, almost to a man, the sort of flunkeys who hang
around a Court.

Wagner did not wish to be kapellmeister--on the contrary, wished most
vigorously not to be kapellmeister. What on earth he did wish to be,
how he hoped to earn bread--he who had had only one opera produced,
and gained L45 by it: it is idle to speculate concerning such
questions. Excepting that he laboured incessantly at his
operas--scheming and sketching, if not actually composing and
writing--he would seem at this stage of his growth to have been a Mr.
Micawber, whose contemporary, of course, he was. He flirted with von
Luettichau, the intendant of the theatre, a fine specimen of a court
barbarian. Wagner neither would nor wouldn't; and it was only when the
theatre found it could not well do without him, and asked him to say
definitely if he would, that he accepted the offer. We can imagine how
poor, stupid, unimaginative Minna would rejoice at the news. She ought
to have married a pork butcher, or would have behaved admirably as the
mistress of a beerhouse or cafe; but as the wife of a man of genius--!
To be the wife of the kapellmeister of one of Germany's principal
opera-houses--a court opera-house--that was almost, if not quite, as
good; and for the time she rested content with her lot. And we may
believe that Richard, too, felt a double gratification, even against
his deepest and truest instincts. The salary lifted a burden off his
shoulders for a while; and was he not appointed to the very post his
idol Weber had occupied? Nevertheless, things soon came to pass which
show how the Richard who set off from Pillau to Paris with his bare
travelling expenses, and the Richard who was to do yet madder things
hereafter, was the Richard of this middle period. This von Luettichau
said it was the rule of the court that a new conductor should serve a
year on trial. Wagner was quite brutally reminded that the mighty
Weber had been compelled to do so; and he was told _he_ must do so. He
point-blank refused; sent the Luettichau man a long explanation--which,
I dare say, was never read--of why he couldn't accept such terms;
spoke of the necessity of getting some sort of order and discipline
into an orchestra which Reissiger had allowed to go to pieces, etc.,
etc. But he had to his credit, as we have seen, the triumphs of
_Rienzi_ and the _Dutchman_; and it