Find out why Wagner was forced to flee Dresden to avoid arrest in 1849...
Wagner on the run... an arrest warrant is issued
'The Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner is wanted for examination on account of his active participation in the recent rising here, but as yet he has not been found’. Thus ran a warrant published in a Dresden newspaper on 19 May 1849, empowering the local police force to hunt down and capture the fugitive composer. Wagner was 120 miles away from Dresden at the time, staying with his friend Franz Liszt in Weimar. ‘Wagner is of middle height, has brown hair, and wears glasses,’ the warrant continued. ‘Well, that applies to a lot of people!’, the German composer reputedly retorted.
Wagner... violent political associations
Joking aside, his situation was undoubtedly serious. Wagner had indeed been extensively involved in the May Uprising in Dresden, one of the last in a wave of violent insurrections sweeping Europe in the 1848-9 period. Sympathetic to the left-wing revolutionaries aiming to unite the 39 separate German states into a single constitutional democracy, he wrote articles inciting citizens to revolt, distributed hand grenades and monitored the action from the tower of the Dresden Kreuzkirche.
While there, he (typically) engaged in an ‘earnest philosophical discussion’ with a schoolmaster and sent a note to his wife Minna requesting ‘some necessary provisions’. Elsewhere, eyewitnesses reported seeing Wagner manning barricades, handling a gun and mingling with his fellow revolutionaries as the street-fighting against Saxon and Prussian troops unfolded.
Wagner himself was curiously diffident in his later memories of this tumultuous period, perhaps anxious to mask his full involvement. Initially attracted, he claimed, ‘by surprise and interest in the drama, without feeling any desire to join the ranks of the combatants’, by his own admission he was soon organising a demonstration and having placards printed. ‘Are you on our side against the foreign troops?’, they read, in an attempt to turn the local Saxon soldiers against the Prussian forces. Within a week, however, the writing was on the wall, as a superior number of government soldiers – around 5,000 – gradually subjugated the 3,000 insurgents.
Wagner... a wanted man flees arrest
Arrests of those involved in the Uprising began, and Wagner quickly transported his wife Minna, their dog Peps and a pet parrot to his married sister’s house in Chemnitz, 60 miles away. Returning to Dresden, he witnessed the final collapse of the Uprising before attempting to return to Chemnitz. This, though, was impossible. Wagner had, it seemed, ‘been seen in close association with the revolutionaries’, and would face arrest if he lingered in the city.
And so he went to Liszt in Weimar, ‘where I had originally planned to spend my holidays’, as Wagner later wrote, with ripe if unintentional irony. Now, however, he was a wanted man, and worried how the eminent Liszt might react to his situation. ‘I found it very difficult to confess that I had not left Dresden in the regulation way for a conductor of the royal opera,’ he wrote sheepishly in his autobiography.
Wagner... an escape across the border to Switzerland
Though Wagner mused disingenuously on his precise legal situation – ‘Had I done anything criminal in the eye of the law or not?’, he wondered – Liszt had no doubt that the composer should immediately flee the German territories, avoiding arrest and potential imprisonment. Taking coaches, and leaving Minna behind, Wagner made the 300-mile journey from Weimar to Lindau in Bavaria. There, on 28 May 1849, he caught a steamer across Lake Constance to Rorschach in Switzerland. He was travelling, illegally, on a friend’s passport, which fortunately went undetected.
Though initially penniless, Wagner now experienced ‘a level of freedom and comfort that I had never enjoyed before’. After sojourning briefly in Paris, he sought a ‘place of refuge’ in Zurich, where he stayed for the next nine years. Minna eventually joined him, but their relationship was terminally fractured, and Wagner had several affairs in the 1850s. Despite ongoing emotional turbulence (or because of it), he was also highly productive, writing essays including ‘The Artwork of the Future’, and beginning compositional work on both Der Ring des Nibelungen and Tristan und Isolde.
Wagner avoids arrest... an influence on his famous Ring cycle
The Ring in particular would bear the heavy imprint of Wagner’s involvement in the May Uprising, which served to clarify his evolving thoughts on the organisation and destiny of human society. Its tale of greed, cruelty, exploitation, lovelessness and economic inequality had been starkly foreshadowed in the embattled streets of Dresden, where for a short period a revolution in the social order seemed possible. The Ring was about the continuing need for such a revolution – ‘so that the people of the revolution might understand, in the noblest sense, its real significance’.