During his time in Prague, still only nineteen, he began writing the libretto of his first opera, Die Hochzeit. It was not long before he began to set the opera to music, but the work was never completed. His sister Rosalie did not like the libretto, and didn’t hesitate to say so. “My principal object was, all the same, to win my sister Rosalie's approval. My poem, however, did not find favour in her eyes: she missed all that which I had purposely avoided, insisted on the ornamentation and development of the simple situation, and desired more brightness generally. I made up my mind in an instant: I took the manuscript, and without a suggestion of ill-temper, destroyed it there and then. This action had nothing whatever to do with wounded vanity. It was prompted merely by my desire honestly to prove to my sister how little I thought of my own work and how much I cared for her opinion.”²

Among his friends at this time was Heinrich Laube, a publisher and intellectual in the forefront of the Young Germans (a political literary society which sought to reject the Romantic movement). Wagner began to write articles for the Zeitung für die elegante Welt and other publications.

Würzburg

In 1833 Richard gained an appointment as choirmaster at Würzburg’s theatre (due to his brother’s influence), and he began work on a new libretto, Die Feen. He carried over some of his characters from Die Hochzeit into it. This opera was completed, text and music, in 1834, and it remains an attractive piece of work that speaks highly of Wagner’s potential, even though the influences of Marschner and Weber are strongly to be discerned. Die Feen was never performed during Wagner’s lifetime – its first performance lay fifty years in the future.

During this time, Wagner began to engage in love affairs with women, and possibly impregnated and subsequently abandoned Friederike Galvani, who was ostensibly engaged to an oboist. He realised that he had some quality attractive to women, and did not scruple to use this quality. He possessed, in addition, something magnetic in his personality that drew friends to him, who exerted themselves on his behalf – Wagner never considered these exertions as obligating him in any way, for he interpreted them as the just due of his talent. In opposition to this quality of attraction, he also had the facility of creating enemies, and in his dealings with others he was not a deeply sensitive or sympathetic man. This dichotomy was to persist his whole life, gaining him admirers and detractors in equal number and of equal fervour.

In 1834, he began work on the libretto of a new opera, Das Liebesverbot (based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), and soon after, in July, he accepted the post of music director with Heinrich Bethmann’s touring theatrical company in Magdeburg. It was not a large company, and its solvency was somewhat in doubt. Possibly Wagner only accepted the post after meeting and becoming involved with one of the actresses, Christine Wilhelmine Planer, known as Minna, whom he was later to marry.