Friday, March 08, 2013

Wagner autobiography ... much more interesting than I imagined

I am reading a fascinating book, the autobiography of Richard Wagner called My Life. It is such an interesting insight into how life was lived in 1850. I am up to the part where he and his wife are on a boat,  traveling  to Paris from Konigsberg (now Poland). They are traveling without passports and to get out of Konigsberg without a passport they had to flee across a border at night behind the backs of Cossack guards. Wagner seems to have regarded small things like laws as irrelevant to him.

So now they are on a boat being blown up the coast in a violent storm, the noise and fury of which he later wrote into his opera The Flying Dutchman.

I found my copy in English on Amazon for free, contributed by a team of volunteers. When I tried to find this again I found other copies on Amazon as well ... but not free.


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