Richard Wagner was not the first German composer to write an autobiography. As a body of scholarly publications on music became established from the mid-eighteenth century onward, composers began to record the facts of their lives for posterity, often prompted by the authors and compilers of the newly emergent encyclopedias and dictionaries. Johann Sebastian Bach might have refused to write anything autobiographical when urged to do so by Johann Mattheson, but others proved more willing. Georg Telemann and Joseph Haydn were among those who provided brief autobiographical sketches for various editors. As the century progressed, composers needed less and less prompting to commit their lives to paper, and the autobiographies of men such as Christian Schubart (1739–91), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–99), and others offer firsthand accounts of the musical life of Central Europe. By the time Wagner published his “Autobiographical Sketch” in 1843, it was not unusual for a composer to write about himself, nor was it new to link a man’s music with his biography. In his extensive review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835, Robert Schumann related that work’s program in detail, noting that “the composer wanted to depict several moments from the life of a … musician.” He tut-tutted the work’s obvious tendency to autobiography, finding it distastefully Francophone. The German man, he assured his reader, possessed instead a “shyness before the workplace of genius; he wishes to know nothing of the origins, the tools and secrets of creation … let the artist thus shut himself away in his labor pains; we would experience terrible things if we could see all works down to the foundations of their creation.” Wagner was of a different opinion. He knew that the public most definitely wanted to see the artist’s “labor pains.” His “Autobiographical Sketch” was different from similar texts by his predecessors in that its author was young—not yet out of his twenties—and little known. His Rienzi had only just been premiered in October 1842, and his Flying Dutchman on January 2, 1843, both in Dresden; and in the wake of his success he was appointed kapellmeister there in early February.