Wagner spent a miserable two and a half years in Paris, from September 1839 to April 1842, attempting to take the Opéra by storm through sheer persistence, though he had to his credit but two overlong, immature works—Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot—which no reputable opera management would touch. In Paris, he completed the score of Rienzi in debtors' prison—resourceful borrowing fueling spendthrift extravagance set the stage for the colossal luxury and appalling debt of his subsequent career. On Meyerbeer's recommendation, Rienzi was accepted by the Dresden Court Theater and Wagner returned to Germany to see the production through. The premiere on October 20, 1842, despite lasting six hours, was an unqualified success and a money-maker for the house, under whose terms Wagner was paid a flat fee of 300 thalers, with no royalties. Meanwhile, as Rienzi's success was lifting him from obscurity, Wagner was abandoning its French and Italian models—Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836) in the vanguard—for the "deeper" and more metaphysically fraught conception of Der fliegende Holländer, with its theme of "redemption" through the love of a devoted woman. Despite the mixed reception of its premiere on January 2, 1843—with Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, Wagner's favorite soprano, as Senta—Der fliegende Holländer proved a viable stage vehicle and the Intendant of the Dresden Court Theater, Freiherr von Lüttichau, offered him an assistant conductor's post. As he passed his 30th birthday it was evident that Wagner was a person of consequence. He dickered and Lüttichau offered him a permanent post as Kapellmeister at a salary of 1,500 thalers a year. Despite the attendant prestige, he was a liveried servant and obliged to compose music for special occasions, among which was a mammoth choral festival in Dresden. Of Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (Love-feast of the Apostles), composed between May 14 and June 16, 1843, Wagner wrote, "I designed a great choral scene, selecting the apostolic Pentecost with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost as its subject. I completely avoided any actual solos, but worked out the whole in such a way that it should be executed by detached choral masses...When, therefore, 1,200 singers from all parts of Saxony gathered around me in the Frauenkirche"—for the premiere, July 6, 1843—"I was astonished at the comparatively feeble effect produced on my ear by this colossal human tangle of sounds." Playing half an hour, the division of choral forces into three, four, even five groups looks ahead to the Grail temple scenes in Parsifal.

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