Dresden, the capital city of the Kingdom of Saxony since 1806, was intimately connected with Wagner’s childhood and his early professional life as Royal court Kapellmeister from 1843 to 1849. The locale is thus both a key site of early life impressions and the site of the composer’s most critical period of creative development, from the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer up to the first conceptual stages of Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy. The shared post of Hofkapellmeister involved continual negotiations between a musical-theatrical ancien régime and Wagner’s developing vision of a radical new aesthetic-social order manifested in his own operas, writings and utopian ideals. Wagner’s programming of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at key junctures during the later period of his Kapellmeistership and the burning of the ‘old’ (Pöppelmann) court theatre during the May 1849 insurrection are read as symbolic of a key transition in Wagner’s life and artistic career.