The old world is very remote from us now, but it is worth while making a
small attempt to realize how it stood to Wagner. When he was born, in
1813, Bach had been dead only a little over sixty years; Mozart had been
dead about twenty years, and Haydn about ten; Beethoven was in the full
splendour of his tremendous powers; Weber and Schubert had still their
finest work to do. To grasp all that this means, let us consider our
relation to Mendelssohn. He died nearly sixty years ago; yet, whatever
we may think of him as a composer, we can scarcely call him
old-fashioned: he remains indisputably one of the moderns. Now, Wagner
can never have looked upon Bach as a modern. He spoke of him and his old
periwig almost as one might allude to an extinct race of animals. The
history of an art cannot be measured off in years: in some periods it
moves slowly, in others with startling rapidity. Since Mendelssohn's day
composers have sought rather to develop old resources and forms than to
find and create new ones, whereas in the sixty years that lie between
Bach's death and Wagner's birth the whole form and content, the very
stuff, of music was changed. In 1750 he would have been a daring and
extraordinarily sapient being who prophesied that within forty years
Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a
great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and
certainly no such list of mighty names. It was in the period of swift
transition from Bach's fugues to Beethoven's Choral Symphony that Wagner
was born, a period when musical Germany was in a state of tumultuous
ebullition. Later we shall see for how much this counted in the growth
of Wagner's genius. In the meantime it may be observed that in externals
the world of 1813 was not so far removed from the world of 1750. All the
men on whose work Wagner was fed and brought up had their roots in a
past that is now dead and buried. Had he been born a few years earlier
he might have worn a wig; the stock was not to depart for many a year to
come. A man might still, without causing remark, wear coats, waistcoats
and trousers of many hues. The old world was going fast, but it had not
gone. The fires of the French Revolution had cast strange lights amongst
the peoples and struck a deadly chill into the hearts of kings and
governors. Napoleon had shown what the will, brain and energy of a man
could do, and all the forces of reaction were gathering together to
crush him at Waterloo; the heads of men were seething with new ideas,
destined to bring about the strangest results a few years afterwards;
but the old order still prevailed, had not yet yielded to the new. Let
us remember how short a time had passed since Haydn retired, after a
life spent at a pig-tail German Court in the service of a princeling
whose position was about as lofty as that of an English country squire,
though it must be admitted that his tastes were a little more elevated.
Railways had not defiled the landscapes of Europe, nor gas robbed her
cities of all romance by night. The watchman blew his horn and called
the hour, and told all those abed that it rained or snowed. Most of the
blessings of civilization, which were to do so much for humanity and
have done so little, had yet to come. Fair fields and forests, fresh,
unpolluted rivers, cities of great-gabled houses, old-world narrow
streets and beautiful gardens, and, excepting in England, few noisy
smoking factories and foul chemical works--this was the Europe into
which Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813.
He was born in Leipzig. His father, a police official of some vague
sort, died when he was a few months old, and his mother went to Dresden
and married Ludwig Geyer, an actor. Richard, however, had no great luck
in the matter of fathers, for six years later Geyer also died. Dresden
was, as things were in those days--ninety years ago--a fairly musical
city; it had Weber at the opera and musicians of various degrees of
celebrity, deserved or undeserved. This, however, cannot have much
affected Wagner as a child. Rather, it is worth while glancing for a
moment at the artistic life which went on at his home. Whatever else it
may have been, it was not specially musical. Geyer was an actor,
Wagner's sister became an actress, and the atmosphere of the theatre
must have pervaded the family circle. This accounts somewhat for
Wagner's earlier artistic attempts. He showed none of the preternatural
musical precocity of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, who in their very
cradles were steeped in music. While his musical powers lay a long time
latent, his thoughts and energies were from babyhood directed to the
theatre. At the age of ten he probably knew a great deal more about the
drama of the day than he did of its music; probably he knew better when
a play was well represented than when a symphony was well played. Yet,
while his theatrical tendencies were encouraged, he must have been far
from being indifferent to music. He realized that Weber was a very great
man, and used to watch him passing in the street. This is significant,
for Weber remained to him throughout his life as a demigod; from _Die
Feen_, his boyish opera, until after _Lohengrin_ he used freely the
Weber phraseology and melodic contours, and when Weber's remains were
transported from London to be reinterred in Germany it was Wagner who
pronounced the inevitable discourse.
Still, the theatre was his first love, a love rather intensified than
otherwise when his mother removed back again to Leipzig and Richard was
sent to Nicolai Lyceum. How the family lived at this time is hard to
say, but probably it was done through the help of his sister and other
relatives. Anyhow, it was not till later that Wagner learnt the meaning
of the word poverty, and then it entered like iron into his soul; and in
the meantime he got a good general education. Leipzig was then hardly
more musical than Dresden. Bach had worked and died there; Mozart, not
so long before Wagner's birth, had visited it and got to know some of
Bach's motets by the astounding process of memorizing the separate parts
and putting them together mentally. It was far from being the busy, if
somewhat philistine, musical centre we know to-day. It had its
Gewandhaus concerts, but their state may be inferred from a report
written by Mendelssohn long afterwards, in which he spoke of dismissing
the incompetents of the band, who went away as men who had lost their
bread. It had its opera, which was doubtless as good as the average
German opera of the time. But without a conservatoire, without musicians
of the first rank, with its middling orchestra, it cannot be compared
with, say, Vienna, where the very air breathed music and great musical
traditions and memories abounded. Bach, the poor organist and
schoolmaster, was little more than a name to all save his pupils and
their pupils. His _Matthew_ Passion lay there untouched, with the dust
thick on it, and there it remained until Mendelssohn had it sung a
century after its first and only previous performance.
Here Wagner took lessons on the pianoforte from Gottlieb Müller, and
never learnt to play. Later he worked at counterpoint with Weinlig. But
at first the drama and not music continued to hold his attention. He
studied Greek plays and Shakespeare, and his highest ambition was to
achieve a stupendous drama which in the matter of sensations and murders
should eclipse anything yet done. But it dawned upon him that without
music his play could not make its full and proper effect, so into music
he went, and was at once caught in the impetuous torrent of the time. He
could not play, but he could read scores, and soon all Beethoven was as
well known to him as his mother's face. Accounts, more or less
trustworthy, are given of his singing and whistling the chamber works;
and it is an undoubted fact that he made a pianoforte transcription--one
would much like to see it--of the Choral Symphony. He tried his hand at
composition, and wrote some things that are without value; he sketched
one opera which came to nothing, and in 1833 completed another, _The
Fairies (_Die Feen_), which was not produced till more than fifty years
afterwards. The following year he was appointed conductor of the
Magdeburg Theatre, and with this appointment may be said to end his
apprenticeship to the trade he was to follow for some years.