The life of the great German reformer of the lyric stage is a most
instructive story. In no respect is it more so than in its illustration
of the fact that genius sometimes requires development, that the
aspirations of a young man of promise may be altogether out of the line
of the inspirations of maturity. Wagner began his musical career as the
admirer and imitator of that which was most popular and facile in the
lyric drama, and became at last the regenerator of that art which some
of his early models had dragged in the mire of time-service and gain.
There seems to have been a special providence in the utter failure of
his inartistic attempts, which forced him in his despair to write what
was in him without hope of pecuniary reward. Destiny drove him toward
the goal of fame with the stinging whip of adversity.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipsic, May 22, 1813. His father,
Friedrich Wagner, a man of considerable education though simply a police
superintendent, died in October of the same year of a nervous fever
caused by the carnage at the battle of Leipsic. Left with a family of
seven children, of whom Albert, the oldest, was only fourteen, the widow
married again. Her second husband was Ludwig Geyer, an actor at the
Dresden Court Theatre. He was a man of artistic tastes, a poet, and a
portrait painter, and withal a kindly man, who had a fatherly regard for
his stepchildren. After removing with his family to Dresden, Geyer died
in 1821, and Wagner was once more without a father. The day before his
death Geyer bade little Richard play two simple pieces which he had
learned to strum on the piano, and said feebly to the mother, “Has he
perchance a talent for music?” The next day, when the stepfather lay
dead, Wagner’s mother said to him, “He hoped to make something of thee.”
And the composer adds in his autobiographic sketch, “I remember, too,
that for a long time I imagined that something indeed would come of me.”
In his ninth year Wagner went to the Kreuzschule, where he studied
Greek, Latin, mythology, and ancient history, and in secret worshipped
Weber, whom he saw daily passing by. The boy received some piano
lessons, but beguiled his time with attempts to play “Der Freischütz”
overture with “fearful fingering.” He never became a good pianist. More
important for his future were his poetic studies. On the death of a
schoolfellow he wrote a lament which was printed. He made a metrical
translation of Romeo’s monologue, and he built a terrible tragedy,
compounded of “Lear” and “Hamlet,” in which forty-two persons died, most
of them returning as ghosts to finish the play. In 1828 he left Dresden
and entered the Nicolaischule in Leipsic. At the Gewandhaus concerts he
heard Beethoven’s music. The effect he afterwards described thus: “One
evening I heard, for the first time, a Beethoven symphony. I then fell
sick of a fever, and when I recovered I found myself a musician.” He
tried to write music for one of his tragedies, but discovered that he
needed instruction. Gottlieb Müller tried to teach him, but found his
pupil too wilful. His wilfulness, however, secured the performance of an
overture at the theatre in 1830. The public laughed at it because of the
persistent thumping of the bass drum. Fortunately he realized his lack
of knowledge, and applied to Theodore Weinlig, cantor at the
Thomasschule. Weinlig led him in the right direction, and in less than
six months dismissed him as competent to “solve with ease the hardest
problems of counterpoint.” The immediate results of this course were an
overture, applauded at a Gewandhaus concert, and a symphony in C major,
modelled on Beethoven and Mozart.
In 1832 he wrote his first opera libretto, “Die Hochzeit” (“The
Wedding”), the music for which he abandoned after a few numbers. In 1833
he visited his brother Albert, tenor and stage manager at the Würzburg
theatre, and accepted the position of chorus master. He now had leisure
to write another opera. This was “Die Feen” (“The Fairies”), founded on
Gozzi’s “La Donna Serpente.” Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner were his
models. The work was accepted by Ringelhardt, of the Leipsic Theatre,
but not produced. It was resurrected, however, in 1891, and was
performed ten times in Germany. In 1834, Wagner heard Wilhelmina
Schroeder-Devrient sing in Bellini’s “Montecchi e Capuletti,” and her
power as an actress seems to have set his mind to work on the
possibility of an intimate union of music with acting. A performance of
“Massaniello,” with its quick succession of incidents, completed the
formulation of his idea of the road to success. As Adolphe Jullien
remarks, his object was “first to imagine an animated scene of action,
then to write music easy to sing, and of a nature to catch the public
ear.” He now began his second opera, “Das Liebesverbot” (“The Love
Veto”), based on Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” but so altered as
to become practically a glorification of free love.
[Illustration: