1822-1827. _Continued._
From the record of the Kreuzschule it appears that Wagner entered that
famous training college on the 22d December, 1822, as Richard Wilhelm
Geyer, son of the late court actor of that name. He would then be nearly
ten years old.
[Sidenote: _AT THE KREUZSCHULE, DRESDEN._]
He told me that he well remembered the eager delight with which he
looked forward to the prospect of enjoying systematic instruction. He
hoped to be placed high in the school, yet dreaded the entrance
examination, conscious how very patched was _then_ his store of
information. During his first seven years’ residence in Dresden, from
1815-1822, the Kreuzschule, had been an every-day object to him, and yet
on entering the building for the first time as an intending student, a
feeling of awe took possession of him. The unsuspected majesty of the
building, the echo of his footfall on the stone steps, made his young
heart beat with expectant wonder. The result of the examination was to
place him in the first form, his bright, quick, intelligent replies
proving more valuable than his disconnected knowledge. For the masters
of the Kreuzschule he ever retained an affection, their genial bearing
and friendly tuition comparing favourably with the pedantic overbearing
demeanour of the masters of the St. Nicholas school in Leipzic, where
he went later on, men who represented a past and effete dogmatic German
pedantry.
The direction of his school studies was almost entirely classic. For
Greek he evinced a strong affection. Many a time has he told me that he
was drawn towards the history of the Greeks by their refined sense of
beauty, and the didactic nature of their drama, embodying as it did
their religion, politics, and social existence.
Wagner never lost an opportunity of dilating upon, by speech and pen,
what might accurately be described as the basis of all his art work. The
drama of a nation, he persistently contended, was a faithful mirror of
its people. Where the tone of the drama was base the people would be
found degraded either through their own acts or the superior force of
others. Where the mission of the national drama was the inculcation of
high moral lessons, patriotism, and love, there the people were thrice
blessed. This idea of a national drama for his fatherland possessed him.
He longed to lift the German drama from its “miserable” condition, and
his model was “the noble, perfect, grand, and heroic tragedy of the
Hellenes.” These words I have quoted from a pamphlet, “The Work and
Mission of my Life,” written less than ten years ago by Wagner. Their
meaning is so clear and they summarize so accurately what Wagner in his
younger days oft discussed with me that I am glad to add my testimony to
what I know was the ambition of his life.
In his ardent struggles to found a national drama we clearly trace the
young Dresden student. Here, indeed, is a plain incontestable instance
of the boy as the father of the man. His school studies were
pre-eminently Greek language and literature, and it was this which
dominated almost the whole of his future career. Hellenic history
permeated his entire being, and he gave it forth in the form and model
of his immortal music-dramas, in the mode of their development, and in
their close union between the stage story and the life of the people.
At school, translations of Æschylus by Apel, a German writer of
mediocrity, constituted his chief textbooks. The tragedies suited so
well the boy’s nature that he soon became possessed with a longing to
read them in the original. So real and fruitful was his earnestness,
that by the time he was thirteen he had translated at home, and entirely
for his own gratification, several books of the “Odyssey.” This private
home work was, he remembered, greatly encouraged by his mother, who,
although untutored herself, revered, with a divination characteristic of
women of the people, his efforts after a knowledge which she felt would
surely be productive of future greatness. This piece of diligent extra
school work is another of the many examples of the boy Wagner, “father
to the man.” Hard worker he always was. Persistency of application
characterized him throughout his life, and when it is stated that during
this very period of the “Odyssey” translation, he was also privately
studying English to read Shakespeare, who is not amazed at the
extraordinary energy of the boy? No wonder that the school professors
spoke flatteringly of him, and looked for great things from him, and no
wonder that the fond mother felt confirmed in her belief that Richard
“would become something,” and that Geyer’s dying utterance would not be
falsified.
[Sidenote: _EARLY POETICAL EFFORTS._]
Wagner’s nature was that of a poet. The metrical skill of the Hellenes
fascinated him and fostered his strongly marked sense of rhythm.
As regards mathematics, I never remember him in all our discussions to
have uttered anything which might lead me to suppose he had ever any
special liking for that branch of education, but at the same time I
should add that his power of reasoning was at all times strong and
lucid, as if based upon the precision acquired by close mathematical
study. In all he did he was eminently logical.
His effort as a poet dates from a very early period. The incident, the
death of a fellow-scholar, was just that which would touch a sensitive
nature like Richard’s. A school prize was offered for an elegy, and
Wagner, eleven years old, competed. The presence of death to him was at
all times terrible in its awful annihilation of all consciousness.
Whether in man or beast, it was sure to set him pondering on the
“whither?” a question to which at a later period of his life he devoted
much labour to satisfactorily answer. Although not twelve years old,
death had robbed him of his father and step-father, and their dark
shadows flitted before him, reviving sad memories which time had paled.
It was under this spell that the elegy was written, and it is not
astonishing that the prize was adjudged to him. The poem was printed,
but, unhappily, not preserved. In telling me of this early creative
effort, and in reply to a naturally expressed desire to hear his own
opinion about it, he said that beyond the incident he had not the
faintest remembrance of the style or wording of the poem, jocularly
adding that he would himself much like to see his “Opus I.”
There was a halo of poetry about the Dresden school. Theodore Körner,
the poet of freedom, was a pupil at the Kreuzschule up to 1808. His
inspiriting songs were sung by old and young. Loved by all, his death,
at the early age of twenty-two on the battle-field fighting for German
freedom, made him the idol of his countrymen. The boys of his own school
were intensely proud of him. To emulate Körner was the eager wish of
every one of them, and into Wagner’s poetic nature the poetry of the man
and the cause he sung sank deeper than with the rest. The battle-songs
of the fiery young patriot received an immortal setting by Wagner’s
idol, Weber.
[Sidenote: _FIRST LESSONS ON THE PIANO._]
The admiration of the future poet of “Tristan” for the genius of
Shakespeare impelled him, as soon as he had sufficiently mastered
English, to produce a metrical translation of Romeo’s famous soliloquy.
This was done when he had hardly completed his fourteenth year. Up to
this period, poetry unquestionably dominated him. All his essays had
been literary. Nothing had been done in music. It was now, however, that
his latent music forced itself out of him. Up to the time that he
entered the Dresden school, in his ninth year, he had received
absolutely no instruction in music, and during his five years of school
life a few desultory piano lessons from a young tutor, who used to help
him at home with his school exercises, embraced the whole of his musical
tuition up to the age of fourteen. For the technical part of his music
lessons he had a decided dislike. The dry study of fingering he greatly
objected to, and to the last never acquired any rational finger method.
When joked about his ridiculous clumsy fingering, he would reply with
characteristic waggishness, “I play a great deal better than Berlioz,”
who, it should be stated, could not play at all.