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.
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