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.

MAGDEBURG, RIGA, PARIS, 1834-1842.

The trade he had chosen was that of operatic conductor. It was not until eight years later that he made a serious début as an operatic composer. The Forbidden Love (Das Liebesverbot) is entirely unknown to me; but it may be doubted whether Wagner, with his head full of confused ideas, and as yet no definite and distinctive plan or method, could at this time produce a great work of art. He had to pass through his Rienzi period first. But two points may be remarked. Already he had determined to make his own librettos; and his early association with the theatre enabled him to judge much better than any of the libretto-makers of that or any other time as to what would prove effective on the stage. In the second place, in the music of The Fairies, we see to what an extent he had assimilated Weber; the themes are Weberesque in outline, and the whole colour—colour of harmony and orchestration—is also Weberesque. He went on planning and writing operas, but his daily bread-earning work was rehearsing his company and conducting. The experience must have been invaluable to him; but there is nothing especially remarkable to record of the period. He himself left an account of the failure of The Forbidden Love, which was produced in 1836. The company went to pieces immediately after, and he was glad to find a position at Königsberg. This, however, came to nothing, or next to nothing, owing to the director's failure, and again Wagner had to remove, this time to Riga.

The Riga period is one of the most important of his life. He had married Minna Planer, who is said to have been a very pretty woman and quite incapable of understanding her husband and his artistic aspirations; and he began, slowly and tentatively, to shape a course through life for himself. He continued to gain experience in the production of other composers' operas; he studied incessantly, and at last he hit upon the idea of writing a grand opera in the Meyerbeer style, and going to Paris with it, in the hope of getting it produced at the opera there. He was harassed by creditors; and with the daring and energy characteristic of the man whom Fate had destined to build Bayreuth, he determined to try by one bold stroke to retrieve his fortunes. He was still a young man when he went to Riga in 1837, but he was in such a feverish hurry for fame and glory, not to say money, that no obstacle was allowed to stand in his way. During the last few years he had composed a number of occasional things—which we need not stop to consider—but nothing on the sumptuous scale of Rienzi. Heroic personages, dramatic or melodramatic situations, opportunities for huge gaily-dressed crowds and scenic display—these were what the young man was after; and in the story of Rienzi he found plenty to fire an imagination always prone to flame and flare at the slightest suggestion. The libretto was written; the music was partly written; and in 1839 Wagner took one of the most momentous steps in all his stormy career—he sailed from Riga, accompanied by his wife and dog, with the intention of reaching Paris by way of London.

The voyage itself bore noteworthy artistic fruit; for within three years the roar and scream of the tempest, the smashing of heavy seas upon the ship's sides and deck, and (I dare say) the captain's curses, were to be translated into tone and take artistic shape in The Flying Dutchman. London