III
When the family settled again in Leipzig one Ludwig van Beethoven died (March 1827), and Wagner heard of this composer, it is said, for the first time. It is all but unimaginable, yet there seems no reason to doubt it. After all, that was not an age of halfpenny morning and evening papers, and if composers were boomed the deed was accomplished tranquilly in the houses of great society leaders, dukes and archbishops, and the general public knew little of what was going on. I dare say even in our newspaper age many a clever boy of fourteen has never heard of Strauss or Josef Holbrooke, and Beethoven did not loom nearly so large before the eyes of the people as these composers do: the names of Salieri, Marschner, Meyerbeer, Spontini, Spohr and Weber would be much more familiar than his; even in Vienna he was regarded mainly as a deaf, surly old crank who had the support of highly placed personages. So there is the amazing fact: Wagner, who worshipped Weber's operas, had not, when fourteen years old, heard of the existence of a musician a thousand times mightier than Weber. The great hour was at hand.
First, however, he had to pass through a period of boyish disgust and disappointment. At Dresden he had been a favourite with his masters, and had worked hard. His own account of the methods, temper, and intellectual qualifications of his masters seems to me eminently reasonable. Their aim was to bring out whatever was best in their pupils. His account of his first masters at Leipzig similarly bears the stamp of truthfulness. They were a set of conceited academics with only two ideas in the world: first, that they were the very finest flower of Teutonic culture; second, that they must so impose their personalities on the boys, so impress them with their ideal, that every pupil would carry to his dying hour the stamp of the culture of the Nicolai school. Utterly unsympathetic, narrow beyond the dreams of the narrowest of modern schoolmasters, they were frankly, virulently hostile to any one in whom they perceived—as they always did perceive with the unerring instinct of stupidity to detect cleverness—the smallest trace of originality of character, thought or outlook on life. As a rule they seem to have been successful in achieving their aim. An old German friend of mine told me he had calculated that the Nicolai school turned out in ten years more complete, complacent blockheads than any other school in Germany had turned out in half-a-century; and my friend gave me many notable instances of men who had soon won the proud distinction of being unmistakable pupils of the Nicolai school. There were rebels, and Wagner makes it clear that he was amongst them. To begin with, he had been in the second class at the Kreuzschule. The more effectually to imbue him with the Nicolai ambition of becoming a scholar, i.e. a pedant, and a complete, if sausage-munching, German gentleman of the period, they degraded him to the third. No doubt there were protests: one cannot believe that Wagner the boy any more than Wagner the man could refrain from declamation under a grievance; but with such impervious skulls and thick hides protests would be unavailing. The mischief was done: he was numbered amongst the rebels, the lost souls, the unhappy beings who dared to have notions of their own. He neglected his studies and sought refuge in his drama. I wonder if he found, or made, an opportunity of satirizing his precious professors in it.
At home his life cannot have been much better. Good Hausfrau Geyer cannot have understood where the shoe pinched: she can only have seen how he was wasting his time. The tragedy was discovered and there seem to have been solemn family deliberations regarding the probable fate of the reprobate. His Uncle Adolph seems to have acted as the great consoler. He, at any rate, knew better than to think a boy was on the way to the bottomless pit simply because he could not get on with a gang of dull pedagogues. Now and later he lectured Richard in a kindly if sententious way; and he must have fostered the boy's natural strong spirit of revolt. Adolph loathed authority, especially the authority of irresponsible court officials; and in some of his preserved letters he lashes these gentry, the scum of humanity and the parasites of courts, with scathing sarcasm. His sarcasm had no practical result, because the officials never saw it—if they had they would have shrugged their fat shoulders and gone to draw their comfortable salaries. But he taught Wagner that officialdom is the curse of the human race; and in after years that certainly had some practical results—at the moment calamitous to Wagner; in the long run beneficial to him and the human race. Perhaps of all forms of authority that which Adolph found least tolerable, that which he taught Richard to loathe and hate and spit upon, was official authority in art matters. Nowadays, when public opinion counts for something, when those who pay the taxes insist on having some small say as to the way in which they are spent, the intendant of a German theatre is by no means the lordly court-parasite he was once. Yet even now he often flouts his paymasters, feeling fairly secure under court protection. We can easily imagine the high-and-mighty jack-in-office he must have been in Adolph's time.
Wherever he made his power felt it blasted honest art and checked honest art endeavour. It was fitting that Richard should have dinned into him—as I have no doubt he did—his uncle's views on these heroes; for later Richard had a fair amount of fighting to do with them, and in the end it was he more than any other one man who broke their power for ever by appealing to the great public. This attitude is due to Richard's preaching and example; and he learnt it from Uncle Adolph. In one other respect Adolph's influence was good: he opened out to Richard's vision immense fields of literature that the youngster had never heard of. I have previously mentioned that all the culture of the Geyer family came through the theatre. To this Richard added a small school-acquaintance with the classics; and now came Adolph to show him a huge, truly vital literature—poetry and prose dealing with the life of our own epoch. Adolph wrote reminding him of how finely Weber Had cultivated himself, of his breadth, of his outlook on history and mankind. It is evident that Adolph, seeing the irresistible bent of the Wagners towards the theatre, and fearing that Richard might in time learn to be content with a life of ignorant theatre tittle-tattle, did his best to save him, not so much by warning him against the theatre—which he certainly knew to be useless—as by showing how many great and interesting things the world holds. The preaching did not fall on deaf ears; and Richard always declared that in this regard he was incalculably indebted to his uncle. One of Richard's most strongly marked characteristics was the tenacity with which he held any idea that once entered his mind; and it is worthy of note that about this period he read E.T.A. Hoffmann's collected fantasies and Tieck's Tannhäuser. From the first he unmistakably got the minstrels' contest in his own Tannhäuser; from the second, Tannhäuser's coming home after being cursed by the Pope.
So things went on. Richard's mother, Richard, Louise, Ottilie and Cäcilie formed the household; Uncle Adolph and Aunt Sophie lived not far off; and they had plenty of friends. They lived at first in the Pichhof outside the Halle gate and later removed into the town. Richard wandered about the city, seeking the scenes of his babyhood; and his mother pointed out to him the spot where she saw Napoleon rush off, without his hat, to make his: escape after the battle of liberation, while Richard was in his cradle. The Rannstadt gate, where his grandfather spent his life collecting dues, was still standing, though it was soon to vanish; and the house of the Red and White Lion on the Brühl, where Richard was born, was now in the very heart of the Jew quarter. The costumes, speech and gesticulation of these strange animals left an indelible impression on him, and were, perhaps, incidentally responsible for the notorious Judaism in Music of 1850, and all the fallacies contained in that deplorable essay. Richard got his own way in most things, and the seeds were sown of the self-confidence, egotism, selfishness—call it what you will—that was to carry him through unheard-of difficulties and troubles in later life, and was often, unfortunately, to show as an objectionable, even odious, feature in his character. He still laboured at his tragedy, killing off his personages and turning their noses into dust with the careless facility and cheerfulness of buoyant boyhood. He had always been fond of roaming the country, and he continued to nourish that love of the pleasant earth which forced him to keep up the habit all his life and resulted in the glorious pictorial music of the Ring. He struggled in vain to conquer the piano-keys, and, indifferent to the fable of the fox and the grapes, came to the satisfying conclusion that the instrument was not worth mastering. We must remember that through Louise he was in constant touch with the theatre, and it is evident that he kept up the connection after her marriage to Brockhaus the bookseller in 1828, for when the theatre was entirely reformed next year Rosalie came as a principal lady and Heinrich Dorn, who speedily became his friend, as conductor. Drama, literature, school-tasks, open-air rambles, talks with Uncle Adolph—these constituted his life. Now another element was to enter and overwhelm all the rest.
CHAPTER III
EARLY LIFE (CONTINUED)
I
In the second half of the eighteenth century some enthusiasts at Leipzig had founded a series of concerts, with a very small orchestra, which were given in "Apel's house"; in 1781 they migrated to the Gewandhaus, and by this name the concerts were afterwards known. In still later days Mendelssohn became conductor, and for brilliance and neatness the concerts were famous throughout the world; then Reinecke came and they became the most slovenly in the world—in this fine quality of slovenliness not even our London Philharmonic Society could hope to rival them; also, as Reinecke was an acrid reactionary, no modern music could get a hearing there. However, that did not greatly matter; and the world owes the Gewandhaus concerts an everlasting debt of gratitude.
Richard, we know, had never heard of Beethoven, had never heard a bar of his music. At the Gewandhaus the symphonies were regularly played, and to one of the performances he went, contented, with his head full of his play, not dreaming of what was to happen to him ere the morrow. Here are his own words: "I only remember that one evening I heard a symphony of Beethoven's, for the first time, that it set me in a fever, and on my recovery I had become a musician." This is from one of his stories, but it describes with sufficient closeness what actually happened. We know that saturated solutions of some salts at a touch solidify into a mass of crystals, and as far as intentions were concerned this, figuratively, happened to Richard: his purpose was instantly set—he would be a musician—nay, he felt he was a musician. As to his proceedings, however, a better simile would be that of a liquid into which you drop a little of another liquid and immediately a violent commotion with much heat is set up. Beethoven's music touched his young being, and a fermentation began which drove him forthwith to make himself a perfectly equipped technical musician. Almost like Teufelsdröckh and St. Paul, he was "converted" in the twinkling of an eye.
The change was astounding; but Wagner was an astounding genius. The bald fact is that he was musical as well as dramatic; hitherto the dramatist in a favourable environment had grown and flourished while the musician lay latent waiting his time; but the moment the spirit of Beethoven spoke to his spirit the musician sprang up and responded. Weber had been his musical god, but he was now set a little lower, and Beethoven took his place. When he started to compose seriously it was Weber and not Beethoven he copied, but that is easily explained: Wagner, like Weber, wrote theatrical music for the theatre, whilst Beethoven wrote only utterly untheatrical music for the theatre, and it was from Weber and not Beethoven he had to learn his art of theatre music. But it was from Beethoven and not from Weber that the impulse to, compose came. He had heard, probably, all Weber's operas without any desire to go and do likewise; but having heard Beethoven's symphonies, and the incidental music to Egmont, he at once realized that his tragedy would be incomplete without music, and he resolved to write it. Carlyle, overlooking the trifling fact that there is such a thing as the technique of the novelist's trade, and believing in the omnipotence of the human will, set out to write a work of fiction; and we may imagine his disgust and the sincerity of his objurgations when the brute of a novel obstinately refused to be written.
When the incidental music to—whatever the name of his play was—obstinately refused to be written, young Wagner may have said something, though it is not on record; but having a finer instinct than Carlyle he perceived the necessity of acquiring the technique of his new trade. So he got possession of Logier's Method; in a few days made a complete study of it; then he set to work in earnest —with, alas! no more satisfactory fruits. Something that might serve, however, was achieved, and the ambitious composer went on to a fresh struggle. He had heard Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, so, taking Goethe's Laune des Verliebten, he started a kind of fantasia, concocting words and music together. An account of Wagner's youth would be incomplete without some mention of these brave doings; they show clearly how strong the instinct which led him on to the Ring was in him at this early time—to what an unusual degree the child was father of the man. But to take seriously his tragedy and these first musical attempts, made at the unusually advanced age of sixteen, even if I had seen them—which I have not: I do not know whether they are in existence—would be preposterous.
Richard began to see that he could make no headway, and he persuaded his family to let him take lessons from Gottlieb Müller, who must have been a bad teacher for such a boy. Nothing was learnt. Richard was told he must not do this and must not do that, and he was not told what he might or should do; in the end both he and Müller grew disgusted and the lessons were abandoned. I dare say Müller was in a humdrum way a good coach; he could have prepared candidates for our absurd academic examinations; but for an artistic genius, bursting with inarticulate ideas and inchoate purposes he was worse than useless. So Richard had to muddle along as he best might, while his good relatives doubted whether he would ever be able to do anything at all, until by good fortune he tried Theo. Weinlig. Weinlig saw what was wrong and what was wanted; instead of Müller's "you must not do this or that: it is against 'rule,'" he explained matters and showed Richard that if he once learnt the tricks of the trade he would be able to compose just as he liked; in six months Richard had become an expert contrapuntist and could fugue it with students who had toiled for years. "Now," said Weinlig at the last, "you will probably never want to write a fugue, but the knowledge that you can will give you confidence." According to the late Mr. Dannreuther his words were, "You have learnt to stand on your own legs." So it came to pass that Richard's ambition was fulfilled: he was a musician.
In the life of a being so extraordinary as Wagner it is not surprising that he took many steps, each of which seemed the most momentous in his career; but I think on the whole we must reckon this one, from the amateur enthusiast to the fully equipped professional musician, the most important. How long he would have been about it but for Weinlig's timely aid cannot be said. He was steeping himself in Beethoven. He could not play the piano, but he could read scores: Heinrich Dorn declared that he copied those of the overtures with his own hands. He arranged the Ninth Symphony and offered it to Schott, who declined it, of course. Another arrangement, for four hands, was afterwards accepted by Breitkopf, in exchange, it would seem, for a copy of the full score of the same work. Possibly he had borrowed the copy he worked from—or thumbed it until it fell to pieces. Dorn said he never came across such a Beethoven enthusiast, and he felt sure something would come of it. We know something did come of it. Weinlig had taught him the principles of musical form as well as harmony and counterpoint, and thus made the grasping of the plan of each masterpiece an easier task; and to Weinlig the world owes a huge debt of gratitude. Richard acknowledged the debt; and after Weinlig's death in 1842 he dedicated The Love-feast of the Apostles to his widow.