AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCH.
Wagner wrote this in 1843, at the request of a German editor. In it we see the germs of his future genius, and I will select such details as serve to indicate them. Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born at Leipzig on May 22, 1813, and learnt to play a little on the piano at the age of seven. Two years later, when the family migrated to Dresden, he used to watch Weber “with a reverent awe,” as the composer of Der Freischütz passed to and fro to rehearsals. Thereupon his piano exercises were speedily neglected in favor of the overture to Der Freischütz executed “with the most fearful fingering.”
“But this music-strumming was quite a secondary matter: Greek, Latin, mythology and ancient history were my principal studies.” At this time he wrote some prize verses on the death of a schoolfellow. “I was then eleven years old. I promptly determined to become a poet, and sketched out tragedies on the model of the Greeks.” He also translated twelve books of the Odyssey, and learnt English in order to study Shakespeare. “I projected a grand tragedy which was almost nothing but a medley of Hamlet and King Lear. The plan was gigantic in the extreme; two-and-forty human beings died in the course of this piece, and I saw myself compelled in its working out to call the greater number back as ghosts, otherwise I should have been short of characters for my last acts.”
Being removed to the Leipzig Nikolaischule he there for the first time came into contact with Beethoven’s genius; “its impression upon me was overpowering.... Beethoven’s music to Eg-mont so much inspired me, that I determined—for all the world—not to allow my now completed tragedy to leave the stocks until provided with suchlike music. Without the slightest diffidence, I believed that I could myself write this needful music, but thought it better to first clear up a few of the general principles of thorough-bass.... But this study did not bear such rapid fruit as I had expected: its difficulties both provoked and fascinated me; I resolved to become a musician.”
Thus far we see the embryo poet-musician. In his sixteenth year the mysticism in his nature was roused by a study of E. A. Hoffmann: “I had visions by day in semi-slumber, in which the ‘Keynote,’ ‘Third,’ and ‘Dominant’ seemed to take on living form and reveal to me their mighty meaning.” These visions are curiously confirmed by the scientific phenomena of Chladni’s sand figures and the sound forms of Mrs. Watts Hughes. The fact that sound is the means through which all form is produced is a very old teaching. Pythagoras, who brought the art of music from India to Greece, taught that the Universe was evolved out of chaos by the power of sound and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion.
About this time Wagner seriously studied Counterpoint under Theodor Weinlig. In less than six months he was dismissed as perfect. “What you have made by this dry study,” he said to his youthful pupil, “we call ‘Self-dependence.’” In 1832 he composed “an opera-book of tragic contents: Die Hochzeit”; his sister disapproved of the work and he at once destroyed it, although some of the music was already written. Die Feen (The Fairies) followed in the next year and was the first of his completed operatic works. At the age of twenty-one he tells us: “I had emerged from abstract Mysticism, and I learnt a love for Matter.” The result was Das Liebesverbot founded on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in which “free and frank physicalism” prevails over “Puritanical hypocrisy.”
This wild mood soon ceased under the pressure of petty cares; in 1836 he married the woman whose devotion helped him through so many years of bitter struggle. The following year he began his first large work, Rienzi, and became musical director at the Riga theatre. The poem was finished in 1838, and in 1839 when the music was nearly completed, Wagner embarked with his wife and his beloved big dog on board a sailing ship bound for London en route for Paris. His object was to get Rienzi performed there, but despite the influence of Meyerbeer he was doomed to disappointment and found himself stranded there in the utmost poverty. This, as we shall see from an essay later in the volume, was the turning-point in his life; but we have now to consider the next essay, the famous