ere 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.

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 repo