Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14 | Page 5

florid tunes, had
been "the thing," and the libretto merely a peg to hang these tunes on.
In this respect, therefore, the child was father to the man. At the age of
eleven he received a prize for the best poem on the death of a
schoolmate. At thirteen he translated the first twelve books of Homer's
Odyssey. He studied English for the sole purpose of being able to read
Shakspeare. Then he projected a stupendous tragedy, in the course of
which he killed off forty-two persons, many of whom had to be brought
back as ghosts to enable him to finish the play.
This extravagance also characterized his first efforts as a composer,
when he at last turned to music, at the age of sixteen. One of his first
tasks, when he had barely mastered the rudiments of composition, was
to write an overture which he intended to be more complicated than
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Heinrich Dorn, who recognized his
talent amid all the bombast, conducted this piece at a concert. At the
rehearsal the musicians were convulsed with laughter, and at the
performance the audience was at first surprised and then disgusted at
the persistence of the drum-player, who made himself heard loudly
every fourth bar. Finally there was a general outburst of hilarity which
taught the young man a needed lesson.
Undoubtedly the germs of his musical genius had been in Wagner's
brain in his childhood,--for genius is not a thing that can be acquired.
They had simply lain dormant, and it required a special influence to

develop them. This influence was supplied by Weber and his operas. In
1815, two years after Wagner's birth, the King of Saxony founded a
German opera in Dresden, where theretofore Italian opera had ruled
alone. Weber was chosen as conductor, and thus it happened that
Wagner's earliest and deepest impressions came from the composer of
the "Freischütz." In his autobiographic sketch Wagner writes: "Nothing
gave me so much pleasure as the 'Freischütz.' I often saw Weber pass
by our house when he came from rehearsals. I always looked upon him
with a holy awe." It was lucky for young Richard that his stepfather,
Geyer, besides being a portrait-painter, an actor, and a playwright, was
also one of Weber's tenors at the opera. This enabled the boy, in spite
of the family's poverty, to hear many of the performances. In fact,
Wagner, like Weber, owes a considerable part of his success as a writer
for the stage to the fact that he belonged to a theatrical family, and thus
gradually learned "how the wheels go round." Such practical
experience is worth more than years of academic study.
While Wagner cordially acknowledged the fascination which Weber's
music exerted on him in his boyhood, he was hardly fair to Weber in
his later writings. In these he tries to prove that his own music-dramas
are an outgrowth of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. When Beethoven
wrote that work, Wagner argues, he had come to the conclusion that
purely instrumental music had reached a point beyond which it could
not go alone, wherefore he called in the aid of poetry (sung by soloists
and chorus), and thus intimated that the art-work of the future was the
musical drama,--a combination of poetry and music.
This is a purely fantastic notion on Wagner's part. There is no evidence
that Beethoven had any such purpose; he merely called in the aid of the
human voice to secure variety of sound and expression. Poetry and
music had been combined centuries before Beethoven in the opera and
in lyric song.
No, the roots of Wagner's music-dramas are not to be found in
Beethoven, but in Weber. His "Freischütz" and "Euryanthe" are the
prototypes of Wagner's operas. The "Freischütz" is the first masterwork,
as Wagner's operas are the last, up to date, of the romantic school; and

it embodies admirably two of the principal characteristics of that school:
one, a delight in the demoniac, the supernatural--what the Germans call
_gruseln_; the other, the use of certain instruments, alone or in
combination, for the sake of securing peculiar emotional effects. In
both these respects Wagner followed in Weber's footsteps. With the
exception of "Rienzi" and "Die Meistersinger," all of his operas, from
the "Flying Dutchman" to "Parsifal," embody supernatural, mythical,
romantic elements; and in the use of novel tone colors for special
emotional effects he opened a new wonder-world of sound, to which
Weber, however, had given him the key.
"Lohengrin," the last one of what are usually called Wagner's "operas,"
as distinguished from his "music-dramas" (comprising the last seven of
his works), betrays very strongly the influence of Weber's other
masterwork, "Euryanthe." This opera, indeed, may also be called the
direct precursor of Wagner's music-dramas. It contains eight "leading
motives," which recur thirty times