Richard Wagner | Page 3

life and on stone by N. Hanhart_)
WAGNER (_From the portrait by A.F. Pecht_)
KING LUDWIG OF BAVARIA
WAGNER IN 1877

PALAZZO VENDRAMIN CALERGI, VENICE, WHERE WAGNER
DIED, FEB. 13, 1883
CARL TAUSIG
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
I
As the springtide of 1813 was melting into early summer the poet and
musician of spring days and summer nights was born at the house of
the Red and White Lion on the Brühl in old Leipzig. The precise date
was May 22; and owing to many causes the 16th of August came round
before, at the church of St. Thomas, the child was christened Wilhelm
Richard Wagner. The events and circumstances of the period have
furnished the imaginative with many striking portents with regard to
the future mighty composer; and, to do the prophets full justice, after
the event--long after the event--they have widely opened their mouths
and uttered prophecies. Thus the name of the house, describing a beast
such as never was on sea or land, distinctly warned a drowsy people
that the monstrous dragon of Siegfried was about to take the road
leading from Nowhere to Bayreuth. The spring foretold the songs in
_Tannhäuser_ and the _Valkyrie_; the summer, the nights in King
Mark's Cornish castle-garden and amongst the fragrant lime-trees in the
streets of ancient Nuremberg; the horrors of the war raging at the very
gates of Leipzig and Napoleon's flight, the advent of the preacher who
was to earn a long exile by advising the Saxon soldiers not to shoot
their brethren. Events provided material for these and many another
score of prognostications: only, fortunately, no one read events rightly
at the time, and something fresh was left for the biographers to expend
their ingenuity upon.
Richard Wagner came of a German lower middle-class stock. There is
not amongst his ancestry a single man distinguished in letters or any art.
His uncle Adolph, of whom some Bayreuth gentlemen make much,
would not be remembered had he not been Wagner's uncle. Only by

patient research has it been discovered that one or more of his forebears
could so much as play the organ. His father was an amateur theatrical
enthusiast, and he too would have been utterly forgotten had he not
been Wagner's father. His stepfather--though this seems hardly to the
point--was an actor and portrait-painter; and his one claim to
remembrance is that he was Wagner's stepfather. So, however
scientifically minded we may be, however strongly disposed to account
for the sudden appearance of a stupendous genius by the cheap and
easy method of pointing to some distinguished ancestor and talking
pompously of the laws of heredity, in Wagner's case we are baffled and
beaten. He came like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. We must be
content with the fact that he came. His father and grandfather were state
or municipal officials both; and bearing in mind Wagner's frank
detestation of officialdom, the scientist can scarcely draw much
comfort from that.
The grandfather, Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, was born in 1736, only a
few years later than Haydn. In 1769 he married the daughter of a
charity-school master or caretaker; and in 1770, the year of Beethoven's
birth, his first child, christened Carl Friedrich Wilhelm, was born. Four
years later Adolph arrived. Gottlob was a douanier, an exciseman, at
the Rannstadt gate of Leipzig, and passed his days, I dare say, as
honestly as an exciseman can, in examining incoming travellers to see
that they did not bring with them so much as an egg that had not paid
duty. He died in 1795. Meantime, Carl Friedrich had received a
thoroughly sound education, and he became deputy-registrar to the
Leipzig town court. In 1789 he married Johanna Rosina Pätz (whose
name, it seems, is susceptible of many spellings).
The scientific mind may after all find consolation in the all-illuminating
truth that Friedrich and all his children were more or less passionately
addicted to the theatre and attracted by it. It was Friedrich's one hobby;
and though Friedrich's brother Adolph had a horror of it, the feeling
was not aroused by it as an artistic institution, but as an agency for the
intellectual, moral and worldly ruin of young men and women. In his
leisure Friedrich arranged dramatic performances and took part in them,
and, as amateurs go, he appears to have been highly successful.

Histrionic persons were constant guests at his house on the
Brühl--amongst them notably one, Ludwig Geyer, who became a fast
friend of the family and played an important rôle, off the stage, with
regard to that family soon after Richard's birth. Friedrich, during his
later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or
any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights
against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the