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 Paetz
(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 Bruehl--amongst them notably one,
Ludwig Geyer, who became a fast friend of the family and played an
important role, 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 powers of feudalism had combined
to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over
Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics,
scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him
again. While Richard was in his cradle the whole of Saxony was filled
with the squalor and misery and loathsome terrors of war. Leipzig was
occupied by the French; Marshal Davoust was left there as commandant,
with power of life and death, and all the other privileges of a
military governor; and in the deputy-registrar of the law-court he
found the man for the post of provi