edy, 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 "Freischuetz." In his
autobiographic sketch Wagner writes: "Nothing gave me so much pleasure
as the 'Freischuetz.' 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