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 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.