Wagner’s career shows a curious growth away from his early ideas.  He was at first an artistic disciple of Meyerbeer, and not only drew operatic inspirations from him, but was saved from starving by Meyerbeer’s money and by his letters of introduction; later he came to abhor Meyerbeer’s operas, and to despise the man himself and his ways.  Wagner earned himself numberless powerful enemies by his fierce hatred for the Jewish race, and by his ferocious attack in an article called “Judaism in Music.”  Yet his first flirtation was with a Jewess, and it was not his fault that he did not marry her.  She lived in Leipzig, and was a friend of his sister.  She had the highly racial name of Leah David, and was a personification of Jewish beauty, with her eyes and hair of jet and her Oriental features.  It has been remarked that all of Wagner’s heroes and heroines fall in love at first sight.

He began it.  His first view of Leah plunged him into a frenzy.  “Love me, love my dog,” was an easy task for Wagner, and he was glad of the privilege of caressing Leah’s poodle, and of mauling her piano.  He never could fondle a piano without making it howl.  Now Leah had a cousin, a Dutchman and a pianist.  Wagner criticised his execution, and was invited to do better.  The man hardly lived who played the piano worse than Wagner, and the result of the duel was a foregone defeat.  The last chapter of this romance may be quoted from Praeger: 

“Wagner lost his temper.  Stung in his tenderest feelings before the Hebrew maiden, with the headlong impetuosity of an unthinking youth, he replied in such violent, rude language, that a dead silence fell upon the guests.  Then Wagner rushed out of the room, sought his cap, took leave of Iago, and vowed vengeance.  He waited two days, upon which, having received no communication, he returned to the scene of the quarrel.  To his indignation, he was refused admittance.  The next morning he received a note in the handwriting of the young Jewess.  He opened it feverishly.  It was a death-blow.  Fraulein Leah was shortly going to be married to the hated young Dutchman, Herr Meyers, and henceforth she and Richard were to be strangers.  ’It was my first love sorrow, and I thought I should never forget it, but after all,’ said Wagner, with his wonted audacity, ’I think I cared more for the dog than for the Jewess.’”

Wagner entered the university at Leipzig and for a time went the pace of student dissipations; he has described them in his “Lebenserinnerungen.”  He took an early disgust, however, for these forms of amusement and was thereafter a man, whose chief vices were working and dreaming.

One of his early creeds was free love; and though he gave up this theory, his works as a whole are by no means an argument for domesticity.  In fact they are so devout a pleading for the superiority of passion over all other inspirations, that it is astounding to hear Wagnerians occasionally complain of modern Italian operas as immoral—­as if any librettos could be immoral in comparison with the Nibelungen Cycle.