In less than six months the boy was able to solve the most difficult problems in counterpoint.  He learned to know Mozart’s music, and tried to write with more simplicity of style.  A piano sonata, a polonaise for four hands and a fantaisie for piano belong to this year.  After that he aspired to make piano arrangements of great works, such as Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.”  Then came his own symphony, which was really performed at Gewandhaus, and is said to have shown great musical vigor.

Instrumental music no longer satisfied this eager, aspiring boy; he must compose operas.  He was now twenty, and went to Wuerzburg, where his brother Albert was engaged at the Wuerzburg Theater as actor, singer and stage manager.  Albert secured for him a post as chorus master, with a salary of ten florins a month.

The young composer now started work on a second opera, the first, called “The Marriage,” was found impracticable.  The new work was entitled “The Fairies.”  This he finished, and the work, performed years later, was found to be imitative of Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner; the music was nevertheless very melodious.

Wagner returned to Leipsic in 1834.  Soon there came another impetus to this budding genius:  he heard for the first time the great singer Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, whose art made a deep impression on him.

It was a time for rapid impressions to sway the ardent temperament of this boy genius of twenty-one.  He read the works of Wilhelm Heinse, who depicts both the highest artistic pleasures and those of the opposite sort.  Other authors following the same trend made him believe in the utmost freedom in politics, literature and morals.  Freedom in everything—­the pleasures of the moment—­seemed to him the highest good.

Under the sway of such opinions he began to sketch the plot of his next opera, “Prohibition of Love” (Liebesverbot), founded on Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”  This was while he was in Teplitz on a summer holiday.  In the autumn he took a position as conductor in a small operatic theater in Magdeburg.  Here he worked at his new opera, hoping he could induce the admired Schroeder-Devrient to be his heroine.

Wagner remained in this place about two years and finished his opera there.  The performance of it, for which he labored with great zeal, was a fiasco.  The theater, too, failed soon after and the young composer was thrown out of work.  His sojourn there influenced his after career, as he met Wilhelmina Planer, who was soon to become his wife.

Hearing there was an opening for a musical director at Koenigsberg, he traveled to that town, and in due course secured the post.  Minna Planer also found an engagement at the theater, and the two were married on November 24, 1836; he was twenty-three and she somewhat younger.  Kind, gentle, loving, she was quite unable to understand she was linked with a genius.  Wagner was burdened with debts, begun in Magdeburg and increased in Koenigsberg.  She was almost as improvident as he.  They were like two children playing at life, with fateful consequences.  It was indeed her misfortune, as one says, that this gentle dove was mismated with an eagle.  But Minna learned later, through dire necessity, to be more economical and careful, which is more than can be said of her gifted husband.