It is for the most part a sordid, petty existence, one in which one’s days, weeks, months and years are frittered away; they pass and there is nothing tangible to show for them.  When performances are not over until late, no one rises early; then come the rehearsals; then the evening performance again—­and so home and to bed.  Long intervals of waiting between spells of monotonous work can hardly be used for anything but gossiping at the stage-door or idling in cafes.  Save for those who have risen high in popular favour—­or, during Wagner’s boyhood, the favour of kings or their mistresses—­it is an uncertain life, with engagements terminable, and very often terminated, after a few years; and thus a hand-to-mouth way of grubbing along is generated, and a vagrant spirit developed:  and in the majority, the huge majority, of cases lives spent in squalor, mean squabblings, spells of mechanical work alternating with enforced idleness, end in destitution and utter misery.  Uncle Adolph was quite right:  he knew how close the ordinary actor and opera-singer was to the cabotin.  But Geyer, we must remember, was very far away indeed from the cabotin.  Good-natured and sociable as he seemed, he must have held to his purpose with iron determination and stuck to his work; and whatever Richard and his brothers and sisters may have seen going on around them, we may be sure they saw none of it in their own home.

When in 1817 Weber arrived at Dresden to set up a real German opera, it seemed he must have landed in exactly the wrong place to carry out his plans.  Only by a series of miracles did they get partially carried out; and here, as we know, he composed two works, Der Freischuetz and Euryanthe, destined in after years to exert greater power over Richard’s genius than any other music save Beethoven’s—­a power not inferior to that of Beethoven’s music in some respects.  Weber inevitably became a friend of the Geyers, and before Richard was much older he knew the great person to speak to and set him up in his heart as a demi-god.  But as yet Richard was only picking up a little knowledge and trying, very faintly trying, to play the piano.

Meanwhile, Geyer’s health was failing, though no one then foresaw what was to come.  He acted, he painted, he wrote plays, he saw to the debuts of Albert and Rosalie; he tried a cure here and a cure there.  In 1821 he moved to a larger house at the corner of the Juedenhof and the Frauengasse, and rejoiced to have a larger studio for his picture-work.  In July he went to Breslau and returned ill, tried Pillnitz and came back appearing a little better, and promptly got worse.  On the evening of September 29 he heard Richard strumming the “Jungfernkranz,” and asked his wife whether it was possible the boy had any gift for music; the following evening he died.  The next morning Richard was told by his mother that his father would fain have made something of him; and, like young Teufelsdroeckh, Wagner for long fancied something would be made of him.