Richard Wagner was but six months old when his father, Friedrich, died. He was a registrar of police in Leipzig, a man of a culture far above the ordinary level of his humble official position. By the law he won his bread, but his heart was in the theatre, and it was owing to him that his friend, Ludwig Geyer, painter and actor, who had himself been educated for the law, definitely adopted the stage as his profession, in which he attained a great success. A few months after Friedrich’s death, this Geyer, a good and worthy man, married the widow and devoted himself with all a parent’s affectionate care to little Richard, who knew no other father, and loved him dearly. But the tender relationship did not last long. Before Richard was nine years old Frau Geyer was again left a widow. “She was a good wife and mother,” we are told, “and her son idolized her. The memory of her love supported him in all the storms of his life, and he was talking of her on the evening before his death.” After Geyer’s loss she seems to have been the centre of a small literary, artistic, and theatrical coterie which met at her house, and in these surroundings Richard Wagner’s childhood budded and bloomed. For him in his earliest days the theatre was everything—always the theatre. He was the constant companion and playmate of his stepfather, who carried the child with him even to rehearsals. Indeed, the whole family was bitten by the stage-craze. His eldest brother, brought up to be a doctor, threw away pills and potions and lancet, and became an actor; his three sisters followed the same bent: what wonder that this child, full of imagination and poetic fancy, brought up in the glare of the footlights, should catch the contagious fever which was burning up all those near and dear to him? Even in the next generation the flame was still blazing. The voice and acting of his niece Johanna is yet a glorious memory among the very oldest opera-goers, and his son Siegfried, an architect by profession, has found his true vocation in the direction of the Bayreuth theatre, and is known as himself a composer of operas. The dramatic impulse was vibrating in every fibre of Richard’s nature. By the time he was sixteen he had completed a tragedy suggested partly by _King Lear_, partly by _Hamlet_, inspired wholly by heredity. And here was laid the foundation of that dramatic art which was destined to bring a new revelation to the world. He was a Poet—above all things a Poet; but it was borne in upon him that the message of the Poet must be incomplete as a language speaking to the soul unless it were united to the mystery of another power; that power was music, and of music he knew nothing, or no more than what enabled him to play the piano by ear.