This was also the year Wagner’s stepfather died. The death, inevitably, changed the family’s situation, and Wagner’s mother took in lodgers to help defray expenses.

Dresden was an important city for Germany’s music – it would see several premiers of Wagner’s operas in the future, and it was home to Carl Maria von Weber, Louis Spohr, and Marschner. The work of these three important composers of the German Romantic opera movement exercised a strong influence upon the young boy. Spohr lodged with the Wagner family for a while, and Weber visited occasionally, due to his interest in the voice of Richard’s sister Clara.

Boy Alone

Wagner was left on his own in Dresden in 1826, when his sister Joanna Rosalie received an offer to sing on the stage in Prague – the whole family, sans Richard, moved to Prague to facilitate the offer. The young Richard, aged thirteen, boarded with a family while he attended school, and was soon running wild, cutting school, writing romantic poetry, and enjoying being without discipline. He had a disdain for ordinary studies, avoiding the shell because he was only interested in the kernel, so to speak. Without having learned adequate Greek grammar, he plunged himself into writing a translation of twelve stanzas from Homer’s Odyssey, and began to write a highly lurid five-act tragedy entitled Leubald und Adelaide which owed a great deal to the German romantic tragedies of the 18th century. Highly derivative, seeping with gore and tragical situations, by Wagner’s own account the work was a melodramatic and blood-soaked piece of sensationalism, although the boy was convinced it was a mighty work, and might even serve as his justification for having skipping school, when the time came that he had to admit his lack of appearance there to his family.

It did not, of course…

Leipzig schooling

A year later, when Richard was fourteen, his mother moved back to Leipzig – another daughter, Luise Constanze, had been offered a musical stage role there, and Richard joined his mother and sister in Leipzig to continue his musical studies under the auspices of Christian Gottlieb Müller, who failed to inspire him. He did not manage to do well in the St Nicholas School, where his refusal to learn the rudiments properly made him quite unpopular. Again, he cut school, and it was only upon the desperate remonstrances of his family that he agreed to attend the school once again. However, there was an irrevocable break between young Richard and St Nicholas School in 1830.

There is considerable confusion in Wagner’s biographies about this period in Leipzig – several of them say he attended the Thomasschule for two years, but this is certainly not the case. Wagner writes in his autobiography of this period in great detail, and as regards places and dates he is generally reliable.