Why did Richard Wagner flee Germany?

Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, then part of the Confederation of the Rhine, who lived at No 3, the Brühl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in the Jewish quarter on 22 May 1813.He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine (née Paetz), the daughter of a baker. Wagner’s father Carl died of typhoid fever six months after Richard’s birth. Afterwards, his mother Johanna lived with Carl’s friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer.

In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married—although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers.She and her family moved to Geyer’s residence in Dresden. Until he was fourteen, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father.

Geyer’s love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel.In late 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel’s school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher.

He struggled to play a proper scale at the keyboard and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear. Following Geyer’s death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, the boarding school of the Dresdner Kreuzchor, at the expense of Geyer’s brother. At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct. At this period Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright.

His first creative effort, listed in the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (the standard listing of Wagner’s works) as WWV 1, was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was in school in 1826, the play was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner was determined to set it to music and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.

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By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner’s first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with Christian Gottlieb Müller. In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and then, in March, the same composer’s 9th Symphony (both at the Gewandhaus). Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th Symphony. He was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. Wagner’s early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.

In 1829 he saw a performance by dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and she became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In Mein Leben, Wagner wrote, “When I look back across my entire life I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced on me,” and claimed that the “profoundly human and ecstatic performance of this incomparable artist” kindled in him an “almost demonic fire.”

In 1831, Wagner enrolled at the Leipzig University, where he became a member of the Saxon student fraternity. He took composition lessons with the Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig.Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner’s musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons.

He arranged for his pupil’s Piano Sonata in B-flat major (which was consequently dedicated to him) to be published as Wagner’s Op. 1. A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenesque work performed in Prague in 1832 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1833.He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which he never completed.