his cardinal maxim that in an opera "the play's the thing," and the
music merely a means of intensifying the emotional expression. Before
his time the music, or rather the singing of florid tunes, had been "the
thing," and the libretto merely a peg to hang these tunes on. In this
respect, therefore, the child was father to the man. At the age of
eleven he received a prize for the best poem on the death of a
schoolmate. At thirteen he translated the first twelve books of Homer's
Odyssey. He studied English for the sole purpose of being able to read
Shakspeare. Then he projected a stupendous tragedy, in the course of
which he killed off forty-two persons, many of whom had to be brought
back as ghosts to enable him to finish the play.

This extravagance also characterized his first efforts as a composer,
when he at last turned to music, at the age of sixteen. One of his first
tasks, when he had barely mastered the rudiments of composition, was to
write an overture which he intended to be more complicated than
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Heinrich Dorn, who recognized his talent
amid all the bombast, conducted this piece at a concert. At the
rehearsal the musicians were convulsed with laughter, and at the
performance the audience was at first surprised and then disgusted at
the persistence of the drum-player, who made himself heard loudly every
fourth bar. Finally there was a general outburst of hilarity which
taught the young man a needed lesson.

Undoubtedly the germs of his musical genius had been in Wagner's brain
in his childhood,--for genius is not a thing that can be acquired. They
had simply lain dormant, and it required a special influence to develop
them. This influence was supplied by Weber and his operas. In 1815, two
years after Wagner's birth, the King of Saxony founded a German opera in
Dresden, where theretofore Italian opera had ruled alone. Weber was