the meantime he got a good general education. Leipzig was then hardly
more musical than Dresden. Bach had worked and died there; Mozart, not
so long before Wagner's birth, had visited it and got to know some of
Bach's motets by the astounding process of memorizing the separate parts
and putting them together mentally. It was far from being the busy, if
somewhat philistine, musical centre we know to-day. It had its
Gewandhaus concerts, but their state may be inferred from a report
written by Mendelssohn long afterwards, in which he spoke of dismissing
the incompetents of the band, who went away as men who had lost their
bread. It had its opera, which was doubtless as good as the average
German opera of the time. But without a conservatoire, without musicians
of the first rank, with its middling orchestra, it cannot be compared
with, say, Vienna, where the very air breathed music and great musical
traditions and memories abounded. Bach, the poor organist and
schoolmaster, was little more than a name to all save his pupils and
their pupils. His _Matthew_ Passion lay there untouched, with the dust
thick on it, and there it remained until Mendelssohn had it sung a
century after its first and only previous performance.

Here Wagner took lessons on the pianoforte from Gottlieb Müller, and
never learnt to play. Later he worked at counterpoint with Weinlig. But
at first the drama and not music continued to hold his attention. He
studied Greek plays and Shakespeare, and his highest ambition was to
achieve a stupendous drama which in the matter of sensations and murders
should eclipse anything yet done. But it dawned upon him that without
music his play could not make its full and proper effect, so into music
he went, and was at once caught in the impetuous torrent of the time. He
could not play, but he could read scores, and soon all Beethoven was as
well known to him as his mother's face. Accounts, more or less
trustworthy, are given of his singing and whistling the chamber works;