For a great revolutionary, Wagner was curiously long in coming to consciousness of himself. The record of his youth and early manhood is one of constant fluctuation between one ideal or influence and another. The most remarkable feature of him in these days, indeed, is his mental malleability. In his later years he is the centre of a solar system of his own; everything else in his orbit is a mere planet that must revolve around him or be cast out. In his younger days, on the contrary, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the changing currents of men and circumstances. One of the earliest writers to influence him was E. T. A. Hoffmann, under whose sway he fell apparently as early as 1827. It was about the same time that he first heard, at a Gewandhaus concert, some of Beethoven\'s music. During the early \'thirties he was deeply absorbed in Beethoven, especially in the Ninth Symphony—a work which, he tells us, was at that time regarded in Leipzig as the raving of a semi-madman. Wagner\'s knowledge of it was at first derived solely from copying the score; it was without having heard a performance of the work that he made in 1830 the two-hands pianoforte arrangement of it which he vainly tried to induce Schott to publish. His own Overture in D minor (1831), his King Enzio Overture and his Symphony in C major (1832) were, as he admits, all inspired by Beethoven, the first of them being more particularly influenced by the Coriolan Overture. He heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time at a Gewandhaus concert in the winter of 1831-2; the performance, under Pohlenz, seems to have been a very unintelligent one, and it left Wagner in considerable doubt as to the value of the work. "There arose in me," he says, "the mortifying doubt whether I had really understood this strange piece of music[289] or not. For a long time I gave up racking my brains about it, and unaffectedly turned my attention to a clearer and less disturbing sort of music."[290]

Weber\'s Freischütz had also powerfully affected the boy\'s imagination; no doubt Weber struck him even then as a musician peculiarly German. In his own Die Feen (1833), he tells us, he tried to write "in German style."[291] Nevertheless, in spite of all these influences, he turned for a while against German music, which he criticises with some frankness in an article on Die deutsche Oper,[292] published anonymously in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt in June 1834. The Germans have no German opera, he says, for the same reason that they have no national drama. "We are too intellectual and much too learned to be able to create warm human figures." Mozart could do this in the Italian melodic style; but with their contempt for that style the modern Germans have got further from the path that Mozart opened out for dramatic music. "Weber did not understand how to handle song; Spohr is hardly any better"; yet it is through Song that a man expresses himself musically. Here the Italians have the advantage over the Germans. It is true that the Italians have abused the organ of late—"yet I shall never forget the impression that a Bellini opera lately made on me, after I had become heartily sick of the eternally allegorising orchestral bustle, and a simple and noble Song made its appearance again." Weber was too purely lyrical, and Spohr is too elegiac, for the drama. Weber\'s best work is consequently the romantic Der Freischütz; as for Euryanthe, "what paltry refinements of declamation, what a finiking use of this instrument or that for bringing out the expression of some word or other!" His style is not broad enough; it dissipates itself in mincing details. His ensembles are almost without life. And as the audience do not understand a note of it, they console themselves by calling it amazingly learned, and respecting it accordingly. "O this fatal learnedness," he cries, "this source of all the evils that afflict us Germans!" In Bach\'s time music was regarded only from the learned side. The forms were then limited, but the composers full of learning. Now the forms are freer, but the composers have less learning, though they make a pretence of it. The public also wants to appear learned, affects to despise the simple, and is ashamed to admit that it enjoys a lively French opera. We must not be hypocritical, but must admit there is a good deal that is good in both French and Italian opera; we must throw over a lot of our affected science, and become natural men. No real German opera composer has appeared for some time, because no one has known how to "gain the voice of the people"—no one has grasped life in its real truth and warmth. We must find a form suited to the needs of our own days. "We must seize upon the epoch, and honestly try to perfect its new forms; and he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor French—nor even German."

The youthful essayist repeats a good deal of this, with additions, in an article entitled Pasticcio, published in the Neue Zeitsc............