According to Wagner\'s own account, he sketched tragedies in his childhood, and worked out one that was a sort of blend of Hamlet and King Lear; and, inspired by Beethoven\'s Egmont, he soon desired to adorn this grand tragedy with music of his own. A brief study of Logier\'s Method of Thorough-Bass did not provide him with the needed technique, though, convinced that he was born to be a musician, he wrote a sonata, a quartet and an aria in secret. In his sixteenth year he placed himself under a teacher, who, however, could do nothing with him in the excessively febrile state in which he then was. His nervous excitement culminated in a round of the usual student excesses; and having calmed down again he set himself to study composition in earnest with Weinlig, the cantor of the Thomas School. Six months\' work sufficed to satisfy Weinlig that his pupil was now competent to stand on his own legs. It is at this time (1831) that he produces the compositions that are the earliest we now possess of his.

At present he has apparently no inclination towards opera. The raw works of his adolescence had all been instrumental; among them was the Overture in B flat major (1830) that was performed in the Leipzig Theatre, and in which the drum-beat every four bars ended by moving the audience to uncontrollable merriment. It is not till the summer of 1832 that he plans a first opera. Die Hochzeit; he writes the text, but composes no more than a fragment of the music. Meanwhile he produces, as the result of Weinlig\'s schooling, a number of works more or less in the conventional style. The pianoforte sonata in B flat major that was published by Breitkopf & H?rtel as the composer\'s Op. 1 is dedicated to Weinlig, under whose eye the work was written. His teacher had evidently seen the need for curbing the exuberance of the boy\'s undisciplined mind. He made him write simply, in the set forms, and with regard to the clarities of the pure vocal style. For this first sonata, Wagner tells us, Weinlig induced him to take an early sonata by Pleyel as a model; the whole work was to be shaped on "strictly harmonic and thematic lines." Wagner himself never thought much of it. But if it is no more than an imitation of the current sonata style, it is an unmistakably capable imitation. Weinlig was right; he had given his pupil independence. In all these youthful works, indeed, we are struck by the unquestioning self-confidence of the manner, and by the boyish vigour that animates them. As a reward for his docility in the matter of the sonata he was allowed by Weinlig to compose a pianoforte fantasia in F sharp minor. He treated this, he says, in a more informal style. It is really a quite powerful work for a boy of eighteen. It defines a mood, and maintains it with singular persistence; it expresses something truly felt; it comes from the brooding absorption of spirit that was afterwards to produce the Faust Overture. It is liberally sown with recitative passages that suggest some knowledge of Bach (the Chromatic Fantasia or the G minor Fantasia for the organ), or of Beethoven (pianoforte sonata in A flat. Op. 110, &c.). The manner and feeling of the adagio suggest the slow movement of Beethoven\'s fifth symphony, the later ornamentation of the main melodic idea being quite in the style of that movement. Altogether the Fantasia is by no means a work to be despised; it is the one composition of Wagner\'s of this period in which we catch a decided note of promise for the future.

The Polonaise in D major for four hands (1831) is more in the conventional manner, but quite interesting, and as original as we can expect from the average young composer of eighteen. The A major sonata (Op. 4, 1831) flows on in the glib, confident way that is characteristic of all his early instrumental works, and has many good points. The weakest movement is the third—a rather amateurish fugue. There is some expression in the slow movement, and a general freedom of style everywhere except in the fugue. The idiom as a whole is that of the early Beethoven, but occasionally the writing suggests a boy who knew something of Weber and of the later Beethoven, though his invention and his technique were as yet equal only to imitating the simpler models.

For its day the Symphony in C major (1832) is a very capable piece of student work; the interest slackens very considerably in the finale, but the other movements are handled with the customary young-Wagnerian vigour and confidence. In spite of the ease and the cleverness of it, however, we can rarely feel that it is anything more than a piece of competent school work, though there is undeniable thoughtfulness in the andante.

The work of the next five years varies in quality and purpose in a most puzzling way. In 1832 he writes the King Enzio Overture, under the influence, as he tells us in Mein Leben, of Beethoven. It is plainly modelled on the dramatic overture of the Egmont and Coriolan type—a type that Mendelssohn, in the Ruy Blas and elsewhere, afterwards cultivated, without however adding anything to it. The young Wagner has a thorough grasp of the form. The Overture is concise and well balanced; all the details are clearly seen in relation to the dominant idea. The thematic invention is good, the themes being not only expressive in themselves but capable of bearing the weight of a certain amount of dramatic development. Yet after writing this fine Overture, that really may point without presumption to Beethoven as its parent, he was capable of producing in 1836 the shapeless and frothy Polonia Overture, which is the oddest mixture of a pseudo-Polish idiom and the cheap, assertive melody of Rienzi. Here and there it gives us a foretaste of his later power of climax-building, but on the whole it is a feeble and amorphous work. The Rule, Britannia Overture (1836) is hardly any better; it is a long-winded and pointless dissertation on our patriotic song, the original tune being by far the best thing in it. The Columbus Overture of the preceding year is rather better. Its style is a curious blend of Beethoven, Rienzi, and the Italian opera; it is oddly anticipatory of Liszt in its repetitions and its make-believe development: but the work has a sort of strength. It is evidently the outcome of a vision clearly seen, and translated into as good music as Wagner\'s powers at that time permitted.

Meanwhile in 1832—the same year as the King Enzio Overture and the C major symphony—he had written Seven Compositions to Goethe\'s Faust—"The soldiers\' song," the "Peasants under the linden," "The song of the rat," "The song of the flea," Mephistopheles\' song ("Was machst du mir vor Liebchens Tür"), Margaret\'s song ("Meine Ruh\' ist hin"), and a "melodrama" to accompany the recitation of Margaret\'s prayer to the Virgin.[396] Almost all of these have individuality, the least notable being Mephistopheles\' song. The soldiers\' song is breezy, with one or two crudities in the vocal part-writing. The "Bauern unter der Linde" is fresh and gay; the rat and flea songs are fairly humorous; it is rather curious that Wagner\'s rat song should begin with the full scale of D major in descending motion, while that of Berlioz commences with the same scale in ascent. Margaret\'s song is quite good, though it moves a little stiffly, and has neither the ardour of Schubert\'s setting nor the perfect mating of idea and expression that we find in that masterpiece. Wagner, indeed, developed very slowly. For a long time his genius could only move heavily: there was no swiftness in him, either of idea or of form,—no consuming heat. The melodrama is expressive, and the reiterated syncopations are effective. Wagner probably chose the melodrama form, rather than a purely lyrical setting of the words, because he felt that the former gave the dramatist in him more scope.

In 1832-33 the dramatic impulse became very strong in him. He had written the Hochzeit fragment and Die Feen by the end of 1833, and between 1834 and 1836 he finished the Liebesverbot. Already he had a technique equal to the expression of all the dramatic thinking of which he was capable at that time. How dexterous his hand had become is shown incidentally in the aria he added to Marschner\'s Vampyr in 1833,—a very vigorous and finished piece of work. There is the same skill in the "Romance of Max" that he added to the Singspiel Marie, Max and Michel (1837). There is piquancy in the scoring of the latter, and the vocal part has a rhythmic variety that we do not often find in Tannh?user and Lohengrin. Apparently the only non-dramatic work he wrote at this time was the New Year Cantata, which is one of the freshest and most pleasing works of his youth. It consists of an overture and four ............