Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner was born on 22 May 1813 to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, then part of the Confederation of the Rhine. His family lived at No 3, the Brühl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in Leipzig's Jewish quarter. He was baptised at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth, and youngest, child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine Wagner, 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 o…

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