WAGNER’S essays and treatises on music, art, literature, and philosophy have been collected into ten thick volumes which have genius enough in them to have made him famous had he been unknown as a musician. They have, too, all the originality and aggressive individuality which those who refuse to admire his music call eccentricity. By no means a great master of prose style, Wagner is at all times a great man who lacks little of being a great thinker. No matter how obscure his sentences may become at times, it is never safe to leave one of them without mastering his meaning, as far as it is possible to do so. His whole life is full of meaning, and everything he writes is full of his life purposes.

  Born in Leipsic, May 22d, 1813, he was educated in the University of his native city, where also he began the systematic study of music. In 1833 he became chorus master in the theatre at Würzburg. From 1834 to 1842 he lived and worked successively at Magdeburg, Königsburg, and Paris. In 1843 he was appointed court Kapellmeister at Dresden and remained there until 1849, when he fled to Paris to escape arrest on a charge of complicity in the revolutionary movement of that year. After living in Zurich, London, and Paris until 1861, he returned to Germany and lived a comparatively peaceful life as a composer and musical director in different German cities, until his death, February 13th, 1883. He was twice married, his second wife being Liszt’s daughter, Cosima. He took up his residence at Bayreuth in 1872, and in 1876 completed there the theatre which he opened with the performance of the famous “Nibelungen” tetralogy,—a comoposition in which, as in all his works, he seems to have attempted to give expression to the ethnical impulses which have moved the Teutonic race through the whole course of its history.