Early years
A building with four main storeys with an open shop to one side of an arched entrance and garret windows in the roof. A sculpted figure of an animal is above the arch.
Wagner's birthplace, at 3, the Bruhl, Leipzig
Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, who lived at No 3, the Bruhl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in the Jewish quarter on 22 May 1813.[n 1] He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine (nee Paetz), the daughter of a baker.[3][4][n 2] 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.[6] In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married?although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9] 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.[10] 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 of Geyer's brother.[11] At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischutz, which he saw Weber conduct.[12] At this period Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright. His first creative effort, listed in the Wagner

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