Every great achievement is referable to some preceding one often quite as great but more obscure.  No man stands alone in his deed.  The doer of every great work has been helped thereto by his predecessors working the same soil.  The greater the performance, the more prominently this comes out sometimes, as in the case of Shakespeare whose indebtedness to Christopher Marlowe and others will at once come to mind.

To Beethoven and to Shakespeare, Wagner paid tribute on all occasions.  Especially is this true in his relation to Beethoven, to whom he readily yields the palm in the realm of music.  In the eight volumes of his Gesammelte Schriften, no single fact stands out more clearly than his recognition of Beethoven as his chief, his master, from whom proceeds all wisdom and knowledge and truth.  One can hardly read any of Wagner’s prose writings without seeing how readily he falls into the place of disciple of Beethoven.  “I knew no other pleasure,” he says in A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, “than to plunge so deeply into his genius that at last I fancied myself become a portion thereof.”  The Pilgrimage, though an imaginative work, is the medium he employed to give utterance to his regard for Beethoven.  His letters to musical friends, to Liszt, to Fischer, especially those to Ulig, are filled with praise of the older master.  In a letter to Meyerbeer, in 1887, he states how he came to be a musician.  “A passionate admiration of Beethoven impelled me to this step.”  The only one who was good enough in Wagner’s eyes to be compared with Beethoven, was Shakespeare.  These two names are frequently brought into juxtaposition in his works.  No musician is worthy of comparison with his demigod.  “Mozart died when he was just piercing into the mystery.  Beethoven was the first to enter in,” he says in his Sketches.  As if even this praise were too great, he severely criticises Mozart’s operas and symphonies elsewhere.

The deferential attitude which Wagner assumes toward Beethoven is not accorded any other musician.  Consciously or not, when he talks about other musicians (except Bach) he, for the most part, assumes the role of censor.  But Beethoven comes in for unstinted praise.  “It is impossible,” he says, “to discuss the essential nature of Beethoven’s music without at once falling into the tone of rhapsody.”

Wagner seems hardly to have been able, when writing about music, to refrain from mention of Beethoven, he is so full of the subject.  It has a bearing on every important event in his life.  At the ceremonies attending the laying of the foundation-stone of the Festival Play House at Bayreuth, the Ninth Symphony was performed, and in a little speech he says:  “I wish to see the Ninth Symphony regarded as the foundation-stone of my own artistic structure.”  In “Religion and Art” we find these words:  “to whom the unspeakable bliss has been vouchsafed of taking one of the last four symphonies of Beethoven into his heart and soul.”