Many enthusiasts have worked in Wagner’s cause from Liszt down, but none have equalled Wagner in this respect—­in enthusiasm for his master.  He pays tribute to Beethoven in all conceivable places.  He first heard of him when told of his death.  His first acquaintance with Beethoven’s music was a year after the master’s death, on his arrival at Leipzig at the Gewandhaus concerts.  Wagner was then in his sixteenth year.  “Its impression on me was overpowering,” he says.  “The music to his Egmont so inspired me that I determined not to allow my own completed tragedy to be launched until provided with such like music.  Without the slightest diffidence I believed that I could write this needful music.”  He had up to this time no special leaning toward music.  He had not previously entertained a thought of it as a career, but his first hearing of Beethoven’s music decided him to adopt it, such was the kinship between these two minds.  Through Beethoven he discovered that “music,” to use his own words, “is a new language in which that which is boundless can express itself with a certainty impossible to be misunderstood."[G]

[G] Thoreau, in 1840, expressed himself similarly.  We quote from the recently published Service.  “Music is a language, a mother tongue, a more mellifluous and articulate language than words, in comparison with which speech is recent and temporary.  There is as much music in the world as virtue.  In a world of peace and love music would be the universal language and men greet each other in the fields in such accents as a Beethoven now utters at rare intervals at a distance.”

The episode made a turning-point in his life.  Hitherto his whole mind and thought had been placed on literature, the drama in particular, as a career.  Through Beethoven he first learned what a power music possesses in the portrayal of the emotions and passions.  He had, as he says, an intimate love and knowledge of Mozart without apparently being much influenced thereby.  Up to this time Shakespeare had been his archetype.  Now, with a fine discriminating intelligence, marvellous in a youth of sixteen, Beethoven is to be included in this hero-worship, and is eventually to supplant his former ideal.  “It was Beethoven who opened up the boundless faculty of instrumental music for expressing elemental storm and stress,” he says in the “Art-Work of the Future,” and elsewhere in the same article, “the deed of the one and only Shakespeare, which made of him a universal man, a very god, is yet but the kindred deed of the solitary Beethoven, who found the language of the artist-manhood of the future.”

Wagner’s criticisms on music are admirable.  Here he expresses his thoughts as plainly as in his compositions.  His disquisitions on music as an art and on Beethoven in particular, are always lucid and forcible.  He may be misty in his philosophical speculations, but when he speaks on music it is in the authoritative tone of the master, familiar with every phase of his subject.  He always contributes something of value, and his thoughts are an illumination.