Most revered master!
In the first onrush of the opening semester, made particularly strenuous this year by reason of my long absence, nothing more stimulating could have happened to me than to receive a copy of your Beethoven. How much it has meant to me to become acquainted with your philosophy of music—which is as much as to say, with the philosophy of music—I could prove to you by an article I wrote last summer on the "Dionysian Point of View."
Indeed it was by the aid of this study that I am enabled to grasp your arguments fully and to enjoy them profoundly, however far removed is your range of thought, however surprising and amazing is everything you have to say, especially the explication of Beethoven's real achievement. And yet I fear that the æstheticians of our day will regard you as a somnambulist whom it would not only be unadvisable, but positively dangerous, to follow, were such a thing possible. Even the majority of the cognoscenti (students) of the Schopenhauerian philosophy will find difficulty in translating into concrete concepts the profound harmony between your ideas and those of your great master.
For this reason I regard your essay as "published and yet not published," as Aristotle said of his esoteric writings. I like to dwell upon the thought that it is chiefly those to whom the message of Tristan has been revealed who will be able to follow Wagner, the philosopher, and I, therefore, consider the capacity for a genuine appreciation of your work as a priceless distinction bestowed only upon the select few.
Your grateful and faithful Friedrich Nietzsche.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 15