A first edition of this important essay written for the centennial celebrations of Beethoven's birth, in which Wagner develops his ideas about music and text as expressive mediums. Although he asserts that music is the more expressively powerful of the two, he ultimately concludes that music and text together yield a wider range of artistic possibilities than either can achieve on its own. These musings build on thoughts first set down in his earlier writings, Oper und Drama and Zukunftsmusik.