 Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—who had been composing piano, choral and orchestral music since he was a teenager—admired Wagner for his musical genius, magnetic personality and cultural influence. Wagner was the same age Nietzsche’s father would have been, and he had also attended the University of Leipzig many years before. The Nietzsche-Wagner relationship was quasi-familial and sometimes-stormy, and it affected Nietzsche deeply. Early on, he could write (in 1869) that his friendship with Wagner was the “greatest achievement” [die größte Errungenschaft] of his life, and he was still energetically engaged in appraising and pondering Wagner’s cultural significance twenty years later at the end of his writing life. But Nietzsche broke with Wagner personally and intellectually in the late 1870s, and his assessments became increasingly negative (and more and more explicit) as time went on. Nevertheless, even after their break, Nietzsche was still reminiscing wistfully in 1882 about how his days with Wagner had been the best of his life. During the months surrounding Nietzsche’s initial meeting with Wagner, Ritschl recommended Nietzsche for a position on the classical philology faculty at the University of Basel. The Swiss university offered Nietzsche the professorial position, and he began teaching there in May, 1869, at the age of 24. 