# Famous and not so famous quotes about Wagner



## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

With great trepidation I'd like to open another thread about Wagner, and plead with other forum posters not to peddle their personal agendas on this one. I'm looking for good conversation, help and input, and having a thread locked isn't much help.

To recap, I'm giving a talk in June and, as you might have guessed, it concerns Wagner. I've decided my talk will consist mainly of quotes about Wagner and his music ranging from his times to modern day. i.e. Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Mark Twain, Shaw, Nietzsche through to Hitler, Woody Allen, Barenboim and Stephen Fry.

You can probably guess some of what will be included, but I'd love to hear of any insightful or witty comments you have come across.

I have the book Wagner Remembered, which is pretty good for contemporaneous (?) accounts. Anything else similar?


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

_Wagner Remembered_ is an awesome resource, but it's the only thing of it's kind that I'm aware of.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes on Wagner.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

"I have never found a work as dangerously fascinating, with as weird and sweet an infinity, as _Tristan_, -- I have looked through all the arts in vain. Everything strange and alien about Leonardo da Vinci is demystified with the first tones of _Tristan_. This work is without a doubt Wagner's _non plus ultra_...the world is a poor place for those who have never been sick enough for this 'voluptuousness of hell': it is permissible, it is almost imperative, to reach for mystical formulae at this point."

Sviaoslav Richter on _The Ring_:

"I'm convinced that it's impossible to wish for anything better. This is true happiness! I can understand why Wagner is so inaccessible to the vast majority of listeners -- they fail to lift themselves up to the same height. Unfortunately, they are too lazy, too mean-spirited, lacking in the necessary imagination. Between Wagner and them there lies a (gigantic) gulf."

Thomas Mann:

"The overpowering accents of the music that bears away Siegfried's corpse no longer refer to the woodland youth who set forth in order to learn fear; they instruct our feeling in what is really passing there behind falling veils of mist. The sun-hero himself lies on his bier, struck down by pale darkness, and the word comes to the aid of our emotions: 'the fury of a wild boar', says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, 'who mangled the flesh of this noble youth'. A perspective opens out into the first and furthest of our human picture-dreamings, Tammuz, Adonis whom the boar slew, Osiris, Dionysus, the dismembered ones, who are to return as the Crucified whose side a Roman spear must pierce that men may know him -- all that was and ever is, the whole world of slain and martyred loveliness this mystic gaze encompasses; and so let no one say that he who created Siegfried was in _Parsifal_ untrue to himself."

D.H. Lawrence:

"I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death."


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

I am also fond of a recollection by Felix Weingartner in his memoirs, who was present in 1882 for the first _Parsifal_ performances. After the second, he and a friend saw a carriage outside of Wagner's home at Wahnfried and waited in hopes of catching a glimpse of the composer. Then he describes how he heard Wagner's well-known Saxon accent and saw Cosima emerge from the home, accompanied by Josef Rubinstein, and then Wagner. Before entering the carriage, he heard Wagner say "Well, goodbye, my dear Rubinstein, hope we meet again soon, remember me to your father." 20 years later Weingartner described his thoughts as the carriage rode away:

"I gazed after it almost bereft of my senses. What a tremendous life, what gigantic power was being carried away in that insignificant vehicle. How negligible and almost unreal the physical presence seemed in comparison with the magnitude of the spirit it encased."


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

John Ruskin's famous over-the-top comment on Die Meistersinger: "Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, ... and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound -- not excepting railway whistles -- as I was by the cessation of the cobbler's bellowing."


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## HumphreyAppleby (Apr 11, 2013)

Puccini after playing the opening chords of _Tristan_ on the piano.

"Enough of this music... the rest of us are dilettantes and mandolin players."

This is a paraphrase from William Berger (the original line is much better):

"Wagner criticized Jews, yet kept Jewish friend; he advocated vegetarianism, yet ate meat; one has to wonder, given his anti-vivisectionism, whether he was secretly performing live animal dissections in his basement."


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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

Probably not based on a real anecdote, but _se non e vero, e ben trovato_. In the Tony Palmer early '80s Wagner TV miniseries, Wagner (Richard Burton) is in Venice sitting on an outdoor cafe in a plaza with his [first] wife. A noisy army band is squeaking out its version of Rienzi's Prayer. Wagner can't stand his music played by street musicians like those. He walks up to the bandmaster, thanks him for the homage, but tells him, patting him on the back and smiling: "See what you can do to Verdi, now." The bandmaster grins and nods, overwhelmed at the attention. As Wagner walks back to his table, the band resumes massacring Rienzi's Prayer. A great double-take at that point by Burton.


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## Bardamu (Dec 12, 2011)

Rossini:

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time."

"Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour."


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A small collection:

"This Tristan is turning into something fearsome...the opera will probably be banned...only mediocre performances can save me! Good performances will drive people mad!" -- Richard Wagner

"I would rather like to not accomplish anything in Paris than in Berlin." -- Richard Wagner

"I wish his operas had fewer words." --Michael Tilson Thomas

"For me Wagner is impossible...he talks without ever stopping. One just can't talk all the time." -- Robert Schumann

"It is impossible to communicate with Schumann. The man is hopeless; he doesn't talk at all." -- Richard Wagner

"I love Wagner. But the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws" -- Charles Baudelaire

"Wagner surpasses every composer in his rich variety of instrumental color, but in both form and style he went too far. At the outset he successfully avoided mundane subject-matter, but he later strayed from his idealistic aims by carrying his artistic theories to extremes, and committed the very error that he had set out to reform: and so the monotony, which he avoided with such success, now threatens to dominate him." -- Giuseppe Verdi

"I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide." -- Mark Twain


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## Donata (Dec 28, 2013)

Charles Baudelaire on Tannhäuser, "His is the art of translating, by subtle gradations, all that is excessive, immense, ambitious in spiritual and natural mankind. On listening to this ardent and despotic music one feels at times as though one discovered again, painted in the depths of a gathering darkness torn asunder by dreams, the dizzy imaginations induced by opium."

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time."
-- Gioacchino Rossini

"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches -- he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

The problem wih Wagner's music is that it makes you want to go out and invade Poland .

Woody Allen .


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

Today I did my inaugural talk for the local quasi-intellectual lunch/afternoon debating group, and I'm pleased to report that it went extremely well.

If anyone has done or contemplated doing a talk on Wagner, you'll know that you won't be short of source material, the problem will be how to avoid getting bogged down in the vastness of material available. As I read various books (1) and viewed some very informative websites, I started to formulate a plan. Initially, the idea was to have "Wagner: in the words of others", and that was proceeding pretty well, but it was still too large in scope. What really struck me as I researched, is how Wagner's personality and demeanor was very different to what people might suppose. There's an impression that he was a miserable, angry and hate-filled misanthropist. Whilst those qualities may exist, in fact he was the epitome of the dictionary description of the word _mercurial_ as well as having any number of amusing eccentricities. The personal accounts of this make very good reading, and also good to read aloud to a room.

Wagner's influence on Joyce (Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) and Eliot (The Waste Land) was another area that was worth exploring with a well-read audience. His innovative influence on the things that opera/concert/theatre-goers take for granted also proved to be good material for raising a few eyebrows. Interspersing the talk with musical excerpts (bleeding chunks!) while I swigged my coffee, gave an added dimension.

(1) Recommended reading: Aspects of Wagner, Bayreuth: The Early Years, and Wagner Remembered, all highly recommended.


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## mamascarlatti (Sep 23, 2009)

Congratulations! Glad it went well.


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

I'll post a few of the entertaining ones that I used in the talk. Some had to be edited for the benefit of read-aloud performance. I'm pretty bad at accents, but did my best with French, German, English, American, female, Queen Victoria etc.
------------------------------------

Camille Saint-Saens, the French composer, attended the second cycle of the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876 as a newspaper correspondent.

_ By way of preface I would like to give some details of Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians which will not be out of place.

I myself have studied the works of Richard Wagner for a long time. I have given myself completely to this study and all the performances I have attended have left me with a profound impression that all the theories in the world will never succeed in making me forget. Because of this I have been accused of being a Wagnerian. Indeed, for a while, I believed myself to be one. What a mistake, and how far from the truth. I had only to meet some true Wagnerians to realise that I was not one of them and never could be!

For the Wagnerian, music did not exist before Wagner, or rather it was still in embryo - Wagner raised it to the level of Art. Bach, Beethoven and occasionally Weber, announced that the Messiah would come and thus have their importances as prophets. The rest are of no importance. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, none has written a single bearable note. The French school and the Italian school have never existed. If a Wagnerian should hear music other than Wagner's his face shows only disdain. Any of the Master's works, even the ballet music from Rienzi, plunges him into an indescribable state of ecstasy.

I once witnessed a very curious scene between Wagner and a charming young lady, who was a writer, and Wagnerian of the first rank. This lady was imploring Wagner to play her on the piano this unparalleled, indescribable chord she had discovered in the score of Siegfried.

"Oh Master, this chord!"

"But my dear child," says the master "it is simply the chord of E minor, you can play it quite as well as I can."

"Oh Master, Master, please... this chord!"

The Master, in the end, went to the piano and played E G B - whereupon the lady fell back on a couch with a sigh. It was more than she could bear.
_


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

Together with Prince Albert, Queen Victoria attended the penultimate Philharmonic concert on 11th June 1855 and was introduced to Wagner during the interval. She noted afterwards in her diary:
_
We dined early with Feodore, her girls, our boys, and all the ladies and gentlemen going to the Philharmonic where a fine concert was given, under the direction of the celebrated composer Herr Richard Wagner. He conducted in a peculiar way, taking Mozart's and Beethoven's symphonies in quite a different time to what one is accustomed. His own overture to Tannhause is a wonderful composition, quite overpowering, so grand, and in parts wild, string and descriptive. We spoke to him afterwards. He is short, very quiet, wears spectacles and has a very finely developed forehead, a hooked nose, & projecting chin. He must be about 34. 
_
(Actually Wagner was 42).

For his part Wagner describe the queen as .... _'not fat.. but very small and not at all pretty, with, I am sorry to say, a rather red nose. But there is something uncommonly friendly and confiding about her and though she is by no means imposing, she is nevertheless a kind and delightful person.'_

In 1858 Queen Victoria's daughter 'Vicky' was married to kaiser Frederick III. The Bridal Chorus (i.e. Here Comes The Bride) from Lohengrin, which premiered in 1850) was chosen, along with Mendelssohn's Wedding March. This Wagner and Mendelssohn double act has played a part in millions of weddings since then.


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

Eduard Devrient was the intendant to Grand Duke Friedrich in Karlsruhe, where Wagner had landed whilst looking for backers and a new position. His writing shows the exasperation many probably experienced in their dealings with Wagner.

_8th May 1861. Visited Wagner at his hotel. As he says himself, he has earned absolutely nothing in recent years and got through a vast amount of money in Paris, all of it belonging to his friends and which he ought now to be seriously thinking of repaying. This poor man sat there in his green velvet dressing gown, lined in purple satin, with Turkish trousers of the same material and a broad brown velvet beret perched askew on his head.

I left him in no illusion as to the slender hopes than he places on the part of the Grand Duke, both for the production of Tristan and, even more, for the honorarium that he is seeking, nay, demanding, so that he can lead a carefree existence in a home of his own, writing his music and doing just as he pleases, naturally of course, in velvet and satin and the luxurious creature comforts that I know of his place in Zurich. He vacillates between acquiescing in his fate and dreaming up the most fanciful plans and ideas. Finally he said, somewhat ominously, that if all else fails, he will settle HERE in Karlsruhe... where he can live comfortably and inexpensively and travel between Paris and Germany. It would then be his pleasure to take an occasional interest in the work of our local theatre and in individual projects. What a hailstorm of trouble and unpleasantness I see looming and threatening me in my old age!_


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

Ludwig II of Bavaria (later to become Mad King Ludwig famous for the Neuschwanstein castle) came to the throne in 1864 at the age of 18. A passionate fan of Wagner, he wasted little time in summoning the composer to Munich.

The following is from his private diaries.

4th May 1864

_Two o'clock, rapture, fairest hope fulfilled, the man I have longed for came: Richard Wagner! spoke until quarter to four about the decline of art, About his career, works! Tristan & Isolde, Lohengrin, Tannhauser, Meistersinger, Ring des Nibelungen. Music. Ecstasy! Sublime delight! Sun's radiant light! To cherish Him and perish, to grasp him, ne'er to unclasp him. to hold him. Joy untold. What wondrous fate this is! O rapture and, oh, bliss!_

(I suspect Wagner would have shared many of these sentiments!)

Ludwig immediately settled Wagner's most pressing debts and presented him with a large amount of cash. In their 19 year association Wagner received from the king 562,000 marks, entirely from the civil list.


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

With Ludwig's steadfast and passionate backing, an opera house specifically for Wagner's works is built on a hill near Bayreuth, Bavaria, together with a family home for Wagner. It is to open in 1876 with the premiere of the 4 day tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Lilli Lehmann, the famous German soprano, wrote extensively in her memoirs about the first Bayreuth festival of 1876, in which she created 3 of the singing roles. She captures much of the giant artistic effort required by so many singers and musicians as they encountered hour after hour of complex music, which they and sometimes nobody had heard before.

_ I was present at all the rehearsals, even when I had no part to play, and observed, listened and learned. Even so it was quite bewildering to gain acquaintance with the work by hearing fragments and there were many of the artists who found it incomprehensible - until Wagner went through their parts with them. But as we learned so our enthusiasm grew.
_

In one excerpt she relates an incident at a rehearsal where Wagner himself was obliged to act out a scene for a soprano who couldn't grasp it.

_
Sieglinde was to be sung by Frauline Scheffsky from Munich, believed to be a friend of King Ludwig. She was big and powerful and had a big powerful voice. But she lacked poetry and the brains to express what she lacked. In her first scene, where Sieglinde, overcome by her wretched lot, calls Siegmund back to her, she failed totally. HER Sieglinde had no suggestion of great sorrow or inner longing. Wagner was very dissatisfied and acted the scene out for her --- HIS Sieglinde...

stood transfixed at the broad stone table as Siegmund leaves the hearth to utter 'I turn my eyes and steps from here'. Something beyond control stirs in her breast, her face is grief-stricken and shows her fear that this man, whom she does not know but feels belongs to her, will abandon her to her misery. She turns her face and body, only slightly, as if to run after him as she cries 'So tarry here'. - then she adopts her former stance and at the phrase 'at a house where ill-luck lives' she is supporting herself with both hands behind her, grasping the table. There she remains, almost crushed by agony, head back, eyes closed, until startled by (her husband) Hunding's foot-fall. This she follows with eye and ear before going to open the door to him. Wagner, no feminine figure, played all this with an overwhelmingly touching expression. Never since has any Sieglinde, in my experiences, come near to matching him, even remotely._


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Mark Twain, "At the Shrine of St. Wagner":

_Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn't mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was "Parsifal." Madame Wagner does not permit its representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The first act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing._


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

(Aware that my audience contained many Joyceians (or whatever they're called), I decided to go a little off-topic to illustrate Wagner's influence on literature.)

The most influential poem of the last century in any language, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, contains four quotations from Wagner’s opera (two from Tristan and Isolde and two from Gotterdammerung), as well as secondary connections. In addition, part of the central section of the poem parallels the first scene of the third act of Gotterdammerung, with Thames-daughters substitued for Rhine daughters. 

What may well be the most influential of modern novels, those of James Joyce, are pervaded with Wagnerian reference. When, in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus cries ‘Nothung’ as he lifts his ashplant to smash a chandelier in a Dublin brothel, we are given not just the cry itself from The Ring but a reminder of the fact that the tree in which Nothung had been embedded by Wotan was an ash, and that Wotan’s spear, the chief power symbol of The Ring, was an ashplant. In the same novel we have the chanting of the blood-brotherhood oath from Gotterdammerung. In Finnegans Wake we have extensive parallels with Tristan, plus a fairly direct reference to Wagner - The ‘wagoner’ and his mudheeldy wheesindonk (Mathide Wesendonk, with whom he was having an affair at the time he composed Tristan.)

Finnegan’s Wake begins and ends in the Liffey, just as Wagner’s Ring does in the Rhine.

On all these works the influence of Wagner extends beyond direct quotation, and beyond imagery, to the structure itself, for in them his technique of weaving a seamless frabric out of fragmentary leitmotifs is consciously adapted from music to literature. Most important of all, the use of the interior monologue in the novel originated as an attempt to make words do in fiction what Wagner’s orchestra had done in his operas.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

"The trouble with Wagner is that he talks all the time. No one talks all the time." ~ Clara Schumann


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

PetrB said:


> "The trouble with Wagner is that he talks all the time. No one talks all the time." ~ Clara Schumann


"It is impossible to communicate with Schumann. The man is hopeless; he doesn't talk at all." --Richard Wagner


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

KenOC said:


> "It is impossible to communicate with Schumann. The man is hopeless; he doesn't talk at all." --Richard Wagner


LOL! The "talk all the time" is of course, _an analogy_ referring to Wagner's aesthetic of an endless stream of music without a break, and likely to his notion, which he very much put into practice, of "endless melody."


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

PetrB said:


> LOL! The "talk all the time" is of course, _an analogy_ referring to Wagner's aesthetic of an endless stream of music without a break, and likely to his notion, which he very much put into practice, of "endless melody."


That and the fact that he talked all the time.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

PetrB said:


> LOL! The "talk all the time" is of course, _an analogy_ referring to Wagner's aesthetic of an endless stream of music without a break, and likely to his notion, which he very much put into practice, of "endless melody."


Analogy? "To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did."

--Deems Taylor, "The Monster" https://sites.google.com/site/kenocstuff/the-monster


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Mark Twain, "At the Shrine of St. Wagner":


Unfortunately, I had to cut a lot of Mark Twain's entertaining articles from the talk, because his excerpts tended to be lengthy pieces. I did of course correct the familiar mistake of attributing "Apparently it's better than it sounds" to him rather than his quoting of Edgar Nye. Far from being dismissive of Wagner, Twain was clearly quite the fan.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

C.S. Lewis on his first encounter with Wagnerian art:

"It was as if the Arctic itself, all but the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water. I can lay my hand on the very moment; there is hardly any fact I know so well, though I cannot date it. Someone must have left in the schoolroom a literary periodical: The Bookman, perhaps, or the Times Literary Supplement. My eye fell upon a headline and a picture, carelessly, expecting nothing. A moment later, as the poet says, 'The sky had turned round.' 
"What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to that volume. I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Sigfried. How did I know, at once and beyond question, that this was no Celtic, or silvan, or terrestrial twilight? But so it was. Pure 'Northernness' had engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity ... and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner's Drapa, that Sigfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes. And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like a heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to 'have it again' was the supreme and only important object of desire. 
" ... All this time I had still not heard a note of Wagner's music, though the very shape of the printed letters of his name had become to me a magical symbol. ... But I had this in common with Wagner, that I was thinking not of concert pieces but of heroic drama. To a boy already crazed with 'the Northernness,' ... the Ride came like a thunderbolt. From that moment Wagnerian records ... became the chief drain on my pocket money.... 'Music' was one thing, 'Wagnerian music' quite another, and there was no common measure between them; it was not a new pleasure but a new kind of pleasure, if indeed 'pleasure' is the right word, rather than trouble, ecstasy, astonishment, 'a conflict of sensations without name.'"


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

_Cosima, tut meinen arsch schauen groß in diesem kleid?_


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

amfortas said:


> That and the fact that he talked all the time.


Yes, indeed ... Gemini! :scold:


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

'I really loathe Wagner – everything he stands for – and I don’t even like his music very much........It’s like if you have a palate that you’ve developed over the years to distinguish between the best Burgundy and Côtes-du-Rhône – then you’re suddenly given this appalling Spätlese that’s actually got a fair dose of paraffin in it as well, and sheep drench – I think your palate would be ruined. That’s my fear.’ (Sir John Elliot Gardiner)


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

“I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM.” 
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> 'I really loathe Wagner - everything he stands for - and I don't even like his music very much........It's like if you have a palate that you've developed over the years to distinguish between the best Burgundy and Côtes-du-Rhône - then you're suddenly given this appalling Spätlese that's actually got a fair dose of paraffin in it as well, and sheep drench - I think your palate would be ruined. That's my fear.' (Sir John Elliot Gardiner)


I didn't realize that Gardiner was an idiot. Disappointing.

I'm sure there's no end to stupid disparaging remarks about Wagner. Do you keep a file of them, or do you just have a terrific memory for this particular genre?


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I didn't realize that *Gardiner was an idiot. *Disappointing.
> 
> I'm sure there's no end to stupid disparaging remarks about Wagner. Do you keep a file of them, or do you just have a terrific memory for this particular genre?


Not an idiot, Woodduck. Just doesn't share your taste in music. But it doesn't make him an idiot. There are plenty of people in this world who don't like Wagner but it doesn't make them idiots!
I don't have to keep a file. Quotes like this are very easy to come by! As Wagner himself made no end of stupid, disparaging remarks about other people is it surprising that people make them about him?


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

"From the first entry of the cellos, my heart contracted as in a spasm . . . Never before had my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion; never before had my heart been consumed by such suffering and yearning, by such holy bliss; never before had such heavenly transfiguration transported me away from reality. I felt myself no longer of this world . . . A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet." -Bruno Walter, on first hearing the _Tristan_ prelude


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## Star (May 27, 2017)

After a performance at the Bern Opera, in 1908, of Richard Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” Albert Einstein commented to his companion, ‘Wagner is, God forgive me, not to my taste.’
He said on another occasion: “I admire Wagner’s inventiveness, but I see his lack of architectural structure as decadence. Moreover, to me his musical personality is indescribably offensive, so that for the most part, I can listen to him only with disgust.”


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Not an idiot, Woodduck. Just doesn't share your taste in music. But it doesn't make him an idiot. There are plenty of people in this world who don't like Wagner but it doesn't make them idiots!
> I don't have to keep a file. Quotes like this are very easy to come by! *As Wagner himself made no end of stupid, disparaging remarks about other people is it surprising that people make them about him?*


Gardiner says he "loathes everything that Wagner stands for." That is idiotic. Wagner stood for a great many things, many of which I'm certain that Mr. Gardiner also stands for. Further, his comparison of Wagner's music with paraffin and sheep drench, and his "fear" that it would "ruin his palate," is also idiotic. The most charitable explanation for this is that Gardiner has a crude sense of humor. Perhaps you share it. Myself, I prefer Mark Twain, on Wagner or anything else.

Are you looking to take revenge on Wagner for his own stupid remarks, then? Or just add to your own long, long record of disparagements by hiding behind the foolish remarks of other people? I can see no other reason for quoting Gardiner, who really ought to go back to conducting Bach, where he actually seems to know something.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Star said:


> After a performance at the Bern Opera, in 1908, of Richard Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," Albert Einstein commented to his companion, 'Wagner is, God forgive me, not to my taste.'
> He said on another occasion: "I admire Wagner's inventiveness, but I see his lack of architectural structure as decadence. Moreover, to me his musical personality is indescribably offensive, so that for the most part, I can listen to him only with disgust."


Apparently Einstein never noticed the line in _Parsifal:_ "You see, my son, here time becomes space." Or maybe that's where he got his theory and didn't want to admit it...


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## Star (May 27, 2017)

.................................................................


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## Star (May 27, 2017)

I like this article which contains quotes from quite a few people. Just about sums up my own feelings about Wagner and his operas

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/01/nothing-wrong-bored-by-opera


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Gardiner says he "loathes everything that Wagner stands for." That is idiotic. Wagner stood for a great many things, many of which I'm certain that Mr. Gardiner also stands for. Further, his comparison of Wagner's music with paraffin and sheep drench, and his "fear" that it would "ruin his palate," is also idiotic. The most charitable explanation for this is that Gardiner has a crude sense of humor. Perhaps you share it. Myself, I prefer Mark Twain, on Wagner or anything else.
> 
> Are you looking to take revenge on Wagner for his own stupid remarks, then? Or just add to your own long, long record of disparagements by hiding behind the foolish remarks of other people? I can see no other reason for quoting Gardiner, who really ought to go back to conducting Bach, where he actually seems to know something.


I cannot see that musical taste shows anything about knowledge. Gardiner does not like Wagner so he has a crude sense of humour? Of course, Wagner didn't in some of the thing he said?


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## Forss (May 12, 2017)

Nietzsche puts it so aptly: "I understand perfectly when a musician says today: 'I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.'"


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> I cannot see that musical taste shows anything about knowledge. Gardiner does not like Wagner so he has a crude sense of humour? Of course, Wagner didn't in some of the thing he said?


Many people don't like various composers but don't say stupid things like "I loathe everything that he stands for" or compare the music to "paraffin and sheep drench." Do you think these are intelligent remarks? What they really are is the sort of gross hyperbole that people rightly criticize when ignorant people offer it here on the forum. But apparently, given your defense of them, they're very much to your taste. There's just no accounting for tastelessness.

(And no, Wagner didn't say stupid things about music he didn't like. His criticisms, even those meant humorously, made actual points worth discussing. The breadth of Wagner's appreciation of other music is only one of the things about him that isn't generally known because people are too busy denouncing him as arrogant and prejudiced. Did you know that he was an advocate for Italian Renaissance music? You can hear its influence in _Parsifal_.)


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Forss said:


> Nietzsche puts it so aptly: "I understand perfectly when a musician says today: 'I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.'"


Nietzsche is an absolute treasure trove of quotable remarks about the composer he loved/hated/loved. His harsh condemnation of _Parsifal_'s supposed capitulation to Christianity's decadent morality of pity was followed by these:

_Putting aside all irrelevant questions (to what end such music can or should serve?), and speaking from a purely aesthetic point of view, has Wagner ever written anything better? The supreme psychological perception and precision as regards what can be said, expressed, communicated here, the extreme of concision and directness of form, every nuance of feeling conveyed epigrammatically; a clarity of musical description that reminds us of a shield of consummate workmanship; and finally an extraordinary sublimity of feeling, something experienced in the very depths of music, that does Wagner the highest honour; a synthesis of conditions which to many people - even "higher minds" - will seem incompatible, of strict coherence, of "loftiness" in the most startling sense of the word, of a cognisance and a penetration of vision that cuts through the soul as with a knife, of sympathy with what is seen and shown forth. We get something comparable to it in Dante, but nowhere else. Has any painter ever depicted so sorrowful a look of love as Wagner does in the final accents of his Prelude?

I cannot think of it without feeling violently shaken, so elevated was I by it, so deeply moved. It was as if someone were speaking to me again, after many years, about the problems that disturb me - naturally not supplying the answers I would give, but the Christian answer, which after all has been the answer of stronger souls than the last two centuries of our era have produced. When listening to this music one lays Protestantism aside as a misunderstanding - and also, I will not deny it, other really good music, which I have at other times heard and loved, seems, as against this, a misunderstanding!

In the art of seduction, Parsifal will always retain its rank - as the stroke of genius in seduction. - I admire this work; I wish I had written it myself; failing that, I understand it. - Wagner never had better inspirations than in the end. Here the cunning in his alliance of beauty and sickness goes so far that, as it were, it casts a shadow over Wagner's earlier art - which now seems too bright, too healthy. Do you understand this? Health, brightness having the effect of a shadow? almost of an objection? - To such an extent have we become pure fools. - Never was there a greater master in dim, hieratic aromas - never was a man equally expert in all small infinities, all that trembles and is effusive, all the feminisms from the idioticon of happiness! - Drink, O my friends, the philtres of this art! Nowhere will you find a more agreeable way of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manhood under a rosebush. - Ah, this old magician! This Klingsor of all Klingsors! How he thus wages war against us! us, the free spirits! How he indulges every cowardice of the modern soul with the tones of magic maidens! - Never before has there been such a deadly hatred of the search for knowledge! - One has to be a cynic in order not to be seduced here; one has to be able to bite in order not to worship here. Well, then, you old seducer, the cynic warns you - cave canem.

_


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## Star (May 27, 2017)

I like Wagner’s music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time, without people hearing what one says. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

Star said:


> I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time, without people hearing what one says. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)


Clearly not accurate. I remember when my squash-wrecked knee joint cracked during Parsifal and it reverberated around the whole opera house.

The fact that it makes it into Wilde's only novel is notable though.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Many people don't like various composers but don't say stupid things like "I loathe everything that he stands for" or compare the music to "paraffin and sheep drench." Do you think these are intelligent remarks? What they really are is the sort of gross hyperbole that people rightly criticize when ignorant people offer it here on the forum. But apparently, given your defense of them, they're very much to your taste. *There's just no accounting for tastelessness.
> *
> (And no, Wagner didn't say stupid things about music he didn't like. His criticisms, even those meant humorously, made actual points worth discussing. The breadth of Wagner's appreciation of other music is only one of the things about him that isn't generally known because people are too busy denouncing him as arrogant and *prejudiced*


Frankly I've always thought 'Jusaism in music' to be pretty tasteless. Prejudiced too. But I don't want to get n a war of words.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

"Wagner is the Shakespeare of music ." John Philip Sousa .


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

DavidA said:


> Frankly I've always thought 'Jusaism in music' to be pretty tasteless. Prejudiced too. But I don't want to get n a war of words.


If "Jusaism" should be spelled "Juiceaism," it may not be as tasteless as you think.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

superhorn said:


> "Wagner is the Shakespeare of music ." John Philip Sousa .


A surprising observation from the "Stars & Stripes Forever" guy. It reminds us that Sousa did compose other music and was a well-trained all-around musician. According to Wiki, he started his music education by playing the violin as a pupil of John Esputa, and studied harmony and musical composition at the age of six. He also studied voice, violin, piano, flute, cornet, baritone horn, trombone, and alto horn, and had perfect pitch.


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## lextune (Nov 25, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> I didn't realize that Gardiner was an idiot. Disappointing.





DavidA said:


> Not an idiot, Woodduck. Just doesn't share your taste in music. But it doesn't make him an idiot.


It might not make him an idiot, but it does mark him as less of a musician. 
The lame "I don't even like his music very much" remark, leaving the door open to saying he does like Wagner's music _somewhat_, is pathetically wishy-washy....he knows the power of Wagner's music, he just doesn't like it, which is fine, but his attempts to disparage it are extremely weak.



Star said:


> After a performance at the Bern Opera, in 1908, of Richard Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," Albert Einstein commented to his companion, 'Wagner is, God forgive me, not to my taste.'
> He said on another occasion: "I admire Wagner's inventiveness, but I see his lack of architectural structure as decadence.


Reading about Einstein's violin "skills", I am not surprised to find out that he is unable to perceive the might of Wagner's structures.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

superhorn said:


> "Wagner is the Shakespeare of music ." John Philip Sousa .


And Sousa is the Shakespeare of marches.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Don Fatale said:


> Stephen Fry


did a good documentary; I've found the bit starting at 19:40 especially memorable-


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

hammeredklavier said:


> did a good documentary; I've found the bit starting at 19:40 especially memorable-


Why? Because the music is beautiful, or because Fry interrupts it with yet another tedious ( and apparently obligatory) rehash of Wagner's antisemitism?

Read carefully. The title of the thread is 

*Famous and not so famous quotes about Wagner*

Give us a ****ing break.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

"Wagner is the Shakespeare of music ". John Philip Sousa .


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