Wagner Quotes

• Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Sick, Disease, Made

  "Der Fall Wagner". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888.

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• I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Music, People

  1891 The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch.4.

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• The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

  Ernest Newman

  Jobs, Work, Inspiration

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• 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

  Music, Cat, Glasses

  Charles Baudelaire (1919). “The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire”

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• A culture that gave the world the spiritual creations of the Classical Music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert, the paintings of Michelangelo, and Raphael, Da Vinci and Rembrandt, does not need lessons from societies whose idea of spirituality is a heaven peopled with female virgins for the use of men, whose idea of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel.

  Ibn Warraq

  Spiritual, Men, Ideas

  Ibn Warraq (2010). “Virgins? What Virgins?: And Other Essays”

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• I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Country, Art, Thinking

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• Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

  Mark Twain

  Music, Witty, Humorous

  Autobiography (published in 1924).

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

  Gioachino Rossini

  Time, Judging, Opera

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

  Gioachino Rossini

  Funny, Music, Humor

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• They tell me Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

  Edgar Wilson Nye

  Music, Sound, Opera

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• I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.

  James Toback

  Art, Drama, Film

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.

  Richard Wagner

  Musician, Sound

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• 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

  Funny, Sarcastic, Suicide

  Mark Twain (1924). “Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review”, p.175, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• The music of Wagner imposes mental tortures that only algebra has the right to inflict.

  Paul Bins, comte de Saint-Victor

  Music, Torture, Algebra

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• Western culture is what gave us Mozart, and Da Vinci, and Wagner, and Beethoven.

  Milo Yiannopoulos

  Western Culture, Culture, Western

  Source: thestagblog.com

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• Beethoven and Wagner for many years wrung our hearts. But now we are sated with them and derive much greater pleasure from ideally combining the noise of streetcars, internal-combustion engines, automobiles, and bust crowds than from rehearsing, for example, the 'Eroica' or the 'Pastorale'...away! les ust be gone, since we shall not much longer succeed in restraining a desire to create a new musical realism by a generous distribution of sonorous blows and slaps, leaping numbly over violins, pianofortes, contrabasses, and groaning organs, Away!

  Luigi Russolo

  Heart, Blow, Years

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• There are probably many people in Israel who believe that Wagner, who died in 1883, lived in Berlin in 1942 and was friends with Hitler.

  Daniel Barenboim

  Believe, Israel, People

  Interview with Joachim Kronsbein and Bernhard Zand, www.spiegel.de. June 22, 2012.

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• Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.

  Stefan Zweig

  Greatness, Thinking, Decision

  Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig (1977). “A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931-1935”, p.67, Univ of California Press

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• When I'm alone at home, I really prefer to listen to Wagner's orchestral music rather than any vocal music. I find it illuminating not to have to pay attention to voices in the recordings.

  Kiri Te Kanawa

  Home, Voice, Attention

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• ...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Humorous, Names

  Mark Twain (2015). “Mark Twain's Essays: Top Essays”, p.131, 谷月社

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• I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Thinking, World, Opera

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• Wagner festival was [Adolf Hitler] time with the Wagner family. [Eva Braun] asked once to attend but he forbade it and that was that, she never asked again.

  Gretl Braun

  Festivals

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• What terrible harm Wagner did by interspersing his pages of genius with harmonic and modulatory outrages to which both young and old are gradually becoming accustomed and which have procreated d'Indy and Richard Strauss.

  Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

  Genius, Pages, Becoming

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• Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

  Steve Reich

  Real, Age, Jazz

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• You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

  Philip Larkin

  Crazy, Odd, Finnegans Wake

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