Wagner Quotes

Richard Wagner commenting on the music of Ludvig Van Beethoven: He was a Titan, wrestling with the Gods.

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

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner.

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

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.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

And my singing, I don't think I could sing Wagner or opera, but I could probably carry a tune. I was in a musical once, but it was never performed.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.

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.

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

I am honored to have John Lloyd called the Black Wagner. It is a privilege to have been compared with him.

I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.

yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut

I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.

Remember, Those who have the gift of faith are growth-oriented, goal-oriented, optimistic, and confident. – C. Peter Wagner.

Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.

Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy 'fetishization' of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?

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.

If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.

If one has not heard Wagner at Bayreuth, one has heard nothing! Take lots of handkerchiefs because you will cry a great deal! Also take a sedative because you will be exalted to the point of delirium!

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.

What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself.

Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner ...deadpan funny ...his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of 'textile genius' who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope.

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.

Thankfully, it is getting better for women composers. We now have five women Pulitzer Prize winners in music since 1983: Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Shulamit Ran, Melinda Wagner, Jennifer Higdon, and Caroline Shaw. When Marin Alsop was asked what it felt like to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, she said, "I am exceedingly proud to be 'the first' but I am also a bit shocked that there can still be firsts for women in 2013!"

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.

My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.

To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.

I dig Strauss and Wagner, those cats are good...

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.

I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories.

Ah! My dear friend painting is to us what the music of Berlioz and Wagner was before us - a consolatory art for sore hearts! And yet there are only a few like you and me who feel it!!!

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

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.

One day he [Wagner] was batting against a young pitcher who had just come into the league. The catcher was a kid, too . The pitcher threw Honus a curve ball, and he swung at it and missed and fell down. Looked helpless as a robin. I was kind of surprised, but the guy sitting next to me poked me in the ribs and said, 'Watch this next one.' Those kids figured they had the old man's weakness, you see, and served him up the same dish - as he knew they would. Well, Honus hit a line drive so hard the fence in left field went back and forth for five minutes.

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!

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.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

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

Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies. It's no wonder Waltraud Wagner, the Austrian Angel of Death, convinced her friends to kill with her. It just seems natural. You and me against the world.

I don't know if you've ever seen this film called Elite Squad, which, actually Wagner [Moura] is the one narrating that. José Padilha, one of creators of our show, that's where the style comes from. It has a heavy narrator. But I thought about it a lot. You [the viewers] have to work for the show, unless you're bilingual. It's a really aggressive type of filming, it's engaging, you've got to read.

The first typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner's Siegfried. : the music of Siegfried expressed for the first time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.

I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.

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.

Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going.