Wagner Quotes - Page 2

• I just can't listen to any more Wagner, you know...I'm starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.

  Woody Allen

  Witty, Humorous, Conquer

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• I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

  Colm Toibin

  Song, Morning, Writing

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

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Opera, Used, Glad

  Ralph Vaughan Williams (1987). “National Music: And Other Essays”, Oxford University Press, USA

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

  Robert Schumann

  Stopping, Impossible

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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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• 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!!!

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Art, Painting, Like You

  Vincent van Gogh, Martin Bailey (1990). “Vicent van Gogh, letters from Provence”, Editorial Biblos

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal - harmony, dynamics, orchestration - to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves.

  Daniel Barenboim

  Emotional, Expression, Dynamics

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

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• When I was about 19, my stepmother said - because this was back in the 80s - that I had Robert Wagners pompadour. I said, What are you talking about? You mean the guy from Hart to Hart?

  Michael Weatherly

  Mean, Talking, Guy

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• 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.

  Philippe Aries

  Strength, Music, Hero

  Philippe Ariès (1962). “Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life”, Vintage

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• 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.

  Richard Wagner

  Song, Other Worlds, Humanity

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• My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.

  Jean Anouilh

  Giving Up, Years, Wife

  Jean Anouilh “The Waltz of the Toreadors”

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• 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!"

  Barbara Harbach

  Night, Get Better, Proud

  Source: www.barbaraharbach.com

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• I think I have a pretty good ear. I mean, even just starting with, like, Austin Powers, where I did young Robert Wagner. People were, like, "How do you imitate Robert Wagner? What does he sound like? What does that even involve?".

  Rob Lowe

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Wagner is the Puccini of music.

  J. B. Morton

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

  Bernadette Peters

  Listening

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Boyd Holbrook

  Squad, Style, Narrators

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• 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

  Charles Bukowski

  Running, Wine, Night

  Charles Bukowski (2012). “The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993”, p.116, Canongate Books

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• 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.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religious, Mein Kampf, Luther

  Adolf Hitler (1998). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Wagner has some great moments, but a lot of miserable half hours.

  Mark Twain

  Half, Miserable, Moments

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• Science would not be what it is if there had not been a Galileo, a Newton or a Lavoisier, any more than music would be what it is if Bach, Beethoven and Wagner had never lived. The world as we know it is the product of its geniuses-and there may be evil as well as beneficent genius-and to deny that fact, is to stultify all history, whether it be that of the intellectual or the economic world.

  Norman Robert Campbell

  Science, Evil, Intellectual

  Norman Robert Campbell (1953). “What is science?”

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• I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Music, Selfish, Writing

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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