Top 78 Quotes About Richard Wagner
#1. Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
Richard Wagner
#2. 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
#3. To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have men such as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler
#5. Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. he never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun.
Thomas Mann
#6. Richard Wagner commenting on the music of Ludvig Van Beethoven: He was a Titan, wrestling with the Gods.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#7. You might say that Richard Wagner was the Queen Victoria of Europe. He had musical children everywhere!
Zubin Mehta
#8. The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.
Gavin Hood
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.
Richard Wagner
#12. I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.
Richard Wagner
#14. Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.
Richard Wagner
#16. The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.
Richard Wagner
#17. The immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished.
Richard Wagner
#18. When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.
Richard Wagner
#20. It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short there Music's reign begins.
Richard Wagner
#21. Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
Richard Wagner
#23. Wagner thought Rossini unserious; Rossini thought Wagner 'lacked sun'. Wagner also became the butt of a phrase Rossini had used down the years to describe musicians about whom he had certain reservations - "He has some beautiful moments but some bad quarters of an hour!
Richard Osborne
#24. Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries.
Richard Wagner
#25. Divorce is one of the most financially traumatic things you can go through. Money spent on getting mad or getting even is money wasted.
Richard Wagner
#26. Those who grasp the whole, will also comprehend all parts of that whole, even when immediate technical understanding is lacking, and recognize and marshal these.
Richard Wagner
#27. The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them.
Richard Wagner
#28. I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.
Richard Wagner
#29. I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.
Richard Wagner
#30. I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.
Richard Wagner
#31. The French idea of playing an instrument well is to be able to SING well upon it.
Richard Wagner
#32. In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow
Richard Wagner
#33. Many's the man/ who thought himself wise/ but what he needed/ he did not know ...
Richard Wagner
#34. It is impossible to communicate with Schumann. The man is hopeless; he doesn't talk at all.
Richard Wagner
#35. You know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never - never - never ...
Richard Wagner
#36. Everybody feels oppressed during a Wagner performance. That is part of the appeal.
Richard Taruskin
#37. Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being - musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else.
Richard Wagner
#38. The long-term vision is to replace, repair and regenerate failing tissues and organs with the materials of tissues and organs. It's still 'out there,' but it's possible to put together a grant proposal now that doesn't sound completely crazy.
Richard Wagner
#39. Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.
Richard Wagner
#40. I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired.
Richard Wagner
#41. That even in its sharpest pangs of pain a dog can still caress its master we have learnt from the studies of vivisectors.
Richard Wagner
#42. Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord's Supper.
Richard Wagner
#43. Any so-called stimulus program is a ruse. The government can increase its spending only by reducing private spending equivalently.
Richard Wagner
#44. Blessed be, the genius who never knew good fortune! Genius in itself already means so much; what meaning does luck still hold for him?
Richard Wagner
#45. Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.
Richard Wagner
#46. The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.
Richard Wagner
#48. Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
#49. Even though it doesn't look like it, I run. On a treadmill. And I bounce around to all the songs on my iPod - the Pixies, Wagner, Richard and Linda Thompson, even books on tape. Just not self-help ones.
Bill Hader
#50. I am writing Parsifal only for my wife - if I had to depend on the German spirit, I should have nothing more to say.
Richard Wagner
#51. If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.
Richard Wagner
#52. From its first faint glimmerings, History shews Man's constant progress as a beast of prey. As such he conquers every land, subdues the fruit-fed races, founds mighty realms by subjugating other subjugators, forms states and sets up civilisations, to enjoy his prey at rest.
Richard Wagner
#53. Certain things in Mozart will and can never be excelled.
Richard Wagner
#54. Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: "I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come", and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: "You see, my son, time turns here into space
Richard Wagner
#55. The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.
Richard Wagner
#56. It should not be presumed that these people (the Jews), who are so separated from us by their religion, have any right to make our laws. But why blame the Jews? It is we who lack all feeling for our own identity, all sense of honour.
Richard Wagner
#58. The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.
Richard Wagner
#59. For once you are going to hear a dream, a dream that I have made sound ... I dreamed all this; never could my poor head have invented such a thing.
Richard Wagner
#60. The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.
Richard Wagner
#61. Whatever I thought right, to others seemed wrong; what I held to be bad, others approved of.
Richard Wagner
#62. The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.
Richard Wagner
#63. The most tremendous genius raised Mozart above all masters,
in all centuries and in all the arts.
Richard Wagner
#64. One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.
Richard Wagner
#66. One siupreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy and imagination that ceates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.
Richard Wagner
#67. A political man is disgusting, but a political wife, horrible.
Richard Wagner
#68. Music truely has to all other arts the same relation as religion to the church.
Richard Wagner
#69. We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness
Richard Wagner
#70. These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat.
Richard Wagner
#72. But then such a book as this is not meant to amuse.
Richard Wagner
#73. 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
#75. Attack and defence, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.
Richard Wagner
#77. What was infinitely more valuable to Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works would probably have remained unwritten.
Richard Wagner
#78. I know of only one composer who measures up to Beethoven, and that is Bruckner.
Richard Wagner
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