Top 100 Quotes About Wagner
#1. Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.
Stephen Hawking
#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. 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
#5. 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.
Ron Miles
#6. 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
#7. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.
James Horner
#8. Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
Richard Wagner
#9. I just can't listen to any more Wagner, you know ... I'm starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.
Woody Allen
#10. The prices are vertiginous. Carlinhos and Wagner take a booth and they talk and dip their wafers of exquisite beef into the sauces but most of the time they keep companionable silence together, as close men do, and find they have communicated everything. Run
Ian McDonald
#11. For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.
Alexander McCall Smith
#12. Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us ... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]
Liesbeth Heenk
#13. 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
#14. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.
Ernest Newman
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. He (Honus Wagner) was the nearest thing to a perfect player no matter where his manager chose to play him.
John McGraw
#18. Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
#19. My father pretended to be reading his letters. He was a dreadful actor. 'Since when have you liked Wagner?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#20. There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That's baseball.
Ernie Harwell
#21. Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
#22. 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.
Patti LuPone
#23. In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.
John Tavener
#24. 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
#25. Helga Sigrid was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, and still had an accent right out of Wagner. She was almost as tall as he was, and as Nordic as it was possible to get without disappearing altogether whenever the sun came out.
Carsten Stroud
#26. Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!
Marcel Proust
#27. I was so naive in radio technique that I knew nothing about timing. I would write pages on Honus Wagner and then get only half through by the time the show ended. I eventually learned, but there was nobody there to school me.
Waite Hoyt
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.
Rabih Alameddine
#32. Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.
Adolf Hitler
#33. I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner.
Ibn Warraq
#34. She could just imagine, all her friends and family mourning around her grave. The tombstone would read Kari Wagner, Died of Sheer Stupidity.
It would be almost as bad to have her grave marker read Died of Terminal Bedroom Boredom.
Cherise Sinclair
#35. 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.
DJ Spooky
#36. 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
#37. For me Wagner is impossible ... he talks without ever stopping. One can't just talk all the time.
Robert Schumann
#38. {In a letter to his friend Rudolf Wagner}
I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#39. He didn't care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?
Stephen King
#41. 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
#42. A sobering thought: what if, right at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential? - JANE WAGNER
Sarah Ban Breathnach
#44. 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
#45. Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.
Gioachino Rossini
#46. 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
#47. You might say that Richard Wagner was the Queen Victoria of Europe. He had musical children everywhere!
Zubin Mehta
#48. The way to get a ball past (Honus) Wagner is to hit it eight feet over his head.
John McGraw
#49. 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
#50. I love you, Michael Wagner."
"Forever?" he asked.
"Forever," I said.
Judy Blume
#51. Richard Wagner commenting on the music of Ludvig Van Beethoven: He was a Titan, wrestling with the Gods.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#52. In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.
Edvard Grieg
#53. Wagner's philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with Bruckner. Bruckner hadn't written a single word against Jews. Wagner's book on the Jews was one of the most infamous books of the 19th century.
Zubin Mehta
#54. 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
#55. The so-called second New Deal of 1935 - including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor - represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive government approach to the collapse of national prosperity.
Robert Dallek
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. If 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.
Harmony Korine
#59. Okay. There it is. I dressed up. As an owl. And fought crime. Perhaps you begin to see why I half expect this summary of my career to raise more laughs than poor cuckolded Moe Vernon with his foam teats and his Wagner could ever hoped to have done.
Alan Moore
#60. The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.
Nico Muhly
#61. 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.
Hans Frank
#63. A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner's 'Lohengrin' - such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#64. I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple.
Bharati Mukherjee
#65. I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.
D.H. Lawrence
#66. When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.
DJ Spooky
#67. 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
#68. 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 ...
Chuck Palahniuk
#69. She's sweet on Wagner.
I think she'd die for Beethoven.
she loves the way Puccini lays down a tune,
and Verdi's always creeping from her room.
Electric Light Orchestra
#70. When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing. I told him I wanted to be a real Major League baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#71. When I was about 19, my stepmother said - because this was back in the '80s - that I had Robert Wagner's pompadour. I said, 'What are you talking about? You mean the guy from 'Hart to Hart?'
Michael Weatherly
#72. Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.
Georg Solti
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. My stepfather was quite into opera, but he'd play it when he was in a bad mood, so you'd hear this boom through the floor, Wagner, and you'd feel nervous.
Sam Taylor-Johnson
#76. 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
#77. Ray wondered how different his life would be if he was accompanied by music throughout his daily routine. Walking to the pub would be more dramatic with Wagner. Stacking shelves would be quicker with Metallica.
Phil Church
#78. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico ity but not at random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.
John Steinbeck
#79. Lombardi: There's a whole series of beautiful Mozart and Wagner records, in still very pristine condition. But, never a Bible. Until now. May I ask what condition it's in?
Eli: It's beat up. But it will do the job.
Book Of Eli Movie
#80. I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.
I.M. Pei
#81. 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
#82. Badgering a colleague doesn't come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#83. I don't much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There's something about Wagner that's just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman's singing a song.
Philip Kerr
#84. 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
#85. Wagner cleared his throat once again, then pounded a few chords on the piano. But something unexpected happened when he started to sing. He sounded like Kermit the Frog being run over.
Dylan Callens
#86. There isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.
Mark Twain
#89. I was at a banquet, and I went into the ladies' room, and I'm in the stall doing my business, and a piece of paper and pen came from outside the door, and she says, 'Ms. Wagner, would you please sign this for me?' And I said, 'Are you kidding me?'
Lindsay Wagner
#90. After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.
Zubin Mehta
#91. Everybody feels oppressed during a Wagner performance. That is part of the appeal.
Richard Taruskin
#92. Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy 'fetishization' of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?
Slavoj Zizek
#93. It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes.
Anton Seidl
#94. 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.
Elvis Costello
#95. 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.
Wallace Shawn
#96. In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.
Michael Dirda
#97. 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
#98. Wagner has some great moments, but a lot of miserable half hours.
Mark Twain
#99. I am honored to have John Lloyd called the Black Wagner. It is a privilege to have been compared with him.
Honus Wagner
#100. Peter Wagner, my son, just won the Bel-Air Junior Club Championship. Parred the last three holes. One-putts, up and down. Us Wagners don't hit greens. We chip and putt.
Jack Wagner
