Top 40 Wagner Quotes

With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven’t started three years before, I’m screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together.

The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once.

I simply love Wagner’s music. That actually started very early. He was the first composer I was exposed very much to because my parents introduced me to Wagner’s music very early.

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I’m singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

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.

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.

Striker Sandro Wagner is very strong, a true No. 9, who really made his mark playing with Germany in the Confederations Cup.

They see me all the time at Bayreuth and think I only like Wagner’s music, and it’s not true.

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ – such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music.

Wagner had a terrific understanding of politics. In 1829, he was a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to bring down the establishment. He hated religion and churches, which he said enslaved people. But he later developed different views that put art at the centre of the life of the state.

Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

Robert Wagner was my greatest crush.

You look at someone like Neil Wagner – he’s got a big heart, a big engine, and keeps running. And that’s what you want, you want guys who, time and time again, want to be putting themselves in that position, to keep wanting to create chances and keep trying to change the game.

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?’

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.

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.

To be in a position to help my family out and change the trajectory of the Wagner family it’s a pretty dope feeling.

Everything in Wagner’s work – the music, the acting, the staging – stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.

The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe.

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

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.

You might say that Richard Wagner was the Queen Victoria of Europe. He had musical children everywhere!

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven’s triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

Scriabin slept with Chopin under his pillow, and I slept with Wagner under mine. I could not concentrate on memorizing Bach fugues, but I had all of ‘Gotterdammerung’ in my fingers.

C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, ‘Whatever grows a church is good’ and needs to be nurtured.

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

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.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

I’m sure the atmosphere at Tanglewood and the space there and nature – I think it absolutely fits Wagner’s music.

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

If I can’t do an opera as well as most people, I won’t do it at all. I don’t want to touch Wagner because I think a lot of people do it a hell of a lot better than I could. I do the operas I think I can do, know something about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner’s writings, but I can’t accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

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 play opera, to play Wagner, it’s a great joy.