Wagner Opera Quotes

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.

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

Could he make a painting as emotional and epic as a Wagner opera? Not with the intention of replicating the maestro’s music, but to produce a parallel experience where colors were the notes and their composition the tonality.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond, In mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz.

Bizarreness, like salt, gives flavor to existence. Without it, life would be as long and tedious as an opera by Wagner.

Erhebe dich, Genossin meiner Schmach! Der junge Tag darf hier uns nicht mehr sehn. Arise, companion of my shame! Daybreak must not find us here.

Dorothy's world had become very small-visits to the chapel downstairs, vespers, and Communion, and opera on the radio (including Wagner, whom she refused to let Hitler, or even Wagner himself, ruin for her).

Certain numerologists in Germany had figured out that the number nine was fateful to German artists. Beethoven, Bruckner, and Mahler each wrote nine symphonies, Wagner nine operas that are still sung, Schiller, Hebbel, and Grillparzer each nine plays that are still produced.

An artist has to pay for the gift of his genius. Wagner paid. He was defeated, one way or another, all his life. His own self-destructiveness always pursued him. There wasn’t one of his triumphs that was not spoiled, at the moment of triumph, by his own self-destructiveness. But what he couldn’t do, his characters do. In his operas, he splits his many-faceted self into those characters. He drains off the evil in himself and, as the long dramas move towards their great catharses, he brings the good together. Hans Sachs does what Wagner wanted to do but never could – renounce his own wilfulness and open up in understanding and compassion to others.

In few human activities is competition more ingrained than in music, and has been so ever since the battle between Marsyas and Apollo. Wagner has immortalized these vocal battles in his Meistersinger. As instances from periods following that of the Meistersinger themselves we may cite the contest between Handel and Scarlatti got up by Cardinal Ottoboni in the year 1709, the chosen weapons being harpsichord and organ. In 1717 Augustus the Strong, King of Saxony and Poland, wanted to organize a contest between J. S. Bach and a certain Marchand, but the latter failed to appear. In 1726 all London society was in an uproar because of the competition between the two Italian singers Faustina and Cuzzoni: there were fisticuffs and catcalls. Factions and cliques develop with astonishing ease in musical life. The 18th century is full of these musical coteries—Bononcini versus Handel, Gluck versus Piccini, the Parisian “Bouffons” versus the Opera. The musical squabble sometimes took on the character of a lasting and embittered feud, such as that between the Wagnerians and the Brahmsians.

It was music first of all that brought us together. Without being professionals or virtuosos, we were all passionate lovers of music; but Serge dreamed of devoting himself entirely to the art. All the time he was studying law along with us, he took singing lessons with Cotogni, the famous baritone of the Italian Opera; while for musical theory, which he wanted to master completely so as to rival Moussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, he went to the very source and studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. However, our musical tastes were not always the same. The quality our group valued most was what the Germans call Stimmung, and besides this, the power of suggestion and dramatic force. The Bach of the Passions, Gluck, Schubert, Wagner and the Russian composers – Borodin in ‘Prince Igor’, Rimsky and, above all, Tchaikovsky, were our gods. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Queen of Spades’ had just been performed for the first time at the Opera of St Petersburg, and we were ecstatic about its Hoffmannesque element, notably the scene in the old Countess’s bedroom. We liked the composer’s famous Romances much less, finding them insipid and sometimes trivial. These Romances, however, were just what Diaghilev liked. What he valued most was broad melody, and in particular whatever gave a singer the chance to display the sensuous qualities of his voice. During the years of his apprenticeship he bore our criticisms and jokes with resignation, but as he learned more about music – and about the history of art in general – he gained in self-confidence and found reasons to justify his predilections. There came a time when not only did he dare to withstand our attacks but went on to refute our arguments fiercely.

The Thursday Circle covered a multitude of topics, including religion, ethics, politics, and culture. Part of the requirement for the group entailed attending cultural events. One week Bonhoeffer gave a talk on Wagner’s Parsifal and then took the group to see the opera itself. There were questions of Christian apologetics: “Did God create the world? . . . What is the purpose of prayer? . . . Who is Jesus Christ?” There were ethical questions: “Is there such a thing as a necessary lie?” They discussed the Christian perspective on Jews, on rich and poor, and on political parties. One week the topic was “the gods of the ancient Germans,” and another week it was “the gods of the Negro tribes.” One week the topic was “famous poets and their God (Goethe, Schiller),” and another it was “famous painters and their God (Grünewald, Dürer, Rembrandt).” They discussed mystery cults, the Muslim faith, music, Luther, and the Catholic church.*

A 2010 Los Angeles Opera production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle cost $31 million to produce.24 Broadway shows don’t usually cost that much, unless you’re talking about the recent Spider-Man debacle. U2’s last concert-tour budget might be in that range, but those were stadium shows attracting huge numbers of people. And in those latter two instances, the people who wrote the music are still alive, and presumably they get paid a piece out of every ticket sold, which is part of what keeps those production costs up. Wagner has been dead for a long time, so one assumes it’s not his agent who is charging the moon and driving up the cost of these Ring productions. (Granted, it is a four-part epic.) The Los Angeles Opera ended up with a $6 million deficit due to “slack demand for expensive tickets.

So, he eagerly drove from Basel to Bayreuth before the festival began to watch the last rehearsals of The Ring Cycle. As he watched, it hit him like Odin's bowel movement: the opera was shit.

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.

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!

When I have pictorially captured smell, the most palpable of the senses, the next thing will be to imprison sound- vulgarly speaking, to bottle it. Just think a moment. Force is as imperishable as matter; indeed, as I have been somewhat successful in showing, it is matter. Now, when a sound wave is once started, it is only lost through an indefinite extension of its circumference. Catch that sound wave, sir! Catch it in a bottle, then its circumference cannot extend. You may keep the sound wave forever if you will only keep it corked up tight. The only difficulty is in bottling it in the first place. I shall attend to the details of that operation just as soon as I have managed to photograph the confounded rotten-egg smell of sulphydric acid." The professor stirred up the offensive mixture with a glass rod, and continued: "While my object in bottling sound is mainly scientific, I must confess that I see in success in that direction a prospect of considerable pecuniary profit. I shall be prepared at no distant day to put operas in quart bottles, labeled and assorted, and contemplate a series of light and popular airs in ounce vials at prices to suit the times. You know very well that it costs a ten-dollar bill now to take a lady to hear Martha or Mignon, rendered in first-class style. By the bottle system, the same notes may be heard in one's own parlor at a comparatively trifling expense. I could put the operas into the market at from eighty cents to a dollar a bottle. For oratorios and symphonies I should use demijohns, and the cost would of course be greater. I don't think that ordinary bottles would hold Wagner's music. It might be necessary to employ carboys. Sir, if I were of the sanguine habit of you Americans, I should say that there were millions in it. Being a phlegmatic Teuton, accustomed to the precision and moderation of scientific language, I will merely say that in the success of my experiments with sound I see a comfortable income, as well as great renown. A SCIENTIFIC MARVEL By this time the professor had another negative, but an eager examination of it yielded nothing more satisfactory than before. He sighed and continued: "Having photographed smell and bottled sound, I shall proceed to a project as much higher than this as the reflective faculties are higher than the perceptive, as the brain is more exalted than the ear or nose. "I am perfectly satisfied that elements of mind are just as susceptible of detection and analysis as elements of matter. Why, mind is matter. "The soul spectroscope, or, as it will better be known, Dummkopf's duplex self-registering soul spectroscope, is based on the broad fact that whatever is material may be analyzed and determined by the position of the Frauenhofer lines upon the spectrum. If soul is matter, soul may thus be analyzed and determined. Place a subject under the light, and the minute exhalations or

Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung, which ends with the old gods of the pre-Christian Norse mythology destroying the world as they die, in a final murderous and suicidal auto-da-fé.

Then, Wagner premiered his successful Der Ring des Nibelungen opera (often known simply as The Ring Cycle) and his visions, along with those of his costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, spread across the world. He mixed together an awesome but peculiar combination of Norse, Germanic, Bronze Age and Viking history with a massive dose of imagination and unleashed an army of Valkyries and ‘barbarians’ with horned and winged helmets that marched into our collective consciousness.

By the end of Wagner’s life all this had changed. He had lifted the status of the composer to that of a seer, raised the standard of musicianship, brought into being a whole new school of singing and conducting, built the revolutionary Bayreuth opera house, and created in Germany an operatic tradition that was the admiration of the world. Furthermore the mythology which he welded together and the ideology which he promulgated played a key role in the launching of a new German nationalism.

There were several reasons for the disrepute into which opera fell. Among the first of these was the fact that opera bore the “taint” of Wagner about it. For at least thirty years after his death, the entire musical world made heroic efforts to throw off the terrific impact of Wagner. That is no reflection on his music. It simply means that each new generation must create its own music; and it was a very difficult thing to do, particularly in the opera house, immediately after Wagner had lived.

Oh, bother. I thought we could go to the opera,’ said the pirate with long legs. ‘I’m told this Wagner thing is brilliant.’ ‘I’d rather stay on the boat and knock nails into my head,’ said the Pirate Captain sternly. He paused to watch some children sailing toy boats on the lake. Then he kicked at a stone and gave a little cheer when it hit and sank one of them. ‘I know that seemed a little harsh,’ the Captain said, catching the looks some of his men were giving him, ‘but think of it as maintaining my image. In today’s fickle media climate I can’t risk becoming yesterday’s notorious buccaneer. There are thousands of aspiring pirate captains out there.

When you listen to a piece of music, for example, sound waves travel through the air at 1,100 feet per second and collide with your eardrums, setting off a chain of vibrations through the tiny bones of the ear, against the membrane of the cochlea; producing tiny electrical charges that reverberate all across the brain. Maybe you don’t know anything about music in the formal sense, but all your life—from the time when you were nursing in rhythm with your mother—you have been unconsciously constructing working models of how music works. You have been learning how to detect timed patterns and anticipate what will come next. Listening to music involves making a series of sophisticated calculations about the future. If the last few notes have had pattern Y, then the next few notes will probably have pattern Z. As Jonah Lehrer writes in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, “While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. From the three-minute pop song to the five-hour Wagner opera, the creations of our culture teach us to expect certain musical patterns, which over time are wired into our brain.” When the music conforms to our anticipations, we feel a soothing drip of pleasure. Some scientists believe that the more fluently a person can process a piece of information, the more pleasure it produces. When a song or a story or an argument achieves limerence with the internal models of the brain, then that synchronicity produces a warm swelling of happiness. But the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them. As Daniel Levitin observes in This Is Your Brain on Music, the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” arrest our attention with the jarring octave-gap between them, then the rest of the song eases us into a more conventional, soothing groove. In his book Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer showed how Beethoven would establish a clear rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then manipulate it, never quite repeating it. Life is change, and the happy life is a series of gentle, stimulating, melodic changes.