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Richard Wagner Quotes
1813–1883 Germany
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works.
Germany Autobiographers Composers Conductors Essayists Also known as: Wagner, Wagner, Richard
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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.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
"... forced to flee, he imagines that he is hunting. He does not hear his own cry of pain when he claws into his own flesh; he thinks he is expressing pleasure!"
At last one crowning horror gives the tortured wretch the needful strength: he wakes, and what he held most real was but a figment of the dæmon of distraught mankind.
Know Thyself (1881)
"Although my mother gave me courage [and power], I do not thank her for yielding to your trickery; prematurely aged, colorless and pale, I hate happy people, and nothing gives me pleasure!"
There we see nothing but a clash of interests, whose object is common to all the disputants, common and ignoble: plainly the side most strongly organised, i.e. the most unscrupulous, will bear away the prize.
Know Thyself (1881)
Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion's mane and shake at us... It's as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
If gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood's innocence, our greatest poet shews at last the goblin's game of paper money. The Nibelung's fateful ring become a pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral world-controller.
Know Thyself (1881)
So let us save and tend and brace our best of forces, to bear a noble cordial to the sleeper when he wakes, as of himself he must at last.
Know Thyself (1881)
Oh, I hate the thought of all those costumes and grease paint! When I think that characters like Kundry will now have to be dressed up, those dreadful artists' balls immediately spring into my mind. Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theatre!
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)
"I know well Woman's holy duty;
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