Quotes About Music

Please write music like Wagner, only louder.

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.

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

I think sometimes when you speak about something like 'Indian classical music' and 'ragas,' and all of that's new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating - one doesn't know where to begin sometimes.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

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

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.

Wagner always opens you a second breath, and then you go on, and you are absolutely into his musical world, and you can't stop, and you can listen for four hours, five hours, six hours, and then you are like in his mystical hands of his music. He's such a great poet of music.

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

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.

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.

We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.

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.

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.