Quotations
Wagner, Pro and Con
CON
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"Wagner was a beautiful sunset mistaken for the dawn."
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Claude Debussy
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"Wagner represents perhaps the most serious attack ever launched on
the integrity of music as music. His course—leading through
Tristan and The Ring held appalling dangers for composers
who followed in his wake."
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Igor Stravinsky
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"When a work like Tristan or Walküre is in progress,
so completely does it seize the senses that, momentarily, we forget
there is any other music. Later, after the end of the thing,
like someone with a hangover, we regret our earlier excesses.
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Leonard Bernstein
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"Although Beethoven first tested the strength of 'serious' music,
it was left to Wagner to strain the structure to the breaking point.
He seriously weakened it's main pillars: dance (the rhythmic element)
and song (the melodic element). In his wake, lesser hands had little
difficulty pulling down the whole edifice.
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Henry Pleasants
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"The problem with Wagner's pose as Messiah was that too many
subsequently imitated blindly—failing to see that, beneath his
pose, Wagner was a shrewd craftsman and showman.
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Jacques Barzun
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PRO
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"When I was in my 20's, my admiration for the miraculous scores of
The Ring was not matched by my attitude toward the drama
itself. But, recently, I restudied the whole thing and found that the
drama is as timely and keen a series of of human situations as can be
found anywhere in the theater."
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Eric Leinsdorf
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"The stature of Richard Wagner is one of grandeur and suffering, like
the 19th Century of which it is the complete expression. Like that
century, Wagner was furrowed in all his features, charged with a
million aspirations, restless, frenzied, misunderstood."
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Thomas Mann
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"Die Walküre marks a series of 'firsts'for Wagner: the
first of his works to reveal in full the superhuman power and stature
of his creative imagination. The first complete example of his genius
for musical-dramatic organization, and the first clear idication
that The Ring is not merely an entertaining legend come to
life, but an immeasurable canvas depicting the deepest colors and the
most basic forms of the human experience.
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Lawrence Gilman
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"Die Walküre's psychological insight is an incredible, almost
supernatural example of Wagner's intuitive genius. Yet he had the
soul of a very human—all too human—being.
Nothing about him was holy except his works.
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Georg Solti
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"I profoundly admire the whole of Walküre. Great
works should be embraced entirely, body and soul, form and thought,
spirit and life. One ought not to carp at Wagner for his lengths. It's
better to expand one's scale to his.
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Franz Liszt
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Preface
Why This Study Guide?
The stormy spirit of Richard Wagner (1813-83) refuses to stay
put in some quiet niche of music history. The center of wild controvery
during his life, Wagner continues to excite passions pro and con.
More essays have been written about him and by him than any
other composer in history—partly because his impact carried over
into drama, philosophy, psychology, and politics. The list of volumes
about the man and his works stretches to more than 5,000 titles.
[It should also be noted that AltaVista lists over 20,000 web
pages referencing Richard Wagner—GJL.]
Indeed, some observers rank him among his century's most influential
minds (c.f. Thomas Mann's Freud, Goethe & Wagner, 1937;
and Jacques Barzun's Darwin, Marx & Wagner; 1941)
As with his friends—Liszt and Berlioz—Wagner can be
viewed as a textbook case of "romanticism."
