Quote

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

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

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.

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.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

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

Robert Wagner was my greatest crush.

Please write music like Wagner, only louder.

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