Tao Te Ching
Wilhelm Richard Wagner
1813 – 1883 CE
"Music-drama" composer, revolutionary of opera, prolific writer, and forefather of psychoanalysis; Wagner blended with his music a flare for the poetic, philosophical, visual, and dramatic arts. Although famous and greatly respected, most his personal life filled with poverty, political exile, and dramatically painful love affairs. His research and insight into psychoanalytical themes like dream interpretation, the Oedipus myth, and the relationship between anxiety and sex predated Freud's birth. He became a major influence on luminaries like W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot.
Lineages
Artists Central European
Eras
Western
Romantacism (1800 – 1850 CE)Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)
Gilded Age (1860 – 1900 CE)
Victorian (1837 – 1901 CE)
American Civil War (1861 – 1865 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Unlisted Sources
Die Walküre
Judaism in Music (1850)
Know Thyself (1881)
Opera and Drama (1851)
Religion and Art (1880)
Quotes by Wilhelm Richard Wagner (8 quotes)
“I, who rule by means of contracts, am now slave to my contracts.”
from Die Walküre
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“Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civilizer, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been doomed in song and legend... gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood's innocence... the goblin's game of paper money.”
from Know Thyself (1881)
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“The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.”
from Opera and Drama (1851)
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“Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.”
from Judaism in Music (1850)
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“A mystery enwrapped Pythagoras, the preacher of vegetarianism; no philosopher since him has pondered on the essence of the world, without recurring to his teaching. Silent fellowships were founded, remote from turmoil of the world, to carry out this doctrine as a sanctification from sin and misery.”
from Religion and Art (1880)
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“'Property' has acquired an almost greater sacredness in our social conscience than religion: for offense against the latter there is lenience, for damage to the former no forgiveness.”
from Know Thyself (1881)
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“I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts — the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.”
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“Attack and defense, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.”
from Religion and Art (1880)
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Quotes about Wilhelm Richard Wagner (3 quotes)
“I like Wagner’s music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time, without people hearing what one says.”
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“Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches — he has made music sick."--”
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“What value does Wagner's art have? It was without form, without faith; nothing but panting rhetoric devoid of sacred intoxication and nobility, good only for hysterical ladies, hypocrites, and invalids... Now he was working on Christian themes, writing Parsifal. The hero had been defeated—the very man who promised to create new myths and hitch the leopard of reason to the Dionysian chariot!”
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