I'm sure the atmosphere at Tanglewood and the space there and nature - I think it absolutely fits Wagner's music.
Andris Nelsons
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.
I think 'Rheingold' has symbolic meaning of what happens in the world when you're running after the Rhine gold, after the gold. It doesn't end very well. It's kind of a reminder of the values of life, and I think 'The Ring,' in a way, is kind of a prediction of Wagner of what would happen in the world.
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.
To play opera, to play Wagner, it's a great joy.
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.
Anoushka Shankar
C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, 'Whatever grows a church is good' and needs to be nurtured.
Anthea Butler
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.
Anton Seidl
We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.
Bernadette Peters
I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple.
Bharati Mukherjee
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.
Bill Hader
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Colm Toibin
'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.
Daniel Barenboim
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.
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.
Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.
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.
The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe.
David Longstreth
Robert Wagner was my greatest crush.
Debbie Reynolds
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.
Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.
There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That's baseball.
I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.
I conclude that the Wagnerian operas which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services.
Can a great artist be mean-spirited, grasping, harsh to his family, violent in his emotions, vindictive in his hatreds, an all-purpose scoundrel? If our test cases are the likes of Wagner, Picasso, and, let me say, Dickens, the answer is a resounding yes.
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.
A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner's 'Lohengrin' - such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music.
Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.
Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.
Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.
Peter Wagner, my son, just won the Bel-Air Junior Club Championship. Parred the last three holes. One-putts, up and down. Us Wagners don't hit greens. We chip and putt.
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.
In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.
I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
They see me all the time at Bayreuth and think I only like Wagner's music, and it's not true.
You look at someone like Neil Wagner - he's got a big heart, a big engine, and keeps running. And that's what you want, you want guys who, time and time again, want to be putting themselves in that position, to keep wanting to create chances and keep trying to change the game.
In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.
As any opera fan knows, lawyers and judges do not fare well in most operas. Just consider the productions of 'Andrea Chenier,' 'Aida, Norma,' 'Billy Budd,' 'Peter Grimes,' 'The Crucible,' 'Lost in the Stars,' 'The Marriage of Figaro,' 'The Makropulos Case' and Wagner's 'Ring' cycle. Around 1810, the theme of justice emerged in opera.
When I'm alone at home, I really prefer to listen to Wagner's orchestral music rather than any vocal music. I find it illuminating not to have to pay attention to voices in the recordings.
I was at a banquet, and I went into the ladies' room, and I'm in the stall doing my business, and a piece of paper and pen came from outside the door, and she says, 'Ms. Wagner, would you please sign this for me?' And I said, 'Are you kidding me?'
Striker Sandro Wagner is very strong, a true No. 9, who really made his mark playing with Germany in the Confederations Cup.
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.
Wagner had a terrific understanding of politics. In 1829, he was a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to bring down the establishment. He hated religion and churches, which he said enslaved people. But he later developed different views that put art at the centre of the life of the state.
When I was about 19, my stepmother said - because this was back in the '80s - that I had Robert Wagner's pompadour. I said, 'What are you talking about? You mean the guy from 'Hart to Hart?'
The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.
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.
Between parts I was too old for and roles that were too overwhelming, out of reach then for my voice. I carved out a niche with the Wagnerian repertoire since I am attracted by its theatrical intensity.
