Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagnerwas a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth22 May 1813
CityLeipzig, Germany
CountryGermany
When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.
Those who grasp the whole, will also comprehend all parts of that whole, even when immediate technical understanding is lacking, and recognize and marshal these.
Whatever I thought right, to others seemed wrong; what I held to be bad, others approved of.
It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short there Music's reign begins.
The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.
I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.
Many's the man/ who thought himself wise/ but what he needed/ he did not know...
Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.
The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them.
My destiny is solitude, and my life is work.
The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.
The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.
I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.
One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.