Richard Wagner
FameRank: 6

"Wilhelm Richard Wagner" was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). 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 romanticism/romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber/Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer/Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama, and which was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

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I write music with an exclamation point!

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After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?

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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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I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

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I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.

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One supreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy-imagination that creates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.

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I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired.

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Joy is not in things; it is in us.

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Imagination creates reality.

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Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

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