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“... grâce. It’s a gesture, Frink said, that she owed to the final moments of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, where Richard is viciously stabbed by a swarm of Lancastrian soldiers. He falls, then writhes and jerks in painful spasms, each marked in William Walton’s score by a dissonant chord. Then he collapses, his sword ...”

“... approach. Jackson Pollock’s drips are process, as are Lynda Benglis’s polyurethane pours. Richard Long’s walks are process, and Richard Serra’s lead props. Process, in other words, emphasises the how of making as the work’s content, rather than the why. Nash stands out for his sheer commitment to process as an ...”

“... place in concert programmes. Of later Lieder composers, Mahler is admired for his symphonies and Richard Strauss for his symphonic poems and operas.Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor ...”

“... Wagner’s operas in general, and the Ring cycle in particular, have been goading the criticising classes into print for a century and a half, with still no end in sight, but the sacrifice of all those trees has produced very little in the way of a critical consensus; not even on such basic matters as what the Ring is about ...”

“... Adorno​ said of Wagner that he wrote ‘conductors’ music’. He meant this as a put-down, but most good orchestral music written between 1800 and 1920 was conductors’ music, grand in conception, intensely expressive, declamatory, scored for a large orchestra to be performed in imposing concert halls for a mass audience – music which, to be fully effective and to have maximum impact, required a co-ordinating mastermind to run the show ...”

“... more than others. It offers a rich array of choice, including such poetic and elusive pieces as Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967); Victor Burgin’s subtly sensory All Criteria, first published in 1970 in a Camden Art Centre exhibition catalogue for a show called Idea Structures; and Stephen Willats’s astonishingly dynamic graphite anti-grid ...”

“... the names that stand out in Pop painting – among them not only Lichtenstein and Warhol, but also Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, each the subject of one of Foster’s five chapters – were collectors, even connoisseurs, of the omnipresent image: they assembled examples of its endlessly mundane oddity in files and scrapbooks; they deployed ...”

“... fluid’. Mendelssohn had to hear something only once to be able to play it on the piano, as Wagner found when he played the Venusberg theme from his opera-in-progress, Tannhäuser. When Mendelssohn asked what it was, Wagner peevishly replied: ‘Do you think I am going to reveal it to you?’ So Mendelssohn simply ...”

“... dreaming (usually) of being something else. If degenerationist psychiatry had not been given Richard Wagner, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Friedrich Nietzsche, it would have invented them – would have written and composed Parsifal. This act of recognition is best seen in the compilations of paranoid cases carried out by that terminal figure of one ...”

“... le style, c’ est l’ homme même Nietzsche is following in the footsteps of Schopenhauer and of Wagner’s polemic against the conductor Paul Devrient (the topic of the essay itself was suggested to Nietzsche by Cosima Wagner). True, Strauss’s book is vulgar and boring, and Professor Herbert Golder says so more than ...”

“... has been told many times, but rarely with such narrative vigour and moral passion as by Kim Wagner in this centenary account. He quotes at length from Dyer’s own evidence to the commission of inquiry led by Lord Hunter, who had been solicitor general for Scotland in the Asquith government. Again and again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own ...”

“... great achievements crowned a lifetime of ‘aesthetic endeavour’ – Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, Wagner and Verdi, for instance. Said prefers to contemplate instances of lateness that speak less of achievement than of ‘intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction . . . nonharmonious, nonserene tension and, above all, a sort of deliberately ...”

“... It constantly refreshes the listener with reminiscences of familiar masters.’ A little later, Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser holds the audience seated ‘despite the loss of the express at 5.15 entailed by waiting’. Gradually, over almost a year on the Hornet, these instances of Shavian wit and spirit increase. ‘Some glees were contributed by the ...”

“... into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He tried hard to secure a permanent ...”

“... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s tastefully furnished study in his ...”