Search Results

“... to be learned along the way. Certain characters weave in and out of the story, from the great (Wagner) to the now quite obscure (Count Harry Kessler). Rykwert’s favoured protagonists tend to avoid being pinned down to any one vocation; he doesn’t even require that they count architecture or visual art among their pursuits. ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... The other scratch indicated a passage saying that Sir Thomas had an imperfect understanding of Wagner. Back at the office I hurried in to see the editor. By now it was half-past four and the first edition was due to go to the printers at half-past five. In the editor’s office, I found not only the editor but the business manager, both happily unaware of ...”

“... Nietzsche follows up this insight with a fireworks of rhetorics – enter, and eventually exit, Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Rilke, on the other hand, is compelled to face in his own creative work the paradox inherent in the deliberate making of a modern mythology: he acknowledges the difficulty of inventing consciously what was once the ...”

“... in social issues, and he used sex in his writings as a way of describing power relations. As Peter Wagner demonstrated in Eros Revived (1988), politicised pornography was an 18th-century commonplace. Sade’s pornography, as one would expect from a man who so calamitously lacked the power to refrain, is boringly exaggerated. The interminable and elaborate ...”

“... notes: ‘I sought an aesthetic scandal: combining Brechtian doctrines of epic theatre with Richard Wagner’s musical aesthetics, cinematically conjoining the epic system as anti-Aristotelian cinema with the laws of a new myth.’ The second part of this slightly opaque programme is as important as the first. Where Brecht went wrong – that ...”

“... he reworks not only the Norse myth of the perfect knight but also its appropriation by Wagner and the exploitation of Wagner’s work by ultra-nationalists, anti-Semites and Nazis. We see Kiefer’s cot against the wooden background of his studio; a spear and two swords, one blood-stained, the other ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking contrast to hers in both form and content. Serra is Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog exemplified in heavy metal: Louise Bourgeois is the fox, an artist of many devices, to borrow a Homeric epithet which suits her perfectly ...”

“... similar to Mahler’s’, La Grange writes – and that Felix Weingartner would undergo after him. Richard Strauss, Böhm, Karajan and Maazel were later victims. The Viennese love nothing better than to greet a new director as a saviour and then to peck him to pieces. (Seiji Ozawa is next in line for the booby-trapped throne.) Mahler’s Jewishness was used ...”

“... of Sophocles published during the last quarter of the 19th century by the Cambridge scholar, Sir Richard Jebb, had certain technical deficiencies, even when they were new, and the writer’s taste was naturally that of a man of his own time. But they are a singular, if not a unique, example of a commentary which is not only a work of learning but a literary ...”

“... On 25 July​ 1936, Hitler spent the evening at Bayreuth, attending a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried. On his way back to his guest quarters at Villa Wahnfried, the Wagner family residence, he was introduced to a curious delegation that had arrived from Spanish Morocco. It was led by Johannes Bernhardt, a Nazi businessman who lived in the colony, and included another Nazi businessman and a Spanish air force officer ...”

“... onto which nationalists could project an image of German unity before it was finally achieved. As Wagner declared in 1848, ‘we will sail in ships across the sea and here and there set up a new Germany … We will do better than the Spanish, for whom the New World became a cleric-ridden slaughterhouse, and differently from the English, for whom it became a ...”

“... appreciation of the superficially subversive and unassimilable musical aims and language of Wagner. As my initial quotations suggest, far from being simply historical, his feeling for all this is charged with an almost familial sense of belonging: a matter of inheritance over and above mere nationality and blood-ties, of immediacy irrespective of the ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”

“... lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of record’: Sir Richard Burton ‘had done exactly that again and again’. Merchant was educated at St Xavier’s College in Bombay before leaving for the US in 1958, and was clearly not so sceptical about colonialist claims of conducting a mission civilisatrice in the way that ...”