If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact... that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my ...proposition. That "savage animal" has not really been "mortified"; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become--divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who "submits to" Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended--what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, "cruelty."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes," she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the dam...ned dishes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And thus they sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in t...he embrace of night's magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »