Scriabin slept with Chopin under his pillow, and I slept with Wagner under mine. I could not concentrate on memorizing Bach fugues, but I had all of 'Gotterdammerung' in my fingers.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.

Wagner always opens you a second breath, and then you go on, and you are absolutely into his musical world, and you can't stop, and you can listen for four hours, five hours, six hours, and then you are like in his mystical hands of his music. He's such a great poet of music.

I'm sure the atmosphere at Tanglewood and the space there and nature - I think it absolutely fits Wagner's music.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.

In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.

A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.

A Schubert song, the A-major chord at the opening of Wagner's 'Lohengrin' - such incredible beauty is a mystery, the divinity of music.

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

Wagner's philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with Bruckner. Bruckner hadn't written a single word against Jews. Wagner's book on the Jews was one of the most infamous books of the 19th century.

Everything in Wagner's work - the music, the acting, the staging - stemmed from the text. Everything served to interpret the text.

I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.

When I was about 19, my stepmother said - because this was back in the '80s - that I had Robert Wagner's pompadour. I said, 'What are you talking about? You mean the guy from 'Hart to Hart?'

There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That's baseball.

We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.

Peter Wagner, my son, just won the Bel-Air Junior Club Championship. Parred the last three holes. One-putts, up and down. Us Wagners don't hit greens. We chip and putt.

Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.