“I place this point of view first and foremost: Wagner's art is diseased.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1899
in the mind of novelist David Herter
“Bounding rhythms, violent harmonic jerks, alternating with languid melodies; copious floods of rich, sustained harmonies that evoke the memory of the gamelan. . . Debussy’s String Quartet is very distingué, but one does not know how to take hold of it. It is more like a hallucination than a dream. Is it a work? One hardly knows. Is it music? Perhaps so.”
—Maurice Kufferath 1894
“Creation is composed of an infinite number of universes, separated from one another by abysms of nothingness, and the world is only a portal by means of which errant souls are precipitated into glory and become stars in their turn. Eternity is endless and the number of universes is similarly unlimited. To the right and left, on high and down below, everything vibrates, everything palpitates, everything exists, and always progressing, because you cannot only take a single step forward.”
Jane de La Vaudère, 1893
“Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.”
Éliphas Lévi, 1854
“Enjoy the good country air while you may. Here it is foul and pestilential. And the streets are swarming with provincials trailing bewildered wives and squalling brats behind them–all with their noses in the air, gaping at the rooftops and spelling out the names of the streets. The need for a little wholesale slaughter becomes evident. Anyway, what the blazes do they want here, all these people?”
J-k Huysmans, 1912
“Debussy not only heard sounds that no other ear was able to register, but he found a way of expressing things that are not customarily said. He had an almost fanatical conviction that a musical score does not begin with the composer, but that it emerges out of space, through centuries of time, passes before him, and goes on, fading into the distance (as it came) with no sense of finality.”
George Copeland, 1955
“The last Fairy is well and truly buried—or dried, like a rare flower, between two pages of Monsieur Balzac. Michelet has dissected the Witch and with the assistance of the novels of Monsieur Verne, not one of our descendants twenty years hence, on hearing the Dance of the Sylphs—not one!—will be capable of the least sensation of that legendary nostalgia that distracts me now.”
Jean Lorrain, 1891
“The discovery of the microscope was sufficient to prove to us that our senses are deceptive and that we cannot see things as they are. Nature appears to us grandiose and poetic, does it not? But if we were able to see it as it really is, in its all- devouring actuality, it is probable that we would shiver more in horror than enthusiasm.”
"There should be in the world a centre of scientific and philosophical research, where the most notable scholars, in possession of new ideas, could readily experiment the value of the hypotheses constructed either by themselves or by their disciples. A centre from which nothing would drive away the good will. A centre wherein a world record could be kept of the entire range of the progressive imagination of man, and where nothing usefully conceived by the human brain would be lost. A centre from which economic and practical knowledge would flow to all parts of the world. A centre and a city outside of all historical and social quarrels, of all economic and national rivalries, a centre belonging, without possible exception, to all. To the Spirit of all. To the Spirit only."
Paul Adam, 1893
“I can make bronze serpents move, marble statues laugh, and dogs speak. I will show you an immense quantity of gold, I will set up kings, you shall see nations adoring me. I can walk on the clouds and on the waves; pass through mountains; assume the appearance of a young man, or of an old man; of a tiger, or of an ant; take your face, give you mine; and drive the thunderbolt. Do you hear?”
Gustav Flaubert, 1874
"Then Debussy would sit at the piano, and for an hour or so he would improvise. I have never heard such music in my life, such music as came from the piano at those moments. How beautiful it was, and haunting, and nobody but Lilly and I ever heard it! Debussy never put those improvisations down on paper. They went back to that strange place they had come from, never to return. At those moments. Debussy was in that far off world of his, inspired, as if in a trance..And then, with that suddeness of his, he would get up and come over to speak to us, and that was the end of it."
Mary Garden, 1926
“I believe that it is dangerous to initiate laymen into the secrets of musical chemistry. Music really ought to have been a hermetical science, embedded in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief.”
Claude Debussy, 1893