[Ads-l] Quote About Wagner's Music

[Shapiro, Fred]

Thanks to Garson for his characteristically helpful reply.  I had searched barrypopik.com for "richard wagner" and found nothing, but it turns out that Barry's entry avoids giving Wagner's first name.


Fred Shapiro



________________________________
From: Project-wombat <project-wombat-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org> on behalf of ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2016 2:28 PM
To: list at project-wombat.org
Subject: Re: [PW] ? Quote About Wagner's Music (Quotation Query #755)

Barry Popik has a valuable entry on the topic here:

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.barrypopik.com_index.php_new-5Fyork-5Fcity_entry_wagners-5Fmusic-5Fis-5Fbetter-5Fthan-5Fit-5Fsounds&d=CwICAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=sRkhHMQo6W5Ird1lkQFqb23bCfSHAR2XjUSUG53db5M&m=-z0GoZCN6TQu1BDm1pypCr76vdFi4IPiFyEzPHFRCho&s=DBbppxE39MQ5JfLuk-5-SYcgDfZyBN4snGPStLGyZP0&e=

The newspapers.com database has some slightly earlier citations:

The "classical music" variant in "Bill Nye's Bureau" article here:

The Shippensburg Chronicle
Shippensburg, Pennsylvania
Thursday, September 1, 1887 - Page 4

The "Wagner's music" variant here:

The Indianapolis News
Indianapolis, Indiana
Friday, November 22, 1889 - Page 2

I will share more details when I have a chance. Alternatively, someone
may antedate these citations.

Garson

On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 1:52 PM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 1:45 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
> wrote:
>
> In the Yale Book of Quotations I cite "Wagner's music is better than it
>> sounds" to Bill Nye, quoted in Mark Twain's Autobiography.
>
>
> Note that Nye, as reported by Twain, prefixed the famous words with the
> significant
> "I have been told that", suggesting that the idea was already a trope at
> the time.
>
> --
> John Cowan          https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__vrici.lojban.org_-7Ecowan&d=CwICAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=sRkhHMQo6W5Ird1lkQFqb23bCfSHAR2XjUSUG53db5M&m=-z0GoZCN6TQu1BDm1pypCr76vdFi4IPiFyEzPHFRCho&s=tzEqP6nbQ-YJmcQ5W8SKgeAnTxj1NFy5oE4Re15K7aU&e=         cowan at ccil.org
> Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
> informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
>         --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)
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