‘I cannot play that, my dear lady! I am your most devoted servant but I cannot. That is not music – believe me! ... this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art. I will not play it.’
Edmund Pfühl, organist in Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, refusing to play Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.
