‘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.
"A perfumed fog, shot through with lightning!" That's the pull quote for the poster!
ReplyDeleteI actually used that line as a sample various times in review s back in the day - sometimes the full line, sometimes just "perfumed fog".
ReplyDeleteI don't think I ever knew where it came from precisely. Not until I saw it the other day in a book. Must have been quoted or allusively interpolated by somebody else. I thought "I'm having that" and stored it away