New Orts #82

August 10 MMXXV

                           Friday August 15 is International Apostrophe Day!     
                                          Celebrate responsibly!
                                    https://www.apostrophe.org.uk/

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If you love music, go hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company; and it takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed. Few things would mortify me more, than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.
— Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his son in Venice (1749)

If I were to begin life again I would dedicate it to music; it is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.
— Sydney Smith

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time.
— Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

Parsifal— the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock and after it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6:20.
— David Randolph (1914-2020)

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
— widely attributed to Mark Twain, but apparently due to E. W. (“Bill”) Nye: see here