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Isadora: My Life

My soul was like a battlefield where Apollo, Dionysus, Christ, Nietzsche, and Richard Wagner disputed the ground. At Bayreuth I was buffeted between Venusberg and the Grail.

…. drama is the spoken word. The spoken word was born from the brain of man. Music is the lyric ecstasy. To expect a possible union between them is unthinkable……man must speak, then sing, then dance.

But the speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all. It is impossible to mix in any way one with the other.

I am glad that I was young in a day when people were not so self-conscious as they are now; when they were not such haters of Life and Pleasure. In the entr'acte of Parsifal people tranquilly drank beer, but this did not interfere with their intellectual and spiritual life. I often saw the great Hans Richter calmly drinking beer and eating sausages, which did not prevent him later from conducting like a demi-god, nor did it hinder the people around him from carrying on conversation of the highest … spiritual significance.

ln those days, too, thinness was not equivalent to spirituality.  People realised that the human spirit is something that works upward and is unfolded through tremendous energy and vitality. The brain, after all, is but the superfluous energy of the body. The body, like an octopus, will absorb everything it meets, and only give to the brain what it finds unnecessary for itself.

Many of the singers of Bayreuth were of enormous stature, but when they opened their mouths their voices issued forth into the world of spirit and beauty where live the eternal gods.

This was the reason why I maintained that these people were unconscious of their bodies, which were probably, for them, but masks of tremendous energy and power to express their godlike music.