JD wrote: "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." -- Mark Twain (paraphrased).
Mark Twain was making a perceptive comment on contemporary American standards of musical performance, not a philistine denegration of one of the greatest composers ever.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)