Art must die

I was surprised and delighted to see my name pop up in John Colapinto's New Yorker profile of the young jazz bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding. She'd been reading The Rest Is Noise—on a Kindle, no less—and pondering a quotation that appears in the first chapter: lines from a letter that Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt in 1850, condemning the emergent "classical" tendency in the musical world. It's one of Wagner's most remarkable utterances, and I thought I'd reprint a longer sample...