Wagner — a psychotropic drug

It was observed from the beginning that Wagner has the same effect as the continuous consumption of a psychotropic drug: opium, said Baudelaire; like alcohol, said Nietzsche. 

And, as with all de-inhibiting drugs, sometimes there were violent side-effects. 

 

A good performance of Tristan and Isolde, Wagner had predicted to Mathilde Wesendonk while composing the last act, is ‘bound to drive people mad’.

Susan Sontag, in Wagner’s Fluids,

London Review of Books, 10'December'1987