“Very vivid and arabesque this, don’t you think?⁠ ⁠… And now this movement; isn’t it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there’s a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.⁠ ⁠… And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager sentiment⁠ ⁠… and here, I think, is the best part of it, the very essence of passion, the voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish.⁠ ⁠… These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of Phèdre ⁠—‘ Vénus tout entière ,’ and the rest of it; and Wagner has the same. You find it again in Isolde’s motif continually.”