- Marie d'Agoult: Spare him, Francois! Don't cut off his... genius in it's prime!
- Count d'Agoult: Oh, is that what you call it?
- Richard Wagner: Is it true that when Liszt was a kid he played Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata at a concert and the composer himself jumped up and kissed him?
- Rossini: Certainly Beethoven kissed the boy. By that time he was as deaf as a post.
- Richard Wagner: The trouble with your friends, Liszt, is they're all bourgeois pigs.
- Liszt: Oh, pigs if you please. But aristocratic pigs, not bourgeois.
- Princess Carolyn: You and the Tsar are just different sides of the same coin: false gods worshiped in different ways. Dress the Tsar as a peasant and you have a peasant.
- [searches for Liszt]
- Princess Carolyn: Stop skulking behind that screen!
- [continues]
- Princess Carolyn: Dress Liszt in a crinoline and what do you have? The same thing: a sham. Rather than walk naked through the world, he chooses to play the imposter. What do you say?
- Liszt: Bollocks!
- Princess Carolyn: "Bollocks"? I don't speak Hungarian.
- Marie d'Agoult: Your big ambition was to stick your working class cock up a piece of high class crumpet.
- Liszt: Her Majesty gets a lot of satisfaction out of a good smoke?
- Princess Carolyn: It's the perfect form of pleasure. It's exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one ask?
- Richard Wagner: You are Robert Schumann?
- Strauss: No no no. That's Schumann. I am Strauss.
- Richard Wagner: Not Johann Strauss?
- Strauss: [annoyed] No! Levi Strauss!
- Liszt: I always feel that people who like Brahms would prefer to have no music at all. He's a right wanker.
- Liszt: As yet he's unknown, but, he's a great talent and he's somewhere in the audience tonight. HIs name's Richard Wagner. Richard, where are you? Richard? Ah, Richard. Stand up. Take a bow. That's enough. Besides being German, Richard has something else in common with Beethoven. He's a bleedin' genius. How do I know? You told me so yourself, didn't you, Richard?
- Liszt: Well, we are in show business, Dickie.
- Richard Wagner: Yes! Because to you the piano is just - a harlot!
- Liszt: Yeah, and every penny owned by that harlot tonight goes to build a monument to your beloved Beethoven, which your beloved countrymen so belovedly neglected to build.
- Marie d'Agoult: Take me with you on your tours.
- Liszt: Remember the scandal when we tried that in London?
- Marie d'Agoult: Its not my fault if the English are prudes.
- Liszt: The box office took a proper bloody nose to it.
- Marie d'Agoult: Oh, bugger the box office!
- Liszt: They never heard me play in Russia. It would be a shame to waste that good publicity.
- Marie d'Agoult: And while you're storming Moscow, Napoleon, I suppose I'm expected to sit at home like Josephine, saving your press cuttings and knitting your mittens.
- Liszt: I won't be cold, love. Not with all those Russian muffs around.
- [sticks out and wiggles his tongue]
- Marie d'Agoult: It's not that I object at being your mistress. What I really object to is to being *one* of your mistresses.
- Marie d'Agoult: I believed in you then.
- Liszt: All you believed in was a stiff cock and the fact that your old man never had one.
- Liszt: I must admit, my professor had to tell me the meanings of the sixth and ninth commandments.
- Princess Carolyn: Let us practice the 69th - together.
- Princess Carolyn: I rule in a state of 30,000 barbaric peasants - alone. My subjects think me a divine matriarch. But, underneath, I am - a woman.
- Princess Carolyn: Come. We must pray.
- Liszt: Pray?
- Princess Carolyn: No longer must you prostitute your art. Music, like sex, should be approached in a religious spirit. As one of the holiest things in life.
- Liszt: [singing] My shame, Be my gain, Together we can light the flames, Flames of life, Flames of truth
- Liszt: [singing] Life is pain, Pain is loss, Life is pain, Pain is loss, Loss is mine for living, While innocents are dying...
- Richard Wagner: The belief that I shall write music that will fire the imagination of the German people and bring to light a man of iron to forge the shattered fragments of this country into a nation of steel. A vision you will help me realize, dear Franz.
- Princess Carolyn: Some little guttersnipe has written an obscene book about you and the Tsar, for one, is outraged.
- [hands Liszt the book]
- Liszt: "Lisztomania" Marie? Oh, God. It can't be. Why should she?
- Princess Carolyn: Europe is ripe with revolution. You will become the leader of the only one that matters: the revolution in music! The whole world will sing your songs of brotherhood. *Art* is so much greater than politics!
- Princess Carolyn: Then, you can become a saint.
- Liszt: Saint Franz Liszt!
- Princess Carolyn: You must become a Franziscan!
- Richard Wagner: [singing] His day at hand, Will drive the beast from our land, He will restore, Teutonic Godhead, The hour of the Aryan, Super Man, Is at hand.
- Richard Wagner: My sacred works I entrust to her. Through her you will perform the rituals. Through me you will serve the Super Man. You will be - the Master Race!
- Cosima: Beautiful. I recognize the theme that Wagner borrowed - stole.
- Liszt: He was welcome to it. I had plenty more. I didn't mind him taking it. It was what he did with it was horrible.
- Princess Carolyn: Let's face it. We were all pretty horrible - and selfish.
- Marie d'Agoult: The bad is dead and buried. The best of us lives on, enshrined in his music. And that's for everyone to share.
- Lola Montez: Forever.
- Cosima: Forever
- Richard Wagner: Once I dreamed of revolution, Franz. I was a Communist. I believed that one day a leader would rise from the ranks of the people and lead them to freedom. Such a man does not exist. To imagine he ever could is just a foolish dream. No, Franz. We need a Super Man! Such a future will never be born, Franz. Such a creature must be - created!
- Liszt: Don't tell me you're going in for electronic music.
- Richard Wagner: German music is good enough for me! Or, will be, when we rid it of the Jews.
- Liszt: Who's gonna do that? Your Man of Iron? He's a long time coming.
- Richard Wagner: So you're the yid who only makes music on a cash register?
- Felix Mendelsohn: Music, shmusic, it's a living, dear boy.