Lucia L

“He cynically believed that most Americans only pretended to like opera, whereas the German affection seemed genuine, if mystifying. When he attended a sold-out performance of Lohengrin, he allowed that he enjoyed the bridal song and some choruses, but that was as far as he would go. “The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.”[59] He had gone to operas for fourteen years and enjoyed arias from Il Trovatore and other familiar works. By contrast, the “intense but incoherent noise” of Lohengrin reminded him “of the time the orphan asylum burned down.”[60] Leaving the opera house with a headache, he had many future scores to settle with Richard Wagner.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain