Nature & Animals Quote by Richard Wagner

A composer famous for mythic grandeur suddenly talking like a dockhand is exactly the point. "Wherever the fish are, that's where we go" has the blunt, practical rhythm of necessity: you don’t argue with the sea, you read it. Put in Wagner’s mouth, it also reads as a sideways self-portrait of artistic predation and opportunism. He spent his life chasing the conditions that would let his work exist at full scale: patrons, premieres, political shelter, money. The “fish” become the invisible resource every ambitious creator learns to track: attention, funding, institutional power, a city with the right orchestra, a king with the right vanity.

The line’s real force is its refusal of romantic alibis. Wagner is the poster child for the artist as prophet, yet here the artist sounds like labor following the market. That tension is the subtext: ideals are expensive, and the grandest cultural visions still have to eat. It’s also a neat capsule of Wagner’s era, when modern capitalism and modern celebrity were tightening their grip on cultural production. Artists weren’t just making work; they were building machines around themselves, migrating to where the infrastructure was.

The sentence works because it’s morally unadorned. “Wherever” shrugs off loyalty and roots. “That’s where we go” turns survival into policy. It’s collective, too: not “I,” but “we,” as if the whole enterprise - troupe, audience, nation - is conscripted into the chase.