Bl�hardt Wagner (idiot brother of composer and frothing anti-semite Richard Wagner) wrote his relentlessly epic, and much parodied, update of Euripides' Insufferable Womyn of Troy after enduring twenty-three years locked in the basemant of his mother's home in Bavaria. He never tired of telling his collegues (no matter how unendurably tiresome it became to those listening) that [he had] "suffered for his art, and now it was [their] turn."
Bl�hardt endured decades of privation and scorn, justly received as his oevre was universally regarded by his contemporaries as dreck, finally succombing in 1912 to injuries sustained when he was struck by a bus, something which had just been invented for just such a purpose. The Screeching Viking Women has since remained a staple of midnight movie festivals attended by smug neo-bohemian college sophomores mistaking this for irony, and of soundtracks to WWII Hitler documentaries on A&E and the History Channel, as well as late 1950s Tex Avery Loony-Toons cartoons.
--- Joel Selvin, Chronical
"His music is really much better than it sounds!"
--- Samuel Clemens, Tuolomne Fishwrap