The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

Raving mad is quite easy. You just chew up the scenery or something. It's quiet mad that's hard.

Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.