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

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.

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

Success is important only to the extent that it puts one in a position to do more things one likes to do.

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

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

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