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.

Once in a while, when everything is just right, there is a moment of magic. People can live on moments of magic.

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.

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

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