Quotes About Opera

That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.

I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.

Dictatorship is always merely an aria, never an opera.

I read a story about some old opera singer once, and when a guy asked her to marry him, she took him backstage after she had sung a real triumph, with all the people calling for her, asked, 'Do you think you could give me that?' That story hit me right, man. I know no guy ever made me feel as good as an audience. I'm really far into this now, really committed. Like, I don't think I'd go off the road for long now, for life with a guy no matter how good. Yeah, it's the truth. Scary thing to say though, isn't it?

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

Now that I've relinquished my fantasies of all the people I wish I could be, and stopped feeling guilty about not going to the opera or pretending that I want to attend a foreign policy lecture, I have more time for the things that I truly enjoy.

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.

As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.

Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

There was something in the bel canto, not just opera, but a certain style of Italian singing that I responded to deeply.

The catalogue of miseries seems to cry out for commercial spots and a station break: the stuff of noonday soap opera.

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

Goodness gracious me,” exclaimed Alexia, “what are you wearing? It looks like the unfortunate progeny of an illicit union between a pair of binoculars and some opera glasses. What on earth are they called, binocticals, spectaculars?” The earl snorted his amusement and then tried to pretend he hadn't. “How about glassicals?” he suggested, apparently unable to resist a contribution.

We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or televsion to fill up the void... We can do our housework with soap-opera heroes at our side... Now instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.

Wow this place is really big isn't it? They must do proper stuff here, like opera and all that...shite.

Fitzcarraldo is a mad dreamer. He's willing to sacrifice everything in order to make his vision of an opera house. That metaphor of pulling the boat over the mountain is so integral to anyone making any creative effort. It's that universal Sisyphean struggle.

I loved to sing and I loved to act, and I didn’t want to continue opera because I wanted to act.

If you look at Marriage of Figaro or Butterfly or Traviata, all of those elements are in there. I also have to have a very specific location in mind. The physical environment of where the opera takes place is very key - the "sound world."

When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.

I love opera so much. I would never go back to doing it, but I love to listen - I'm grateful for it. I studied diction, breathing control, phrasing, why the song means something. You want to bring that across to your listeners.

Apropos, is not the Scotch phrase 'Auld Lang Syne' exceedingly expressive? I shall give you the verses on the other sheet. The words of 'Auld Lang Syne' are good, but the music is an old air, the rudiments of the modern tune of that name. ... Dare to be honest and fear no labor. ... Opera is where a man gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. ... Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure thrill the deepest notes of woe. ... Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.

So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).

I felt that I really couldn't be creative with opera. You're supposed to sound this way here. You're supposed to crescendo here. You're supposed to do that. I had no sense of identity while singing that kind of music.

That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a big head of steam while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of versimilitude.

I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

I want to sing using a throatsinging style, like for example kargyraa, but at the same time sing it like a normal way. Maybe I will try some opera. To sing a melody, and to sing not only Tuvan traditional melodies, but I would like to try Western classics, blues. I think Tuvan music and American blues are very close to each other.

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

When I go to an opera performance and sit there while people are cheering and shouting "bravo," I sometimes ask myself what exactly they're cheering about. And I even see myself as an artist who also knows how to enjoy other people's performances.

I went out to testify in front of the Ways and Means Committee out in Congress on open free trade to China. Now, this would affect literally every Minnesotan in some way or another, if not all Americans in some way or another....The local media sent no one out to cover my testimony....Well, then a couple weeks later, I go out to do The Young and the Restless, the TV soap opera, and everybody sends crews. We had to move them into a room in three different sections or three shifts of them because there was so much media covering that.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.

Musicians ought to reclaim some of the power in the houses of production. The opera houses are run either by managers or by stage directors, never by musicians.

You're just being cryptic again. It's like soap opera sex. Lots of boring dialogue and when they finally do go to bed, everything's dark and covered by blankets.

The word "theatrical" makes me cringe, because it suggests a performance is staged, put on, rehearsed. And while all this is true for an opera, I believe the act of singing and performing should always be honest, raw, guttural.

Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won. The rest is suffering and historical opera.

I became a set designer for opera.

If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.

My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children's books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life.

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.