Quotes About Opera

I've always gravitated towards opera, and the Royal Opera House is quite possibly the greatest opera house on earth.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.

The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.

I have never heard enough classical music to be able to enjoy it; & the simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but will all my heart. To me an opera is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable. I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't.

When you work on a soap opera, that's three years of you working every day. There was no time to do anything other than the soap opera - you're locked in.

Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!

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

King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.

To be let go from a soap opera is the most embarrassing confidence basher in the world. It's like, 'Oh, if I'm not good enough for that, I'm not good enough for anything.

Music in general and lately opera in particular fills my soul with hope and inspiration.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

My favorite type of music to sing would be between R and B and opera.

Italians are fantastic people, really. They can work you over in an alley while singing an opera.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.

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.

I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

Opera needs to be a total escape from real life. To relate to what we're going through today is fine and dandy, but it's really about being transported and completely swept away by a romantic notion.

I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks. "It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded. "Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie.

To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

Opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely different attitude.

Much later in life, though, Gracie made a major contribution to the opera world. She stayed out of it.

I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized.

We recognize the touch of the Opera ghost.

For better or worse, I've always been curious musically. Whether it's opera or Judy Garland or pop, I've deliberately sought those things out. I've never wanted to do the same things over and over. Some think I've accomplished what I set out to do, and others consider me a dilettante.

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

Liverpool's grand opera also gave us some light comedy - on hearing the news that the house of goalkeeper Pepe Reina was burgled, and his Porsche stolen, while he was heroically saving penalties at Anfield, fans took a typically witty line: police were said to be interviewing a man from the West London area, a certain Frank Lampard, whose whereabouts on Tuesday between 7.45pm and 10.15pm are unknown. Indeed.

I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.

I never pictured myself as a telenovela galan - never imagined Id be in a soap opera.

I am an opera virgin; I'd far prefer to see a musical such as 'Guys and Dolls.

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.

And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts.

In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that's not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep.

Dare to be honest and fear no labor. ... Opera is where a man gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.

I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera.

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

I love space opera, and I believe that every sub-genre has potential no matter how old it is.

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

Theatre can transform a child's life, just as an early cultural experience whether with opera, ballet, music or art is a wonderful thing because it opens the door to a life-long experience, a life-long enjoyment.

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like

Andrei, did you like the opera?" "Not particularly." "Andrei, do you see what you're missing?" "I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless." "Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?" "No. But I enjoyed it." "The music?" "No. The way you listened to it.