Quotes About Opera

I've never been to the opera; I've only seen opera on DVD.

In opera tradition, when opera die-hard fans, there is a replacement of singer or singer wasn't at his or hers vocal best, doing something, they boo. Especially now that they pay hundreds of dollars for the ticket.

That's opera! I just love it. It just thrills me! And it's very different than theatre, and sometimes it can be frustrating because when you come in the first day of rehearsals obviously you're an opera fan, right?

As americans I think it's harder for us to have a relationship with opera because the access to it is so limited.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

I don't like rock opera with back beats.

It was an emergency!" Seth blurted. "Read my lips - emergency reading - not some demented idea of fun. If I was starving, I would eat asparagus. If somebody held a gun to my head, I would watch a soap opera. And to save Fablehaven, I would read a book, okay, are you happy?" You had best be careful, Seth," Grandma warned. "The love of reading can be contagious." I just lost my appetite," he declared.

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.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

I am singing in an operatic voice for the public, to bring something more to Rock and Roll. Because in a Rock and Roll performance, the singer talks to the public whereas in Opera the singer only talks to a character, inside a story. The public sees this as a picture, I want to transport this picture into the room where the public is.

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

Wasn't it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?

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

Hey yogurt, if you're so cultured, how come I never see you at the opera?

When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be an actor. I worked on an Indian soap opera that was my first exposure to production. But I quickly became disillusioned by acting and seeing that in the movies I loved and the TV I loved, no one looked like me. There weren't going to be any leading roles that would be interested in casting someone with my face.

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

My works are a direct response to the typical space opera. I grew tired of always reading about how the people with power, with agency, get involved in huge sweeping arcs of stories. I wanted stories that dealt with real people, people I could relate to.

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

My grandmother was this unbelievably smart, phenomenally cool woman and [soap operas] were just always on in her house. I just realized that I live in a soap opera, and it's awesome.

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.

I didn't want to become this stiffened - and that was just a personal choice, at that time. And, the idea was also to go to film first, get enough notoriety in film that I could interpret some of the opera stuff the way I would want to interpret it.

They crested a rise, and there it was, in the hollow between rolling hills—a low, square building, ghostly gray in the moonlight. "Is that it?" asked Hamilton. "It probably isn't the local opera house," groaned Ian.

When you decide to become an opera singer, it's a commitment that allows nothing else to interfere. Even your family - and I have a young daughter - has to take second place.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.

It's very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

The most widely criticised singers in the history of opera, Maria Callas and Franco Corelli, happen also to be the best singers. I am honoured for being part of their group.

Once, when we were playing at the Apollo Theater, Holiday was working a block away at the Harlem Opera House. Some of us went over between shows to catch her, and afterwards we went backstage. I did something then, and I still don't know if it was the right thing to do—I asked her for her autograph.

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts.

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

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.

I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.

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.

Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama.

I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

New York. It's home to opera, Broadway, museums, the ballet and orchestra - everything that I love. The most real people in the world live there.

As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible.

Soap opera rappers, all these niggas sound like 'All My Children'.

I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera.

Why, in the Peking Opera, are women's roles played by men?...Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life.

Most of my escapades were getting my Labrador dog into the back of my car to drive to Brooklyn where I worked at Avenue M Studios shooting a soap opera and battling being a 17 to 18-year-old playing twins being afraid that I was going to get fired, because who wouldn't fire me? I had no idea what I was doing.

I'd done two years on a soap opera where I was shooting things every day and they gave me a hard time about that, which I think is the wrong way to teach a young actor. They just made me really, really self-conscious about everything I did, which is the opposite of what you need to be when you're filming.

Concurrently, while I was in school, while I was winning awards for acting, I was winning awards for singing, in high school. One of the reasons why I decided to continue on with the acting was the opera world is fraught with a very long process, and I did love the acting, as well. The acting took off sooner, and then you get involved with that.