Quotes About Opera

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.

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don't manage that - but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

I have also just finished three weeks on a soap opera in England. The soap opera is a rather famous one called Crossroads. It was first on television 25 years ago, and it has recently been brought back. I play the part of a businessman called David Wheeler.

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

I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.

It's a special kind of acting, soap opera acting. It's hard for me.

I love comedy and drama equally and music too. I just sort of follow my nose to whatever seems really exciting at the time. Eventually, I might want to do a rock opera.

For the shallow delights of matrimony and opera I have no courage.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.

If I were an opera singer, I"d have sung you an aria. If I were an artist, I would have painted your portrait. But cooking is what I'm best at.

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

I don't find much influence in opera. It was such a different part of me.

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

It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.

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.

I enrolled in an acting workshop and my first acting role was on the TV soap opera 'Melrose Place.'

I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.

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.

I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera.

One of the most wonderful memories in my life was when I sang at the Opera House in Sydney. I will never forget that. It is one of the most beautiful Houses I have ever sung in my life.

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.

[Rock 'n' roll] is still a primitive form and there's no way you can get away from that. It's one of the primitive art forms and that's why it's good and that's why it's lasted...you know, it hasn't become sophisticated and it's not in the opera house.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

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.

Everyone has their own taste: some like theatre, some don't, some like opera, some don't, some like pantomimes, and some don't.

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.

Ever since 1980, sci-fi has generally been more Bladerunner than Star Wars. People talk about Star Wars being the most influential movie of all time and creating the blockbuster along with Jaws and that sort of thing, but really there's not been a space opera that anyone can go and see.

I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music?... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

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.

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.

It's in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I'm clearly dramatic.

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.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.

In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.

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

Opera contains music that reflects a culture of poetry and aesthetic. Spirituals are no different. What separates a spiritual for me is that I also happen to love Jesus. When I'm approaching these songs, I'm not approaching them like Mozart. I see my faith and the struggle of my ancestors and of a people seeking freedom beside what these songs are going to be in terms of their arrangement and delivery.

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.

Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)

The record [American Idiot ] felt special to us, when we recorded it, with all of the artwork and the concept behind it and it being a rock opera, but we didn't really know where it was going to go. It's like I always say, you just follow the music. Not only was American Idiot a special moment for us, but it also led to Ordinary World, too.

I was into opera as a kid - I'd play 'Carmen' and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.

I want to make these films that I think other people would be scared to do. I don't think anyone can go off and make a rock opera. I think it's a very specific niche.

Tom [Courtenay] and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on the dresser, so that's how it started. It's a wonderful documentary. It's called Tosca's Kiss and Mr Hardwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was. It was made in 1983 and Verdi, who was rich and successful, toward the end of his life decided to build a mansion for himself in Milan, where he lived, and he stipulated that when he died opera singers and musicians - because he knew so many who were no longer playing at the Scala and some were poor - could live there.

I've never thought of myself as a singer anyway. . . I've been free from those considerations because so many people over the years told me I don't have a voice. I kind of bought that. I never thought that much about it to begin with. I knew I didn't have one of the great voices. As my Damon Runyanesque lawyer used to say, "none of you guys can sing. If I want to hear singing, I'll go to the Metropolitan Opera."

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

Life is an X-rated soap opera.

If I had the money, I would love to open up a movie theater that just played images and colors and beautiful music. For me, there's nothing like listening to a beautiful opera sometimes - on a record or seeing it live - just to be sleepy and let those beautiful voices take me somewhere I've never been before.