Quotes About Opera

My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.

I was going to be a singer. If I hadn't been in my profession, I was going to be an Opera singer. That's from a young kid. I had all these records from all those famous Opera singers. I wanted to be an Opera singer - that was my whole thing and physical fitness got in the way, thank God.

I didn't grow up imagining myself as an opera composer. Only once in my entire adolescence did I attend an opera. I went and saw Aida at the old Met, didn't understand a thing about it, and thought it was pretty awful. But I think I had it in my genes without even realising it.

I studied with Stella Adler and I didn't like the representational aspect of most opera singers. Most of the opera singers had not a false, but over theatrical way of presenting.

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.

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.

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.

Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime.

Hey you! I told you to slow that nag down! Because of you, I almost heard the opera!

If I'm going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.

And Paul Moravec, not being a theater person, would always trust me when I said things that I am like, "you're going to need another 10 seconds of music year to get them across the stage." But I always knew that the people were going to be coming to hear his music of which my words are going to be a part. It was clear that he wanted to go and direction A., and I wanted to go and direction B. We would've gone and direction A. That's the most important piece of advice I can give to anybody who finds themselves in an opera, or musical comedy situation like that.

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.

I think opera music is very conservative, and Rock and Roll music is conservative as well, and that's why I'm trying to make a bridge between these two elements.

In the '80s, everyone wanted to be in opera. It was groovy.

I am a person. I am not a soap opera. There is never going to be a next [tabloid] installment about my life because my own stuff is my own stuff.

When an opera star sings her head off? she usually improves her appearance.

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

Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.

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

When something like that happens, people want to try to find some dirt and make it more of a soap opera. But I think we both walked away with the door still open, if we want to do something together again. So yeah, I would call it a friendly break-up.

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

What's an opera if everyone is dead in it?

I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.

I never socialized with singers. It's very dangerous if you work with opera... I don't think that in 30 years a singer has entered my apartment.

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.

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

Solitude is the surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places: no, 'tis the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of the easy vacant hour, whose compliance with her opinions can flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can sooth, without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be feared: he who buzzes in her ear at court, or at the opera, must be contented to buzz in vain.

I took opera lessons. I can't read music to save my life, but I would just copy and get away with it. I think that they thought I could read music, but I can't. I would just listen. It was really me just mimicking. That's one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to do that anymore.

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.

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.

The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.

Note that both of these papers [the New York Post and the New York Daily News] are big sellers in a city whose residents like to go around saying they'd never live anyplace else on account of they'd miss the 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.

Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom's an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

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.

But the stuff that I do is more like all the comic roles like in The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus and I just did this Offenbach operetta at the LA Opera. I love it. I just love it. For me, it's like a great mesh of musical theatre and my classical oboe background to be standing on these huge stages with a full orchestra and all the opulence. I'm a complete sucker for the over-the-topness.

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.

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.

All My Children' taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera!

Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.

Life beats down and crushes our souls and theatre reminds us that we have one. At least the type of theatre that I'm interested in; that is, theatre that moves an audience. You have the opportunity to literally impact the lives of people if they work on material that has integrity. But today, most actors simply want to be famous. Well, being an actor was never supposed to be about fame and money. Being an actor is a religious calling because you've been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity. Think about that on the way to your soap opera audition.

Baseball is a soap opera that plays out day after day, one that a lot of elderly women watch until the characters and the plot becomes a part of their life. She got to enjoy the personal side of the players. They were her kids. The Braves were her family.

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.

I always wanted to be a comedian. I loved comedy since I was a little kid, and while I was at university I started doing stand up shows. Once I realized that I was good at it I quit college and left although I had six months left. I went to England. I could have done the last six months but I realized that I was better at standup comedy than I was at singing opera.

It's the perfect environment for prayer. Chanting in Greek is like a beautiful opera, but way better.

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.