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.

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.

The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.

First, my frame of reference for the Britten opera shifted. I'd always thought of Britten's approach in Death in Venice as another exploration of the plight of the individual whose aspirations are at odds with those of the surrounding community: his last opera returning to the themes of Peter Grimes. As I read and listened and thought, however, Billy Budd came to seem a more appropriate foil for Death in Venice.

I was not especially enthusiastic about opera when I was young, and I thought I would never write one. I felt it was an art form of the past, with expensive singers exposing their high notes, and bad theater, and ridiculous stories which don't concern us. But then little by little I realized that it can be defined very differently, that on the contrary opera can be something profound and not superficial - a wonderful meeting point for all the other arts.

As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

I have the greatest fans. I have fans that come from soap opera world, I have fans that come from superhero world, which are a whole different section of fans. They're so cool.

Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.

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.

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?

I think you're born with style, but you have to develop it. You can be born with the talent to be an opera star, but you've got to work and practice it.

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.

And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.

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.

Four billion years ago the planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings 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.

Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

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.

The pop world is popular, and it's about what the people want and connecting to the masses, whereas opera, although it was once popular - and I still believe it can be - it has become very elitist and intellectual, but that certainly doesn't sell tickets. It's a struggle, but I've always embraced struggle and thrived off of it, so it's the way my life needs to go.

I fell in love with the classical crossover genre when I was on AGT. I found out that I could use the microphone to establish a deeper intimacy with the audience. I did not portray an opera character; I was my true self. I would sing a four-to-five minute piece for the audience and then I could talk to them and say "Hi" to them! I would not need to act out scenes where my character was dying from tuberculosis or killing somebody else on stage, I could have a nice conversation with them.

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.

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.

Even from far away, I could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

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.

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

My chance, when it came, was due, literally, to the fact that I was slender.... You cannot make an opera audience believe that a man will endanger his soul, and commit robbery and murder for a very stout lady's sake.

I became a set designer for opera.

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.

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.

Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music and provides concrete examples of some of the best ways to present the music in the widest variety of settings-radio, TV, recordings, movies, concert halls, festivals, solo, small ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, opera, Broadway shows.... You name it, he did it!

An opera singer is like an athlete before a match. An athlete cannot overdo anything. In order to perform at the highest possible level, you need to refrain from activities so as to be able to express this power.

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

You know, my mother never thought I would do anything good in my life, and I was standing in this opera with four gold medals! If she were alive, maybe she'd think I was doing well!

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

Flawless . . . Tightly choreographed . . . Shipstead gains entry into exclusive worlds and trains her opera glasses on private social rituals, as well as behind-the-scenes hanky panky . . . Similar to classic ballet, the power of Astonish Me arises out of the pairing of a melodramatic storyline with scrupulously executed range of movement . . . Shipstead sweeps you into this insider world of sweat, narcissism, and short-lived magic . . . Transcendent.

I don't limit my taste. There's some jazz that I like and there's some opera. I've been listening to what was essentially country music, but it crossed over to rock.

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

You'll find in Africans a fantastic amount of heavy space opera and so on, going on ... which makes the colored African very, very interesting to process because he doesn't know why he goes through all these dances ... and why he feels so barbarous.

I dislike those people that see an opera and say "Oh, they can't act it. They just sing. It's boring." Lean back and just listen to the voices.