Quotes About Opera

I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.

I wouldn't know anything about opera music if it wasn't for Bugs Bunny. That was my entire introduction to opera music. I wouldn't know anything about classical music if it wasn't for "Fantasia." They didn't have to do that stuff. They chose to base this ridiculous, funny, intriguing, creative story on this beautiful classical music. It's the combination of the high and the low that I thought was very cool. But I had no concept of it as a kid.

H is for Hardware store: I'd rather go to the hardware store than the opera. And I like the opera.

The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.

To sing opera, one needs two things: the voice and the passion - and above all, the passion.

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

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 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.

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

Just send the emails and talk to people. Spend all your money on nail polish and opera tickets.

It's the economics, that's why opera is not dying but gets more and more difficult to put on.

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.

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

I'd love to come to Australia. I'd love to walk about the Sydney Opera House.

I belong to the givers. I want to give a little happiness even if I haven’t had much for myself. Music has enriched my life and, hopefully - through me, a little - the public’s. If anyone left an opera house feeling more happy and at peace, I achieved my purpose.

For more than 13,000 days on the run, my life was a soap opera.

I used to pride myself on being impervious to the sentimentalities of soap opera, but when that loveliest of actresses, Rachel Gurney, of Upstairs, Downstairs, perished on the Titanic, I wept so convulsively and developed such anorexia that I had to be force-fed.

I guess I've always had such an identity crisis when it comes to other people's understanding of me. I don't feel it in myself but from an outsider's point of view, I can see they must be thinking, "Who the hell does this guy think he is?" But recently I've been thinking, okay, a white guy can't sing soul, but would a black person be made exempt from singing opera because it's not a tradition that belongs to them? It's the same kind of argument.

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.

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'.

I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music.

I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall.

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

Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

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

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.

Im just a normal person. Its not like I come home and think about opera. My thoughts are about completely other things. Shoes! Dresses! Expensive ones: with a pretty silhouette, beautiful fabrics.

I'm a true opera buff. Operas make the best stories.

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.

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

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

When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

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

An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.

My parents were opera singers and voice teachers, so growing up, I admired musicians and dancers.

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.

It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

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.

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

The show is escapism. If you look back to when I was in college, all the girls in the sorority houses were gathered around watching soap operas. That was the escapism, the show that was giving you something you couldn't have. Now, you go into any sorority house, there are 50 to 100 girls piled in watching The Bachelor. We are the modern-day soap opera.

My greatest experiences in the theatre and the most religious experiences in my life - of which going to the opera is one for me - have been with the Romantic composers' repertoire: it's Wagner, it's Strauss, Verdi, Puccini. That era gets me every time.

Many years ago I was in another soap opera called The Newcomers which was on twice a week for three years. I really don't think I could do another stint like that again.

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.