Quotes About Opera

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.

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.

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 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.

I'm the only person in my family who can't sing. My grandmother was an opera singer and all of her kids were in church five days a week - or between church and vocal lessons at Carnegie Hall. But my mom had her first studio experience recording on my album. She's used to having to fill the room, so she had to adjust to the microphone and not sing opera.

It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing smaller projects.[The opera] Akhnaten fits in with Gandhi and Einstein, so that forms a trilogy in a way.I picked people who were these kind of larger than life characters, who kind of changed the world they lived in by almost the force of their personality and their inventiveness. People that I think not only do I admire but I think they're admirable people.

I tend to sing opera and showtunes in the shower. I don't know why, but when I get in the shower I turn into this big fat opera lady.

The nice thing about doing a pop opera is that, because the convention is set from the beginning that this is an opera and everything is sung, there is never that feeling of "Why is this person bursting out into song?" because the whole thing is sung.

When you work on a soap opera, that's three years of you working every day. There was no time to do anything other than the soap opera - you're locked in.

I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth.

For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume ... to do something with your body. When singing in concert you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural.

I don't like rock opera with back beats.

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.

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.

Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

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

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.

Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.

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

I don't think an opera house is ever a place that can make you entirely happy.

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.

Let's talk about that for a moment, about the couple that Yves Saint Laurent and I were. Like all couples we went through "storms," as the Jacques Brel song says. But if there's one area where we never had the slightest disagreement, it was art. Never. Not once. Not about painting, not about opera, not about theater. We were always in complete communion. Of course, that's how all of the collection came into being.

I like the idea that [Mahatma] Gandhi is appearing now in an opera hall in all these different places, and people kind of think about it again.

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

In preparing my thesis, I have had the pleasure of collecting testimonies from colleagues such as Placido Domingo but also from singing teachers and musicologists. The entire course of study has confirmed what I already thought, that the value and meaning of opera singing, at the beginning of the third millennium, remain intact.

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.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

Soaps taught me the fundamentals of the game. You know, how to show up, hit your mark, how to be on time. That soap opera world is a microcosm of the entertainment culture.

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

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.

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 went to film school when I was 17, and of course when you are very young you think that there is nothing else in the world except film. At some point I started getting hungry to see something else. For five years I didn't make any films, I was traveling around the world, writing for newspapers, working in theater, working in opera, I thought I would never return to film.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

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.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.

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.

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.

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.

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

When I go to an opera performance and sit there while people are cheering and shouting "bravo," I sometimes ask myself what exactly they're cheering about. And I even see myself as an artist who also knows how to enjoy other people's performances.

Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.

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.

The word "theatrical" makes me cringe, because it suggests a performance is staged, put on, rehearsed. And while all this is true for an opera, I believe the act of singing and performing should always be honest, raw, guttural.

In the long term, you have to believe that movies and TV shows will be like the opera and the novel, pretty nichey businesses.

When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera... and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.

I was nostalgic even as a young man. Preferred listening to Opera not Bing Crossby.