Quotes About Opera

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.

I've always gravitated towards opera, and the Royal Opera House is quite possibly the greatest opera house on earth.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

Opera once was an important social instrument - especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi, people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

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.

Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.

I trained with a guy named Tito Gobbi, who was the Marlon Brando of the opera world. Tito Gobbi was the greatest singing baritone in the opera world and I studied in Florence, Firenze, with him. That was my first love, as it was Frank Sinatra's, oddly enough.

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.

I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music.

The operas I listen to aren't in English, and I want to listen to my opera after I'm done with it. I want to have the desire to play it on the stereo. To me, the language is part of the mystery.

I've always enjoyed playing a little left of center characters. Otherwise I'd be on a soap opera.

It was an emergency!" Seth blurted. "Read my lips - emergency reading - not some demented idea of fun. If I was starving, I would eat asparagus. If somebody held a gun to my head, I would watch a soap opera. And to save Fablehaven, I would read a book, okay, are you happy?" You had best be careful, Seth," Grandma warned. "The love of reading can be contagious." I just lost my appetite," he declared.

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

I love film scores and opera, and I wanted to work in those forms. But theater was more accessible. And no one was doing this in the late 1970s, when I began working in the theater. So, I have written scores for thirteen plays, which are not musicals, but straight plays.

Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

I've known my lady (for she loves a tune) For fevers take an opera in June: And, though perhaps you'll think the practice bold, A midnight park is sov'reign for a cold.

Hey yogurt, if you're so cultured, how come I never see you at the opera?

My dream is to be played everywhere, not only at the Opera.

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 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.

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 love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.

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.

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

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.

The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.

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 would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

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

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely different attitude.

Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice.

You sit at a fashion show in another country and you watch all of these paparazzi swarm around a celebrity, only they're a local celebrity, maybe a soap opera star, so you don't have any idea who they are, you just know they're famous to a bunch of stunned Italians. It's weird, because when you can't identify who a celebrity is, they can just look like overslicked stand-ins. That might sound awful, but what I mean is, when you think about most actresses, even in Hollywood, they really aren't that fascinating or glamorous in their own right once you strip away the flashbulbs.

I love opera so much. I would never go back to doing it, but I love to listen - I'm grateful for it. I studied diction, breathing control, phrasing, why the song means something. You want to bring that across to your listeners.

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.

My worry is that opera will become an historic art form as opposed to a living, breathing thing.

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

I keep to a minimum dialect, in-jokes about football (soccer) teams and soap opera characters, so as not to lose North American readers.

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.

It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good

Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.

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.

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.

Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?

Opera on television in Europe is very important. If you think about it in the broadest sense: a lot of the dramas made in India with music are practically operas. They're not sung but they have a very big appeal. I don't know why American television people are so stupid but at the moment, they just seem to have some sort of a block. They just do what they do and they do it for a certain number of years. Then it wears out and they try something else. It's just a matter of time I think.

I remember someone once saying, "Pete, you know you really should take voice lessons." And I said, "Well, if I could find any voice teacher that could teach me to sing like Lead Belly I'd spend every cent to study under him." But every time you'd go to a voice teacher, he'd teach you to warble, as if you'd want to be an opera singer, and that's not what I'm interested in.