Quotes About Opera

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.

The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.

But Opera Man, I go, "Oh, crap! Why didn't I think of that?" Because I could sing fake opera pretty good.

That's opera! I just love it. It just thrills me! And it's very different than theatre, and sometimes it can be frustrating because when you come in the first day of rehearsals obviously you're an opera fan, right?

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 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.

The structure of my life has changed a little. But we no longer have the time that we had, to be with family. Sometimes you can't even spend any time with friends because you are working so hard. You're either on tour or on promotion or suddenly we're taping the soap opera.

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.

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

I sing a mixture of everything from opera, folk music, Broadway. It's a mix of things.

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.

I think it's the responsibility of a major opera house not only to cultivate debate and get people thinking, but also to be interfaced with things that challenge them. To challenge its audience and not just deliver things that they know, even though some of those things are wonderful.

If you think that there are actually covers that we haven't done on 'Glee' that I could then put on an album... We've done everything! Pretty soon we're just going to have to start doing opera and stuff on the show.

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.

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

When I was very young I wanted to be an opera singer, a ballet dancer... The people I loved were a little different.

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.

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

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.

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 stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.

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

Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.

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.

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.

I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.

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

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No.

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.

When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of music.

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.

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.

A ghost who, on the same evening, carries off an opera-singer and steals twenty-thousand francs is a ghost who must have his hands very full!

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.

I really thought I wanted to be a musical-comedy star, but I lived in Phoenix and didn't want to go all the way to New York and be that far away from home. So I thought maybe I'd be a rock 'n' roll singer or an opera singer.

Tom [Courtenay] and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on the dresser, so that's how it started. It's a wonderful documentary. It's called Tosca's Kiss and Mr Hardwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was. It was made in 1983 and Verdi, who was rich and successful, toward the end of his life decided to build a mansion for himself in Milan, where he lived, and he stipulated that when he died opera singers and musicians - because he knew so many who were no longer playing at the Scala and some were poor - could live there.

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work.

I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.

He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?

When there is this giant narrative, when there is a singular story out there like there is right now about the Russians hacking the election so that Donald Trump would win - when the media is pumping it and the Democrats are quoting the media and the media's quoting the Democrats and it's just like a giant blanket thrown all over the country - don't believe the story. It's made up! It is a script. I call the daily soap opera.

The inventor of the modern foundation garment that we women wear today was a German scientist and opera lover by the name of Otto Titsling.

I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, "Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer."

People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.