Quotes About Opera

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.

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were

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.

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 think every singer should be able to jump in for a singer who has been sick, for instance, and learn an opera in two days. I know people who can do it.

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.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

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

The operas that I do are more in the operetta world, but I've gotten to do them in all of these major opera companies so it's been really wild. And I feel comfortable in that world because I went Cincinnati Conservatory and I hung out with all those kinds of people, I love hanging out with them and I understand them and their "diva-osity."

When an opera star sings her head off? she usually improves her appearance.

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

My real passion is for opera. It was born and developed by listening to records, and my dream as a child was to record entire operas when I grew up, and this dream came true.

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

Among the numerous pleasures of Vienna the hotel evenings are famous. During supper Strauss or Lanner play waltzes...After every waltz they get huge applause; and if they play a Quodlibet, or jumble of opera, song and dance, the hearers are so overjoyed that they don't know what to do with themselves. It shows the corrupt taste of the Viennese public.

You're always in a tunnel that you can't see the end of. But there's something that took place on this movie that I don't think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians... and these people the phone hadn't rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver.

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

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

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.

I'm still wondering about the Phantom in the chair, you know at the end of Phantom [of the Opera], so I guess that's my sort of idiocy. I still haven't figured out how they do that.

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

I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing.

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.

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

That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a big head of steam while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of versimilitude.

If you put together all the ingredients that naturally attract children - sex, violence, revenge, spectacle and vigorous noise - what you have is grand opera.

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

Liverpool's grand opera also gave us some light comedy - on hearing the news that the house of goalkeeper Pepe Reina was burgled, and his Porsche stolen, while he was heroically saving penalties at Anfield, fans took a typically witty line: police were said to be interviewing a man from the West London area, a certain Frank Lampard, whose whereabouts on Tuesday between 7.45pm and 10.15pm are unknown. Indeed.

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

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.

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.

It's the perfect environment for prayer. Chanting in Greek is like a beautiful opera, but way better.

. . . 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.

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.

As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible.

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.

Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform.

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.

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.

At the moment I'm enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I'm also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.

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

I'd done two years on a soap opera where I was shooting things every day and they gave me a hard time about that, which I think is the wrong way to teach a young actor. They just made me really, really self-conscious about everything I did, which is the opposite of what you need to be when you're filming.