Quotes About Opera

Well, basically there are two sorts of opera," said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. "There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh I am dyin', oh oh oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.

That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

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.

One of my sisters wanted to be an opera singer. So, we spent a few dollars to try to train her, because Italian people would like to have an opera singer in the family. But she's got trouble coughing, let alone singing. One day, she was in the shower singing 'Madame Butterfly,' three days later the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor.

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

They're getting me involved in intrigue again, and I think it follows a classic formula in a soap opera.

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

'Lollipop Opera' is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It's utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It's like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.

I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation.

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.

Art is all about the experience. I could say I dont really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, Blimey, look at that.

I know one thing - very few writers in Southern California get to write what they want to write. We are more or less worker ants, working for either film companies or tv companies or Internet companies. We do a lot of assigned work. Feelings hardly ever enter into it. If they do, they tend to be on a sort of soap opera level.

Fitzcarraldo is a mad dreamer. He's willing to sacrifice everything in order to make his vision of an opera house. That metaphor of pulling the boat over the mountain is so integral to anyone making any creative effort. It's that universal Sisyphean struggle.

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

If you look at Marriage of Figaro or Butterfly or Traviata, all of those elements are in there. I also have to have a very specific location in mind. The physical environment of where the opera takes place is very key - the "sound world."

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Dumb luck brought on the move from business to acting. I had moved to New York when I was 23, in the year 2000. On a lark, I went to audition for a soap opera.

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.

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.

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.

An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.

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.

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.

When you say you're doing an opera, it's like when you're a seven-year-old and say, 'I'm off to Washington, Dad.' You kind of go, 'Sure. Sure you are, son.'

My family was very supportive of whatever I wanted because my grandfather was an opera singer. My dad's dad. So my dad has an appreciation for the arts, and he let me choose my own path.

I'd hate this to get out but I really like opera.

Writing an opera and premiering in England, you could say I was going right into the eye of the storm and I came out successfully. A little tattered and bruised, but so what, I made it.

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight—and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?

Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime.

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.

My dad became a soap opera actor, and I was an extra in a skating rink scene on the soap. I didn't audition. It was nepotism all the way.

In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

What's all this about yanking poor Magnus and Alec back from their vacation?" Isabelle demanded. "They have opera tickets!

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

The opera ghost really existed

In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. ‘I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,’ they say. ‘Phoebe Wallingford will pay for what she’s done to our family.’ Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder, I turned to look in the direction of Hugh’s loft. ‘You will be mine,’ I commanded.

I've never thought of myself as a singer anyway. . . I've been free from those considerations because so many people over the years told me I don't have a voice. I kind of bought that. I never thought that much about it to begin with. I knew I didn't have one of the great voices. As my Damon Runyanesque lawyer used to say, "none of you guys can sing. If I want to hear singing, I'll go to the Metropolitan Opera."

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

That's why we began calling it the daily soap opera, or it's just the place on radio and TV where Democrat Party agenda is advanced. But it isn't media.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

Soloist are inspiring in Opera and perhaps even in small entreprenurial ventures, but there is no place for them in large corporations.