Quotes About Opera

I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

I have always loved music and singing, and I am open to listen to any type of music. Regardless of my mood, my heart is always set racing when I listen to opera. When I decide which music I want to hear, my choice is almost invariably an opera recording.

Every opera, because every opera is a unique slice of a particular perspective, historical perspective and psychological perspective if not musical style, and so forth, they all present different challenges. Some can be musically very challenging, some can be psychologically more challenging. There is always something that requires a pretty specific amount of energy and attention.

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.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

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.

Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

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.

For the shallow delights of matrimony and opera I have no courage.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

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

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

I don't find much influence in opera. It was such a different part of me.

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

What's an opera if everyone is dead in it?

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.

A lot of performers don't want to leave the circuit, the European opera house circuit, partly because most singers don't sing many concerts, or at least not while they are in their prime.

In a film score, the last thing you want to do is take people out of the movie. The music is secondary. In opera, the music is the main event.

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.

I think it's important to have a blend just as we need to have by the way a mix of different opera companies and different arts companies.

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.

I loved to sing and I loved to act, and I didn’t want to continue opera because I wanted to act.

Later, I even appeared in a Rock Opera with Richard Gere.

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."

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.

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.

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.

I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.

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

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

The opera isn't over until the fat lady sings.

For a while, I couldn't decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I'm glad that I chose the latter because I wasn't a very good singer.

I never pictured myself as a telenovela galan - never imagined Id be in a soap opera.

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

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

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.

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.

I looked at the job of piano accompanist. It's a selfless position and generally they are odd people, according to opera singers I talked to. Just like everybody else, they want more from their life, but now their job is to make others shine.

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.

I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.

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.

What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.

I was into opera as a kid - I'd play 'Carmen' and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.