Quotes About Opera

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

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

During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.

I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.

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.

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.

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

Hey you! I told you to slow that nag down! Because of you, I almost heard the opera!

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.

If an opera cannot be played by an organ grinder, it's not going to achieve immortality.

...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

To survive there, you need the ambition of a Latin-American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony.

I'm very musically inclined. My parents were opera singers. As a young child, I could hear operas and I knew if they were sad, or if they reminded me of something, or they brought back a memory.

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.

People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.

Italians are fantastic people, really. They can work you over in an alley while singing an opera.

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

The only thing that really inspired me for singing was the movie and musical 'Phantom of the Opera.' I went to see it in the theaters, and I loved it so much. And when I got home, I started singing the songs around the house, and my mom thought I was really good, so she asked me if I wanted to do a talent competition. And I said, 'Yes, definitely.'

When something like that happens, people want to try to find some dirt and make it more of a soap opera. But I think we both walked away with the door still open, if we want to do something together again. So yeah, I would call it a friendly break-up.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

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.

When I was growing up, until I was 18 or 19, I was totally invested in the classical music world. I had no concept of anything else. The closest thing to a cool band I listened to was Radiohead. Radiohead were the only band I liked in high school. I was just obsessed with classical music, opera, Claude Debussy, and that kind of stuff.

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

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.

When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being - its beyond belief.

I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall.

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

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.

Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom's an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.

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.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry.

One of the most wonderful memories in my life was when I sang at the Opera House in Sydney. I will never forget that. It is one of the most beautiful Houses I have ever sung in my life.

New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.

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

Life beats down and crushes our souls and theatre reminds us that we have one. At least the type of theatre that I'm interested in; that is, theatre that moves an audience. You have the opportunity to literally impact the lives of people if they work on material that has integrity. But today, most actors simply want to be famous. Well, being an actor was never supposed to be about fame and money. Being an actor is a religious calling because you've been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity. Think about that on the way to your soap opera audition.

When I go to an opera performance and sit there while people are cheering and shouting "bravo," I sometimes ask myself what exactly they're cheering about. And I even see myself as an artist who also knows how to enjoy other people's performances.

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

And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts.

I want to reach as many people as possible with the message of music, of wonderful opera.

I became a set designer for opera.

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.

Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.