Quotes About Opera

It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one's vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don't see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power.

The Death of Boris,' by Mussorgsky?

And Barcelona. You should see Barcelona." "How is it?" "It is all still comic opera. First it was the paradise of the crackpots and the romantic revolutionists. Now it is the paradise of the fake soldier. The soldiers who like to wear uniforms, who like to strut and swagger and wear red-and-black scarves. Who like everything about war except to fight. Valencia makes you sick and Barcelona makes you laugh.

Legrand shares with his predecessor that rare ability to joke in music just as his librettist jokes in words. The composer has in fact termed Amour "an opéra-bouffe"—Offenbach's own form.

Jane Eyre, Thou Shalt Not, and Thoroughly Modern Millie typify currents running through the musical today: one, the extra-musical musical play that encroaches on opera; two, the rehabilitation of dance after years of neglect; and, three, the musical-comedy revival.

Christine: In sleep he sang to me In dreams he came. That voice which calls to me, And speaks my name. And do I dream again? For now I find, The phantom of the opera is here, Inside my mind Phantom: Sing once again with me , Our strange duet. My power over you, Grows strenger yet. And though you turn from me, To glace behind. The phantom of the opera is there, Inside your mind ? ? The Phantom of the Opera ? ?

Wagner and Strauss require great and glamorous singers

His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'24

Outside was the huge winter sky, which made you dizzy just to think of it, inside a small family drama, a soap opera. And she was in the middle.

I never step upon a stage without asking myself whether I will succeed in finishing the opera. The fact is that a conscientious singer is never sure of himself or of anything. He is ever in the hands of Destiny.

Of course there are other prima donnas around. So many of my colleagues, younger ones, are wonderful.

If I do a play, it's my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it's usually the director.

This season, over eight productions, I am presenting four young tenors.

I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.

I got last-minute rush seats to Baz Luhrmann's 'Boheme,' and my favorite singer, Ekaterina Solovyeva, was playing Mimi that day. My face got burned off when she sang the aria 'Donde Lieta Usci.' The woman was technically sobbing and singing opera at the same time. I don't know how you do that.

I wasn't the best in my class at the Royal Academy. There was a really good soprano and baritone who were technically better and are doing really well in opera now. But I was definitely the best mezzo-soprano in my class, because I was the only one of those!

My Mozart career began as a teenager in Los Angeles, singing arias from 'Le Nozze di Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni.'

I have an opera coach who I went to as a teenager, when I was 15 and 16 years old. When I went to college, I forgot about it.

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

In my teens, I saw a terrible production of 'Die Walkuere.' To a person of 15, it was just awful, and it put me off for many years. Eventually I became an opera-goer, if not an opera buff.

I remember once saying in a television interview that the only things I hadn't been in were the opera and the ballet. Two days later, I got a call from Lord Harewood, of the English National Opera, saying "Would you like to be in 'Ariadne auf Naxos?'"

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