Quotes About Opera

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.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.

Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me.

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.

Opera is a very stimulating place to work, and I believe it offers the most intense theatrical experience possible.

eu não odeio nada nem ninguém - perdono a tutti, como na ópera.

Verdadeiramente foi o princípio da minha vida; tudo o que sucedera antes foi como o pintar e vestir das pessoas que tinham de entrar em cena, o acender das luzes, o preparo das rabecas, a sinfonia... Agora é que eu ia começar a minha ópera.

A vida é uma ópera e uma grande ópera. O tenor e o barítono lutam pelo soprano, em presença do baixo e dos comprimários, quando não são o soprano e o contralto que lutam pelo tenor, em presença do mesmo baixo e dos mesmos comprimários. Há coros numerosos, muitos bailados, e a orquestração é excelente...

Tulsa has world-class opera and Starbucks, and a religious conservatism that rules public life.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

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.

I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.

I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love, but how much? A lot, or only a little bit? The opera went on for a long time. Eventually the two youngest people onstage got married, so we could all go home.

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg.

I think that opera in Europe is 30 years ahead of America. There is a broader range of material presented to the public. They value contemporary opera.

Operagoing at its best is about the rekindling of the soul, about having an open window into what makes us human.

A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.

True expression is hard when performing opera. The problem is that opera relies on the dramatic context of the piece. It can be interpreted and represented, but there are guidelines; there is a vocabulary within the pieces that you must know objectively and reflect.

The fact that I could secure an opera engagement made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, if I would really labor for such an end. When I became thoroughly convinced of this, I was transformed from an amateur into a professional in a single day.

The idea is not to have one great singer surrounded by a bunch of nit wits. When the others are good, too, that's when you get something happening in opera.

I always thought of 'Lost' as a psychotic opera. Because there were so many characters, it was important for me to track them with themes.

Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera - even though they're obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds.

Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.