Quotes About Opera

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.

It would be great to do a rock opera, but using more low-fi technology. I love shitty-sounding records.

I performed in Sydney some years ago for the Sydney Festival and I am just so pleased to be returning to the wonderful Sydney Opera House and also performing in Melbourne for the first time.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

I like opera just fine; it's people I wanted to get away from." As

She knows what matters and what doesn't,' she answered, choosing her words carefully. 'She remembers what she receives, but never what she gives. She doesn't hold grudges, and if she thinks something is funny she will laugh, whether it is the done thing or not. She loves the opera, and gorgeous clothes. She is honest when it is fashionable not to be, but she is never unnecessarily unkind. And she will fight to the death for a cause she believes in.

Tonio Treschi was that half man, that less than man that arouses the contempt of every whole man who looks upon it. Tonio Treschi was that thing which women cannot leave alone and men find infinitely disturbing, frightening, pathetic, the butt of jokes and endless bullying, the necessary evil of the church choirs and the opera stage which is, outside that artifice and grace and soaring music, very simply monstrous.

Life is not an opera. Scenes belong on the stage.

The way we define opera circa 1700 may help us to throw light not just on the choices facing Bach and his brilliant peer group at the outset of their careers, but on the cultural milieu which demarcates the changing role of music in early-eighteenth-century society.

We shall see shortly that Bach was to seize on a mutant type of opera that was to serve his purpose when composing the more dramatic of his church cantatas and Passions.

If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.

Augustus' tomb, once a landmark of the city, had many subsequent incarnations as a fortress, a walled garden, a bear-baiting arena and an opera hall. Today it is derelict, inaccessible; a crumbling tumulus, inhabited by cats, at the centre of a square

J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs.

I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain.

Elle est retrouvée! -Quoi? -l'Éternité. C'est la mer mêlée Au soleil. Je devins un opéra fabuleux : je vis que tous les êtres ont une fatalité de bonheur : l'action n'est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement. La morale est la faiblesse du cerveau. À chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues. Ce monsieur ne sait pas ce qu'il fait : il est un ange.

Usually, in musical theater, if you sing operatically or if you sing in a legit style, you're the heart of the show. You maybe get to be moving and do dramatic stuff, but it's very rare to be that funny.

I'm rarely singing in English.

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

That's the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don't know if I'd have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.

There are no electric guitars. 'Hunchback' has arias; it's operatic.

For three years, the 'Meistersinger' score was a ball and chain to me. It went with me to every city and concert hall.

We recognize the touch of the Opera ghost.

For several months, there had been nothing discussed at the Opera but this ghost in dress-clothes who stalked about the building, from top to bottom

She is singing tonight to bring the chandelier down.