Quotes About Opera

It's very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.

Listening to Spanish, Italian, or German opera, you, like me, may have no idea what the words of a particular aria mean, but you don't need this knowledge to understand the feeling they convey. You can tell if it's a song of pleasure, jubilation, triumph, or tragedy.

The rise and fall of Teresa Cornelys proves three things: that the wages of sin are high, that you should "just say no" to opera, and that it's always wise to diversify your investment portfolio.

Caratacus suffered the double indignity of being taken to Rome in chains and having an opera written about him by Elgar.

My parents did not care whether I saw an opera or understood a statue; all that could be considered in time, in the future, for operas and statues belonged to urban culture, and my kinfolks said any person with any kind of background could acquire a city civilization, but that few city people could ever learn the culture of a rural country.

During our conversation, I was surprised to learn of his affinity for Wagnerian opera.

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.

I guess my first professional experience was when my church choir director told my mother that I had a gift with my voice and said that I should think about auditioning, at 11 years old, for the chorus of our regional opera company.

I always hated 'O Holy Night.' It's so operatic and overwrought.

They crested a rise, and there it was, in the hollow between rolling hills—a low, square building, ghostly gray in the moonlight. Is that it? asked Hamilton. It probably isn't the local opera house, groaned Ian.

In my whole life, I've worn black tie three times. I can't tie the knot myself. Once, at the premiere of the opera, I got to La Scala before Domenico, and I was hiding in the corner until he arrived, and I said, 'Quick, you have to tie my tie, please!' Otherwise, I'll wear a tuxedo jacket with jeans and my bling-bling cross.

I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock.

If I can transport audiences for the three or four hours they're at the opera, to make them forget all of their worries, the bills they have to pay and all that, then I've done my job. That, for me, is very gratifying.

Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime.

We do not seem to be finding tomorrow's Toscas.

If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera.

I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.

Pavarotti is dead and the streets are full of arias, my brother. Every window a tenor leans, there are sopranos in the olive branches. And all across the globe the world turns to crescendos.

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.

I had a lot of classical influences. I had classical music and opera and literature, but I also liked sleaze. And putting it together, sleaze and glamour, it just made sense to me.

Existe la vida y existe la ópera, y yo quiero las dos cosas.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it, is killing me now.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it.

Before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time. (The elaborate vocal stylings of opera singing were in many ways designed to coax maximum projection out of the biological limitations of the voice.)