Quotes About Opera

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

I'd love to play Carmen - it's the perfect mezzo role.

New York. It's home to opera, Broadway, museums, the ballet and orchestra - everything that I love. The most real people in the world live there.

This was the lavish background against which I worked my horses at Nakuru. My entrance with Arab Ruta and Wise Child on the flat shore each morning just after daylight must have been as anticlimactic as the spectacle of three mice crossing a stage gigantically set for the performance of a major Wagnerian opera.

When I do concerts and recitals, the two most common requests are spirituals and opera.

Tiles, the best furniture, fabrics, bath fixtures, bronze - just leaf through any design magazine and you immediately understand they're all 'Made in Italy.' We have the premier opera house in the world, La Scala, and behind the Nobel given to CERN is the research of many Italians.

I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.

There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.

I was into opera as a kid - I'd play 'Carmen' and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

I did grow up in France, and even though I didn't go to the school or dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, I absorbed similar ideas in my training. I understand the scale of a big company. I danced for one for almost 20 years.

An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.

You have seven writers in your basement?" Donald nods, signing, "They like it here. There's a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don't usually make much trouble.

The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.

I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.

There is anyway a kind of off-color romance to a deserted seaside town in the winter, your heart's opera scored by the sound of the tide crashing over a stony beach, shushing everything as the waves try to make up their mind whether they're leaving or staying. White waves kissing black stones, shushing all around them. Shhh … shhh.

U2's music was never really rock 'n' roll. Under its contemporary skin it's opera—a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day. A tenor out front who won't accept he's a baritone. A small man singing giant songs. Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.

When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: I spent my days pursuing the nothingness - le rien - it creates. My job is to create that void, that rien . Hunting knife

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

In management terms, directing opera certainly prepares you for a film set: the magnitude of it, the experts in other fields that you have to call on. Both are massive ensemble jobs in which there's incredible pressure to get things done on time and on budget - so much so that making the wrong decision may be better than making no decision at all.

The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.

In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It's called 'Scalia/Ginsburg.' The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.