Quotes About Opera

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

And then we had one of those conversations which make no sense on paper, which you can't repeat and can't even remember. The sounds mean more than the words, like in an Italian opera.

I'd love to come to Australia. I'd love to walk about the Sydney Opera House.

Prima Donna is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience.

In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

I would love to do a musical!

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialisation. No? Nor in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism.

Ah, o defeito da nossa ciência é que ela quer explicar tudo, e se não consegue explicar, então diz que não há nada a explicar. Ainda assim, vemos ao nosso redor todos os dias o crescimento de novas convicções, que pensam que são novas, e que não são nada mais que coisas antigas que fingem ser novas, como as belas damas na ópera.

It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like the fine ladies at the opera.

Mauricio looked like he'd rather b in the front row of a German opera.

Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

What sort of person, said Salzella patiently, sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.

Well, basically, there are two sorts of opera, said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever.

Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha! BEWARE!!!!! Yrs Sincerely, The Opera Ghost

Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.

New Orleans, it was often observed, was the first American metropolis to build an opera house, but the last to build a sewage system.

Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'some one,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must need pity the Opera ghost...

She's singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!

The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

Sir Thomas Beecham once said this at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall when I was there as a boy. He said 'I'm often asked why operas survive generation after generation—La Bohème and things like that. And I always reply. 'They survive because they consist of bloody good tunes'.

Hitler] Mesélt linzi ifjúságáról és arról, hogy gyermekként milyen nagy hatással volt rá a linzi Landestheaterben látott LOHENGRIN-el?adás. Akkoriban megfordult a fejében, hogy operaénekes lesz.

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.

When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of music.