Quotes About Opera

If I'm going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.

A lot of performers don't want to leave the circuit, the European opera house circuit, partly because most singers don't sing many concerts, or at least not while they are in their prime.

A dark and towering shadow, rising like the phoenix from the ashes...malevolent...omnipotent...The Phantom of the Opera!

What's difficult to understand about German opera? It's always the same. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl gets devoured by horrible winged creature with claws.

I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

As a soprano who sings 'Lucia di Lammermoor,' I have the high notes and the trills. No problems there. But going into the low registers is lots of work.

Crazy as it sounds, I'm a believer in destiny and serendipity, and I have had cosmic experiences all my life. Something told me I was meant for greater stuff. And look, I've had a baby! And I've written an opera!

But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This goal-driven attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks the "duty" of attending opera performances

But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we've assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar.

How many times had he listened to the death song of Cio-Cio-San and cried as though it were a new sadness just visited upon him?

Hugh paid no more attention to the farce than he had to the opera. He took every opportunity to study the young woman sitting beside him. She didn't hide her amusement at the production on stage, laughing at the pranks of the fool and clapping one hand to her mouth when the hero fell to his knee and proclaimed his love for the fainting maiden. Hugh sensed it was all genuine, as genuine as her nerves and her devotion to Willy and even her welcoming words to him this evening.

Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.

I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.

Opera purges men of those hesitations and worries which make it difficult for them to acknowledge their importance to themselves. A good performance of an opera, that is, provides a language for us to speak of ourselves as we have always known we should speak.

Soprano, basso, even the contralto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto.

Bed is the poor man's opera.

Someone put opera on inside the house. Someone changed it to hip-hop, thank God. Someone started a shower. Someone vacuumed. Again. Life. In all its mundane majesty. And you couldn't take advantage of it if you were sitting on your ass in the shadows... whether it was in actuality, or metaphorically because you were trapped in an attic's darkness.

I cried for it. That's how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.

Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents' favorites.

Theatre is different. We can spend two weeks around a table talking about subtext. In opera, there is a score, and people already know their parts. And they move differently. I find all this liberating.