Quotes About Opera

I have always felt an excellent rapport ever since my very first concert in Britain at Hampton Court. I have always felt understood. The British understand opera very well.

You could almost write an opera about the selection of music directors for orchestras. The intrigues are really interesting, and then, at the end, the results are completely unexpected.

Unfortunately, opera engagements tend to be made five years in advance, and I don't really agree with that.

I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall.

When you conduct opera, you control the stage. But with a film, the film controls you.

Any time I've performed on one of the major stages, whether it be Covent Garden or the Paris Opera or the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, those are really the top memorable moments for me.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.

I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor - I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.

I couldn't stand the politics in opera.

Diva has a negative connotation.

If you don't think it took a man to sit here, and stay awake, during nearly an hour of opera, baby, you better think again.

Your every emotion goes right over the top with a big audience. It's either laughter or tears, with no in-between. Those tigers in zoos, they must have a big opera all the time.

Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m'alita; Son félé -- bien fol est qui s'y fie! Il neige, le décor s'écroule, Lolita! Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie? Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won't come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me--a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

Manaus is famous for its hulking Amazonas Theater, an opera house built of Italian marble and surrounded by roads made of rubber so the carriage clatter of late arrivals wouldn't interrupt the voices of Europe's best tenors and sopranos.

Are you insinuating that my daughter is a snake?" "No—is a coloratura soprano, is much worse. A little snake, love mamma, do what papa tells, maybe, but a coloratura soprano, love nobody but own goddam self. Is son-bitch-bast', worse than all a snake in a world. Madame, you leave dees girl alone.

As the director of an opera, it is my responsibility to unify the style of the particular performance, but one can certainly approach the piece from different points of view. That's what makes it interesting and keeps it alive.

And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.

Misery loves company. This is a Hollywood soap opera, and I'm not going to be a star in another Bryant soap opera.

No operatic star has yet died soon enough for me.

I started performing with the Boston Children's Opera when I was 5, and I stayed working with that group until I was about 12 or 13, so that was a huge part of my life. It was, weirdly, an extremely professional environment geared towards kids.