Quotes About Opera

I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.

I know I'm an opera singer, but we're actors, too.

I was an acting opera singer, and that's one of the reasons I left opera.

My family was very musical. My brother is an opera singer; my parents both sang.

For me, a diva is like the great opera singer, the great film star - out of reach, in their own world, with a real gift for invention: attention-demanding performance artists with a flamboyant, compelling sense of their own importance so special and inimitable it verges on the alien.

I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!

My mom was an opera singer. She did all the classical music, and I heard it. I know every opera. I know every classical piece of music.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage:

My attention was drawn to the spots on my chest when I was in the bath, singing, if I remember rightly, the Toreador song from the opera Carmen.

It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.

Without Puccini, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even drearier place than the evening news would have us think.

Parsifal is the opera that begins at five-thirty and when you look at your watch three hours later, it is only five forty-five.

La vie sert à faire des opéras-comiques.

Technically, the song's a mess. It follows no known conventional nor commercial formula. It is just a string of dreams, flashbacks, flash-forwards, vignettes, completely disjointed ideas. It changes sequence, color, tone, tempo, all for no apparent reason—which is exactly what opera does.

I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was 'The Phantom of the Opera' with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.

In preparing my thesis, I have had the pleasure of collecting testimonies from colleagues such as Placido Domingo but also from singing teachers and musicologists. The entire course of study has confirmed what I already thought, that the value and meaning of opera singing, at the beginning of the third millennium, remain intact.

Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit.

Las óperas de Rameau empezaban a meter ruido y dieron a conocer sus obras teóricas, que, habiendo permanecido ignoradas, poseían muy pocos. Por casualidad oí hablar de su Tratado de la armonía

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is.

I change the language with which I use my voice. In opera, I know I have an orchestra behind me; I have to communicate to people very far from me.

I love Puccini and that oriental influence in his music.

I don't think two blokes having the same fucking argument for 16 years over and over is the stuff of opera. Oasis: the Opera would be very short. The fat lady would refuse to sing it.

My family was very supportive of whatever I wanted because my grandfather was an opera singer. My dad's dad. So my dad has an appreciation for the arts, and he let me choose my own path.