Quotes About Opera

When you say you're doing an opera, it's like when you're a seven-year-old and say, 'I'm off to Washington, Dad.' You kind of go, 'Sure. Sure you are, son.'

It wasn't until I got involved in 'Doctor Who' that I started doing dramas on television.

For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight—and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?

Bed is the poor man's opera.

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.

Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.

The 'Daughter of the Regiment' that I did in Boston was vintage Sarah Caldwell, which is to say it was brilliant. Before my career was over, I'm sure I sang the role of Marie at least a hundred times, often in productions that cost a fortune, but none touched hers.

Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

The Royal Opera House? I once had the immense privilege of appearing there and was awed by the air of refinement of those seemingly ethereal beings who floated about in the highest echelons of musical accomplishment, effortlessly producing virtuoso performances in several different languages.

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don't manage that - but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

It's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.

Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

In opera, as with any performing art, to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course, but you must also be famous. The two are different things.

I like your opera - I think I will set it to music

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.

I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more

This sounded, even to the Russians of the time, like a fairy tale out of some opera in St. Petersburg's gilded theaters; but the hunger, the poverty, and the desperation were real. The

At 1:00 a.m., they were in the Welsh pub again, having drinks and talking opera and football.

The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.