Opera Quotes

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.

But nevertheless, 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.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

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

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.

Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

But Opera Man, I go, 'Oh, crap! Why didn't I think of that?' Because I could sing fake opera pretty good.

I enjoy all forms of music - pop, classical and opera.

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

I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.

Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while.

People may have thought that we changed a lot. I don't think we came in with that intention. Certain things I can't stomach. But I tried to be as collegial as possible. When you sign that contract, you're tied to that opera house to try your best. But every different team will play with a different intensity.

I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera.

If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera.

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

That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.

I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It's a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it's a great date or something that's just hugely romantic.

I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera.

My favorite type of music to sing would be between R and B and opera.

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

I have also just finished three weeks on a soap opera in England. The soap opera is a rather famous one called Crossroads. It was first on television 25 years ago, and it has recently been brought back. I play the part of a businessman called David Wheeler.