Opera Quotes

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

Since I was a child I've loved going to the opera, theatre and ballet.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

What opera isn't violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can't.

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings.

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.

But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

My parents were opera singers and voice teachers, so growing up, I admired musicians and dancers.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

When something like that happens, people want to try to find some dirt and make it more of a soap opera. But I think we both walked away with the door still open, if we want to do something together again. So yeah, I would call it a friendly break-up.

I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.

Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.

People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.

I know what I am able and not able to do. Fashion? OK. Fashion... clothes in theatre, in an opera, in a concert - all that I love. To make a movie myself... no!

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

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

There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

My dad became a soap opera actor, and I was an extra in a skating rink scene on the soap. I didn't audition. It was nepotism all the way.

I want to reach as many people as possible with the message of music, of wonderful opera.