Opera Quotes

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

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.

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

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

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!

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.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

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

In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play.

People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.

Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.

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.

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.

Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.

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.

A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

Many years ago I was in another soap opera called The Newcomers which was on twice a week for three years. I really don't think I could do another stint like that again.

Opera is one of the most important art forms. It should be listened to and appreciated by everyone.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.