Opera Quotes

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.

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.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

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.

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.

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.

I performed in Sydney some years ago for the Sydney Festival and I am just so pleased to be returning to the wonderful Sydney Opera House and also performing in Melbourne for the first time.

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

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

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.

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.

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.