Opera Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.

I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself.

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 don't like rock opera with back beats.

I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.

I had four or five years in school training as a soprano. I fell into pop singing because of economics. I got out of high school and had to go work, and they weren't hiring opera singers.

I want to get out of the major opera houses.

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

I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things.

The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.

I can go from one extreme to another, from playing at the Sydney Opera House on the Songbook tour to shows with Soundgarden at Voodoo Fest, all in a week.

I don't know why a computer game can't be an art form just as a puppet show or an opera is. I'm still interested in computer games as something I would like to work on someday.

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

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

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.