Opera Quotes - page 17

In opera, there is always too much singing. (Claude Debussy)
I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves. View quote
Claude Debussy
I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner. View quote
Colm Tóibín
Like gladiator games and pyramid building, opera has always been a gloriously money-losing proposition. It is the most extravagant of arts, requiring the constant support of kings, dictators, plutocrats, and town councils. Box-office success is no solution. San Francisco Opera loses money at every sold-out performance. Sane business practices simply don't suffice. Composer Richard Wagner's patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was the ideal operatic angel - very rich and certifiably insane. Mel Brooks' shyster producer Max Bialystock need not have mounted Springtime for Hitler to score a surefire loss. Aida would have done just fine. View quote
Dana Gioia
A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator. View quote
Steven Berkoff
I seem to write an opera about every 20 years if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970. View quote
Virgil Thomson
My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. Yes, it's got hard stuff in it, but so does 'Les Miserables' and 'Phantom of the Opera.' View quote
Marsha Norman
I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again. View quote
Garth Greenwell
My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph. View quote
Francis Ford Coppola
You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation. View quote
Irvin S. Cobb
I've spent a lot of time in London over the last few years and I liked the idea of the Mughal emperor Babur meeting with modern-day disaffected youth and talking to them about their actions. He was a sharp literary critic who could be very sweeping and cruel about poetry if he thought it was bad poetry, and he said some fantastic things that I quoted word for word in the opera. I read the Baburnama – the memoirs of Babur – and quoted lines from it. "Writing badly will make you ill.” What a beautiful thing to say. I read that book and I thought, how dramatic! If he had been a figure in western history it would have been an opera. War, murder, love, tragedy, poetry. It always jumped out at me as something worth doing. (Jeet Thayil)
The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera. View quote
Dave Barry
King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us. View quote
Mason Cooley
I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide. View quote
Mark Twain
For a while, I couldn't decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I'm glad that I chose the latter because I wasn't a very good singer. View quote
Christoph Waltz
Can you hear me when I sing? You're the reason I sing. You're the reason the opera is in me Well, hey now Still got to let you know A house just don't make a home Don't leave me here alone. View quote
Bono
My first offer was when I was 12, and it was for a soap opera. And I turned it down because I knew that I was an unformed actor, and I didn't want to develop bad habits. View quote
Claire Danes
You've paid the money and now you are seated at the opera and the performance has begun. If you sleep and snore through it, who cares? View quote
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
Baseball is a soap opera that plays out day after day, one that a lot of elderly women watch until the characters and the plot becomes a part of their life. She got to enjoy the personal side of the players. They were her kids. The Braves were her family. View quote
Bob Hope
I used to listen again and again to recordings by Maria Callas. She was so musical and so theatrical at the same time. That is rare! I admire the way she cares for the words, so that everything comes from the text. She takes everything from the text and the music to elaborate a character and make her really interesting and impressive. She brings her own nature to the part - what she is, her passion, her fragility, doubts, feelings, violence - everything she is. And she never betrays the text or the music. We're very different, thank goodness, and I am happy with my own voice. But I feel very close to her in terms of discipline - trying to be as disciplined as she. She is an example to follow! Maybe in the past, people were more interested in voice and beautiful sounds. Maria Callas changed that. She arrived, brought a new way of doing opera, opened the way for us. We don't have any excuse now for not doing it! View quote
Maria Callas
She sang as if she had the most beautiful voice in the world - and sang so beautifully that she might as well have had such a voice. Thus she moved opera back a century to the age of Viardot, the acting singer. (Maria Callas)
I really thought I was great when I did a quite serious soap opera for the BBC. I played a nice girl from St. John's Wood. 'Mummy, I think I'm pregnant. I don't know who's done it.' Then I would fall down a hill or something. 'EEEEE! Oh, no, lost another baby.' It seemed all I ever did was have miscarriages-or make yogurt. View quote
Tracey Ullman
Oleg Cassini is the rarest of rare species: a man who genuinely loves women. And for all his talk it is he that has served them for most of his years. He has devoted his life to making women look and feel beautiful with his classically designed clothes most famously creating 'The Look' for Jacqueline Kennedy when she was First Lady. As the first designer to license in 1951, he has been creating everything from evening dresses to sunglasses in more than 60 countries ever since. His name has always suggested glamour, champagne, polo ponies, a box at the opera, he was married to a movie star, and engaged to Grace Kelly before she became a princess. The son of Russian aristocrats banished to Europe after the revolution...he designs clothes that betray a lifelong ache for lost grandeur, there is about him in every gesture from knocking ash from his cigar to straightening his tie an echo of old world distinction. View quote
Oleg Cassini
[E]arly analytic geometers-Descartes in particular-did not accept that geometry could be based on numbers or algebra. Perhaps the first to take the idea of arithmetizing geometry seriously was Wallis... [(1657) Mathesis universalis. Opera 1, 11-228.] Chs. XXIII and XXV, gave the first arithmetic treatment of Euclid's Books II and V, and he had earlier given purely algebraic treatment of conic sections [(1655) De sectionibus conicus. Opera 1, 291-364.]. He initially derived equations from classical definitions by sections of the cone but then proceeded to derive their properties from the equations, "without the embranglings of the cone," as he put it. View quote
John Wallis
Rocannon's World is superior space opera, good vivid fun, short, briskly told, inventive and literate. View quote
Robert Silverberg