Opera Quotes - page 5
At a very early stage I realised that it's a real problem to perform electronic music on stage because electronic instruments are not particularly convincing on a visual point of view: somebody behind his computer, it's not particularly visual. So I was inspired by the opera. And what was the opera in the 19th century? It was the idea for a musician to join and to work, to collaborate with a stage director, with carpenters, painters, people doing decors, graphic artists to have a visual prolongation, a visual correspondence to their work. That's what I tried to do with the tools of my generation: electronics and video and lights and all that.
Jean-Michel Jarre
With Vytautas Juozapaitis as a perfectly evil Don Giovanni, the Teatro Lirico d'Europa seduced an audience of about 850 at the Garde Arts Center Monday night. Juozapaitis, a singer with the Lithuanian National Opera, stood out as the despicable title character of this most famous of Mozart operas. He took over the stage with both his supple and strong voice as well as a stage presence that seemed so natural it was hard to look at him without thinking he was Don Giovanni.
Vytautas Juozapaitis
I am convinced that the decisive factor in dramatic effect will be a smaller orchestra, which does not drown out the human voice as does a large orchestra...The orchestra of the opera of the future is the chamber orchestra which, by painting in the background of the action on the stage with crystalline clearness, can alone realise precisely the intention of the composer with regard to the vocal parts. It is after all an important desideratum that the audience should not only hear the sounds but should also be able to follow the words closely.
Richard Strauss
Producers of opera nowadays usually make the mistake of translating each particular orchestral phrase into terms of a movement on the stage. In this matter one should proceed with a maximum of caution and good taste. There is no objection to bringing life to into the production by changes of position and new nuances of acting during repetitive passages of music, especially in arias. Preludes of one or two bars frequently, and especially in Mozart, clearly express some gesture on stage. But each trill on the flute does not represent a wink on the prima donna, nor every delayed chord on the strings a step or gesture. Whole passages, especially in the finales, are pure concert music and are best left undisturbed by "play acting.”.
Richard Strauss
He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains...but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return.
José Rizal
We went to the Opera to hear music of the vanguard, Maximilian by Darius Milhaud. We clutched our chair. But we were hurled out of it by such a hurricane of wrong notes that we found ourselves, half dead, on the stairway, without knowing how we could fall down quite so far. The composer knows the grammar, the spelling and the language; but he can speak only Esperanto and Volapuk. It is a work of a Communist traveling salesman.
Darius Milhaud
Nobody can predict the future, but there is nobody in my generation who wants to be on the board of a symphony orchestra or an opera company and raise the kind of money that's needed. I think that the energy that in the 19th century went into opera is, in the 20th century, going into films. Films have that same over-the-top, overwhelming, high impact--all of the senses knocked out--and vast popular following, with stars who are larger than life. Well, that's what opera did in the 19th century.
Peter Sellars
