Opera Quotations

Burton Cummings joining the Guess Who in January 1966 changed my life forever. It's been a rocky affiliation, no doubt. One journalist once described our relationship as the longest running soap opera in Canadian history. That may be a bit oversimplified.

My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.

Any opera is interesting if the characters are worth seeing.

In preparing my thesis, I have had the pleasure of collecting testimonies from colleagues such as Placido Domingo but also from singing teachers and musicologists. The entire course of study has confirmed what I already thought, that the value and meaning of opera singing, at the beginning of the third millennium, remain intact.

The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.

I was 6, and I was in the opera 'Carmen.' My dad sang opera and got me into the children's chorus. I was super fat at the time and didn't make eye contact with anyone. I knew I loved acting ever since.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

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

Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.

Even in today's opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic.

I always believed 'The Fly' to be a classic opera story. It's a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice.

Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while.

Tiles, the best furniture, fabrics, bath fixtures, bronze - just leaf through any design magazine and you immediately understand they're all 'Made in Italy.' We have the premier opera house in the world, La Scala, and behind the Nobel given to CERN is the research of many Italians.

Working on a soap opera is such good training for the novice actor. No rehearsal, 120 pages of dialogue per week, and one take to get the scene right. No room for error.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.

I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.

What is the source of power of musicians who are financially browbeaten, most of whom work for minimum wage or less? Musicians who cannot even afford to buy tickets to operas or concerts in which they themselves perform?

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

I had this exceptional classical music voice. If I'd followed a true path for my talent, I would have ended up being an opera singer.

Later, I even appeared in a Rock Opera with Richard Gere.

I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.

Rock pools, so-named because they have been hammered out of rocks at the ocean's edge, are one of Sydney's defining characteristics, along with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, though not as well known.

Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me.

People may have thought that we changed a lot. I don't think we came in with that intention. Certain things I can't stomach. But I tried to be as collegial as possible. When you sign that contract, you're tied to that opera house to try your best. But every different team will play with a different intensity.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

The first rule in opera is the first rule in life: see to everything yourself

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

To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home.

A lot of performers don't want to leave the circuit, the European opera house circuit, partly because most singers don't sing many concerts, or at least not while they are in their prime.

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

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.

My grandma was actually a pretty well-known opera singer in Cuba, and then my mom was a ballerina. Two of my three sisters are dancers, so we grew up in the arts.

I did grow up in France, and even though I didn't go to the school or dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, I absorbed similar ideas in my training. I understand the scale of a big company. I danced for one for almost 20 years.

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 still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.

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've just written a very gritty, non-magical take on the King Arthur legend, 'Here Lies Arthur,' and I'm currently toying with some other historical ideas, as well as working with the illustrator David Wyatt on some sequels to my Victorian space opera 'Larklight.'

'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.

Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

The fact that I could secure an opera engagement made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, if I would really labor for such an end. When I became thoroughly convinced of this, I was transformed from an amateur into a professional in a single day.

All My Children' taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera!

They're getting me involved in intrigue again, and I think it follows a classic formula in a soap opera.

I'd love to come to Australia. I'd love to walk about the Sydney Opera House.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That's the price she has to pay.

But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.

I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings.

The soap opera was so long ago - the thing about soap operas, and there's something to be said for doing it, but you do a script a day. I don't want to say it's a training ground; it really isn't, but what it does teach you is discipline.

Whether you're an opera singer, a legislator or customer service operator, there is a way that we can find common ground with our audience - be they young or old, Democrats or Republicans, rich or poor, religious or secular.

Opera singers, we're not muscle men; you have to be careful about your work.

I'd hate this to get out but I really like opera.

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

Misty Copeland is making history. During American Ballet Theatre's current season at the Metropolitan Opera House, Copeland will alight on that storied Lincoln Center stage, making her New York debut as the Swan Queen in the iconic masterpiece Swan Lake - a crowning achievement for any dancer, regardless of the color of her skin.

Space opera has always given authors a way to include a vast array of ideas and concepts. The opportunities it provides are limitless. Long may it reign.

I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.

The music of the most popular operas is so highly esteemed, it can stand endless revivals.

My sister is an opera singer. I grew up going to her recitals. This whole time, I'm like, 'She's the singer. I'm just strumming along and yelling.'

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

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like

Professionally, I did a couple of operas when I was in school, when I was 18.

Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.

'Macbeth' is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie - such as some of the special effects and bits of film - to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.

When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being - its beyond belief.

Really, the impetus driving me is I've always sung, but I like to act, I like drama, I like text, which is why opera is something I've come late to, I'd say.

I vowed I would never do a commercial, or a soap opera - both of which I did as soon as I left the Acting Company and was starving.

Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime.

Opera is for a lifetime, not just a minute.

I had a year at 3 when I wanted to be a conductor in the opera.

Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?

I don't find much influence in opera. It was such a different part of me.

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 had classical training but I don't consider myself an opera singer though.

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

The jewellery I wear on stage in the opera house is not real, but the bling-bling I wear in concerts? Those are real!

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

Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!

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.

My mom was an opera singer, and she gave up her career to raise a family. But she also taught my sisters how to sing.

For me, few things are more compelling than watching a great opera.

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

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.

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.

You would be amazed at the pompadour that I was rocking in the first job I had on the soap opera called 'Loving,' my first contract job.

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

My mom was on a soap opera for 40 years, so I know about love and romance.

The word 'theatrical' makes me cringe, because it suggests a performance is staged, put on, rehearsed. And while all this is true for an opera, I believe the act of singing and performing should always be honest, raw, guttural.

I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.

The nice thing about doing a pop opera - in the way that doing, say, 'Miss Saigon' or 'Les Miz' would be - is that, because the convention is set from the beginning that this is an opera and everything is sung, there is never that feeling of 'Why is this person bursting out into song?' because the whole thing is sung.

In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire.

I've had an extraordinary life as a dancer. You tour the world, you see all the great capitals of the world, the beautiful old opera houses all over Europe - you go everywhere. As a teenager, I would always say, 'I can't believe this is happening to little me,' because it was always a dream to dance.

My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.

People perceive opera and classical as elitist - I disagree. I've always tried to mix the two, make it more accessible.