Words matter. These are the best Opera Quotes from famous people such as Michael Mayer, Zubin Mehta, Mark Waid, Rosamund Pike, Vladimir Horowitz, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
‘Rigoletto’ has long been one of my favorite operas, and it was on my short list way back when I first talked to Peter Gelb. I started thinking about what I could bring to this masterpiece, which has been seen all over the world for so many years.
I love to conduct opera.
When you’re a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you’ve never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.
I saw a lot of operas from backstage and watched a lot of rehearsals – my parents were singers.
I loved singing. But can you imagine my voice in an opera house?
Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.
I perform in opera houses in the centres of big cities. We live in 20 acres of forest. You need that space to recover and renew.
I don’t necessarily make much art myself, but after I wrote ‘Warped Passages,’ I was fortunate to get involved a little in the art world. I got invited to write a libretto for what we called a projective opera, and I also got invited to curate an art exhibit.
I’ve always wanted to be on a soap opera.
I’d love to come to Australia. I’d love to walk about the Sydney Opera House.
I was 11 and watching soap operas with my mom, and I thought it would be cool to be an actor. I thought soap operas was going to be the dream at the time – it’s obviously now not the dream, but I think soap operas are really cool. Maybe I’ll go back to that.
I seek out hard things. I tried to imitate other singers. It was a self-discovery for me to move from imitating others to me growing to sing in my own voice. The opera was difficult and it felt like a personal conquest.
‘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.
When you come to my show, I want it to feel like opera, like a theatre.
I was attracted to opera when I was 15 or 16. A very rich man in England bankrupted himself to put on a lot of opera during the war, but he converted a lot of people, myself included, in the process.
I’ve always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.
Even in today’s opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic.
Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple.
I love grand opera. I can’t hear ‘La Boheme’ without dissolving.
I conclude that the Wagnerian operas which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services.
When we go to the opera, we put the clothes on we know we must wear for there.
More and more, we’re used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.
I started performing with the Boston Children’s Opera when I was 5, and I stayed working with that group until I was about 12 or 13, so that was a huge part of my life. It was, weirdly, an extremely professional environment geared towards kids.
In my iPod, there are many operas, from A to Z. I have ‘Aida’ and ‘Boheme’ and ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Cavalleria’. My passion is for opera, but when I’m in the car, I listen to everything.
One of our books has been made into a musical, ‘The Great American Mousical,’ which I directed at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. And another, ‘Simeon’s Gift,’ has been adapted for a symphony orchestra and five performers. I’m also a very proud member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Opera singers, we’re not muscle men; you have to be careful about your work.
My parents were both opera singers, and they also were both heavily into religious and church music.
I’m an opera lover.
An opera singer is like an athlete before a match. An athlete cannot overdo anything. In order to perform at the highest possible level, you need to refrain from activities so as to be able to express this power.
What isn’t for everybody shouldn’t be for anybody: the world’s opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
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.
The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
I’d better be on the road, or I’ll be going nuts. I’m not the kind of guy who sits around with a pipe and slippers watching soap operas.
Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.
As a piano player, if 10 is concert level, I’d put myself at a 5 or a 6, but in a completely different genre than classical or opera. In terms of classical and opera, playing accompaniment, I’d say I was a 3.
My father was an opera singer who constantly tried to persuade me not to enter into an artistic career.
When I was general director of City Opera, we were pioneers in the practice of projecting supertitles so that American audiences finally could know what all the singing was about.
The problems I had with the Paris Opera Ballet are a thing of the past.
I keep getting many offers for TV soap operas, and strangely a lot of them are mythological. None seem to be interesting enough or have the budgets that would convince me to accept them.
I have no desire to become a crossover artiste, singing with microphones. I believe in opera; that it is something that young people would love if they had a chance to hear it.
I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings.
For better or worse, I’ve always been curious musically. Whether it’s opera or Judy Garland or pop, I’ve deliberately sought those things out. I’ve never wanted to do the same things over and over. Some think I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, and others consider me a dilettante.
I think one of the great strengths of ‘The Flash’ is just how close everyone is on the show. They tend not to have these raging conflicts, like what we keep giving everybody on ‘Arrow.’ That show is more of a soap opera, and I don’t say that derogatorily.
In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s called ‘Scalia/Ginsburg.’ The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.
People who have passion for horror stories, their appreciation/my appreciation is looking at it as opera.
It is different in Russia. Here there is a television channel devoted to opera and dance.
Who needs soap operas now when we have social media timelines? Now you can get a similar drama fix by just paying attention to your friends and family members’ Facebook pages.
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title – expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.
I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It’s a bit obsessive. That’s why I can’t do it all the time.
Soap operas were my first professional experiences, and I always knew I was eager to explore a lot more work in a lot more arenas.
In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a ‘grand passion’ than of a grand opera.
If you love epic space opera, you shouldn’t miss ‘Interstellar’.
As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.
I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.
An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.
I had a schoolmaster who was a supernumerary at Glyndebourne Opera, and through ,I got a job as a walk-on in Peter Hall’s production of ‘Don Giovanni’ there in 1975 or 1976.
I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao… Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.
Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera – even though they’re obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds.
I never step upon a stage without asking myself whether I will succeed in finishing the opera. The fact is that a conscientious singer is never sure of himself or of anything. He is ever in the hands of Destiny.
Art is all about the experience. I could say I don’t really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, ‘Blimey, look at that.’
I know the world of opera so intimately: historical sweep, sharply defined characters, not too rational an explanation of what’s going on. It’s a feast.
The favorite thing I like to do is nothing. I’m such an expert at doing nothing. I have a boat. I make training films for the Coast Guard. I listen to a great deal of opera.
If I felt that one of my operas did not come off I would certainly say so.
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 was like, ‘Welcome to the world of soap operas! Clothes off and in the bed!’ I thought that’s how it was going to become every day Everything just moved so fast so I really wasn’t seasoned to that.
You can make a debut in 25 operas. But to make a debut at the Metropolitan Opera is huge.
People love a good scandal. We love a good freakin’ scandal and a good soap opera.
I got my first professional job at Harvard, at the Loeb Drama Center, and I remember sitting on campus one day under a tree – I was doing ‘Threepenny Opera.’ I was reading a book, and the light caught me, and I thought, ‘I want to be in the movies.’
My worry is that opera will become an historic art form as opposed to a living, breathing thing.
It’s necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you’re dealing with more than one or two characters, it’s very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
For me, you say the words ‘concept record,’ and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.
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.
The theatre only knows what it’s doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years’ time? A completely different attitude.
It’s quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.
Lots of opera singers are just boring.
Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it’s changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water’s edge.
It was my contention that opera can not only pay for itself if it is well given, but it can also command a much wider audience if given like a play with lots of rehearsals and wonderful singers that fit the role.
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.
I have always been pretty flexible. I could always jump and do all kinds of dangerous movements. In opera, I like to do it because it’s fun, as long as it fits the role.
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.
At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.
I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn’t interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.
Take opera for example – to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.
It’s important that the art forms communicate, whether it’s the dance program with the jazz program or the classical program with the opera program, that these conversations becomes fluid.
My greatest influence came from my parents’ love of classical music. We listened to a lot of arias and operas growing up.
My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
If you think that there are actually covers that we haven’t done on ‘Glee’ that I could then put on an album… We’ve done everything! Pretty soon we’re just going to have to start doing opera and stuff on the show.
Every job you have, there are days that are more difficult than others. I worked on a daytime soap opera, where the volume at which you’re producing this medium is incredible.
Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.
To sing opera, one needs two things: the voice and the passion – and above all, the passion.
For me, a diva is like the great opera singer, the great film star – out of reach, in their own world, with a real gift for invention: attention-demanding performance artists with a flamboyant, compelling sense of their own importance so special and inimitable it verges on the alien.
‘Friends’ played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.
The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I’m charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see ‘Die Fledermaus’, for instance. I’ve never done any of this, by the way. I’ve never written about one opera since I’ve had this job.
I’ll write three operas – one for Verdi, one for Puccini, and one for Bellini.
Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
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.
Writing an opera and premiering in England, you could say I was going right into the eye of the storm and I came out successfully. A little tattered and bruised, but so what, I made it.
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 think ‘Empire’ is entertaining. It’s a soap opera. Does it touch on stereotypes? Sure, it does… I don’t know if that’s necessarily good or bad.
I was studying music in college. I was singing, I was doing operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and then I was offered a job as the music director of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, in Bigfork, Montana.
I love soap operas – the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives – Jessica Fletcher, ‘Columbo,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘L.A. Law.’ Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program – a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
Misery loves company. This is a Hollywood soap opera, and I’m not going to be a star in another Bryant soap opera.
There’s no better training than working on a soap opera because of the amount of hours, the amount of pages you do a day are unbelievable. It’s the best training I had in terms of discipline.
My first job was when I was eight. I did this opera, which was a Robert Wilson/Philip Glass opera, called ‘White Raven.’ That was a very confusing and trippy creation tale, and I was a kid who brought up the sun and rotated the earth. It was very empowering.
I’d always had this hankering to try some opera.
Crazy as it sounds, I’m a believer in destiny and serendipity, and I have had cosmic experiences all my life. Something told me I was meant for greater stuff. And look, I’ve had a baby! And I’ve written an opera!
Americans, they have an incredible operatic tradition: the Metropolitan Opera House is – if not the most prestigious – one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world for over 100 years.
Growing up, my dad took me to the opera.
I’ve always said, I prefer the opera to the soap – those extreme characters and circumstances.
It’s much easier for me to be silly than it is to be serious on soap opera.
I was on a Swedish soap opera when I was 10.
The voice muscle doesn’t last forever. I have a lot of friends who are classical and opera singers. My friend Beverly Sills stopped singing in her 50s, so I’m careful with mine. But I’ll keep going as long as it lets me.
And whether or not you’re interested in opera or classical music or folk music or the theatre, I think that for a nation’s health and well-being it’s very important that the arts scene is supported.
What opera isn’t violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can’t.
I was one of the lucky people who found what I loved at a really young age. When I was 16, I got my first job in a Portuguese soap opera, and I realized how much I really loved it.
I love opera so much. I would never go back to doing it, but I love to listen – I’m grateful for it.
For sure, one moment really defined the path that I was to take in the future, and that was when I won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in New York in April of 1995. I had just turned 25 two days before the finals concert, and when I won, I had no idea how my life would change because of it.
When I’ve seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can’t tell you what that phenomenon is.
Opera – above and beyond anything else – is about the music, and it should be about the music.
Opera requires an enormous commitment. You must devote your whole life to producing that extraordinary sound.
Nothing will ever be as big as ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ for me.
I loved to sing and I loved to act, and I didn’t want to continue opera because I wanted to act.
There’s no half-singing in the shower, you’re either a rock star or an opera diva.
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.
I had an amazing French teacher in high school – it was the one class that I enjoyed. And I studied opera for 11 years, so I did a lot of singing in French.
Formal is formal. I can’t wear sneakers all the time. Sometimes, I wear other shoes. It’s not my challenge designing formal – it’s so boring – but it’s still important. I sell a lot of classic black sneakers made from every material because everyone loves black, and if you mix and match material, you get an opera.
‘Phantom of the Opera’ started in my little 100-seater converted church in Britain with a stage where we did what we did. But it was the score itself was what made it.
I had a year at 3 when I wanted to be a conductor in the opera.
I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can’t listen to music while I write. It’s too absorbing.
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.
I don’t rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.
The first job where I actually made money was on ‘Guiding Light,’ the soap opera. And I played a maid. My name was Ginger, and I had a Brooklyn accent – a really bad one, if I remember correctly.
Opera is an exclusive art form, so it cannot be that popular. I just do what I love to do.
I never pictured myself as a telenovela galan – never imagined I’d be in a soap opera.
My aunt Marcia Cope-Hart was in ‘Phantom Of the Opera’ in San Francisco for quite a few years when I was growing up, so we would go into the city a lot to see her.
My mother was an opera singer and my father is a clarinet player, composer and conductor.
I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
Knowing constitutional law helps one at the opera. The trial in ‘Billy Budd,’ as example, invokes the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution.
When I am on the opera stage, I am playing someone else. In recitals, I even have the chance to talk to the audience, which is something you don’t get to do in opera.
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.
Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.
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.
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.
Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.
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.
I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall.
You hear about Broadway your whole life, and I learned what it meant to work on Broadway in ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’
People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg.
I remember I had a low point when I was working on a soap opera, ‘General Hospital,’ five years ago. It was my first real job, and it was so overwhelming. You would work five days a week and have to learn sometimes up to 30 pages of new dialogue a night, then have one take to shoot it all, the next day.
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
I feel opera is an expression of artistic excellence. To do it is expensive, as there’s a requirement for an orchestra, good voices, excellent sets, and the fact that productions generally have only short runs. But I believe it’s something we ought to achieve as a nation.
I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.
Madeline Kahn is one of my favourite people in the entire world and one of the funniest. She was a talented Broadway star and also sang opera.
People don’t want to pay 8 or 9 dollars to go see a problem that they have in their life, on screen. They pay to get away from that. That’s why they watch soap operas.
When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being – it’s beyond belief.
My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle’s cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.
The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it’s much, much more diluted.
I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.
I think every singer should be able to jump in for a singer who has been sick, for instance, and learn an opera in two days. I know people who can do it.
Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.
I’ve never been to the opera; I’ve only seen opera on DVD.
At the Paris Opera Ballet, they were always making choices for me.
Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair’s shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist’s luck.
I want to get out of the major opera houses.
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.
WWE is a company that produces fiction. It’s a soap opera that runs 52 weeks a year without reruns.
I am an opera virgin; I’d far prefer to see a musical such as ‘Guys and Dolls.’
Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness.
My dad became a soap opera actor, and I was an extra in a skating rink scene on the soap. I didn’t audition. It was nepotism all the way.
When I do concerts and recitals, the two most common requests are spirituals and opera.
Every movie has the thing it’s about, and then, deep down, it has this thing that it’s really about. ‘Star Wars’ is not really about a space opera, action, and the galactic quest. It’s about self-doubt.
I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don’t get very much approbation for it.
It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.
The Royal Opera House? I once had the immense privilege of appearing there and was awed by the air of refinement of those seemingly ethereal beings who floated about in the highest echelons of musical accomplishment, effortlessly producing virtuoso performances in several different languages.
It’s very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.
It was hard to make a living as an actor in New York if you did not do soap operas or commercials.
One of the first things I created was music for the Paris opera’s ballet troupe. That was the first time that electronic music was played at the opera. I really like the relationship between the music and the choreography.
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.
Growing up as a classical musician, you’re taught a lot about outreach and about how people aren’t being taught music in school. But you don’t have to study music to like it. And a lot of the music that people like – be it jazz or rock or opera – is stuff they haven’t studied.
I’m from a small Irish family of 10, so there always was music in the house. Growing up, my older sisters had things like ‘South Pacific’ and opera on.
If I’m going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.
It’s the perfect environment for prayer. Chanting in Greek… is like a beautiful opera, but way better.
To be able to make a good living in a challenging medium like soap operas is great. The best is that I get to act and am rewarded for it. And the people I work with are great. Funny, intelligent, hard working. They’re all great to be around.
Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
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.
Any time I’ve performed on one of the major stages, whether it be Covent Garden or the Paris Opera or the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky, those are really the top memorable moments for me.
I enjoy listening to opera at home, occasionally, but I would much rather see it than just listen to it.
I can’t distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.
‘Prima Donna’ is my kind of love song to opera but it’s not the full experience.
If I can do concert recitals, adapting the repertoire to my needs, then no problem, that’s good enough. But with operas, unless the right circumstances come up, my career is done.
I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth.
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.
The English National Opera does have some terrific productions, which are accessible, and they’re not too ridiculously expensive.
Premiering a new opera is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, and opening nights of any opera are always pretty stressful.
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.
Then I trained as an opera singer for four years before I started singing professionally as a pop act.
Italians are fantastic people, really. They can work you over in an alley while singing an opera.
‘Amores Perros’ is rock, ’21 Grams’ is jazz, ‘Babel’ is an opera, and ‘Biutiful’ is a requiem.
In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.
I always thought of ‘Lost’ as a psychotic opera. Because there were so many characters, it was important for me to track them with themes.
I think if you study people in the street today, you do sometimes feel that they have taken their behavior and their language from things that they have seen rather than read – from soap operas and movies and so on.
All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.
I know I’m an opera singer, but we’re actors, too.
As a young singer, you have to get experience somehow, to try things out and grow as a singer. They way you do that is by going through the ranks and singing at companies like Opera Birmingham. It’s a perfect place to foster a career.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.
I quit my job in the bank when I was 19. I took a chance. I went to Milan to study opera and singing. My father really supported me economically.
The Calandra Institute, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the library at Lincoln Center, and the Fashion Institute of Technology were helpful and key to piecing together what life must have been like at the turn of the last century.
Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don’t have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
I actually think storyboards are great. I don’t draw well enough to do them myself. I’ve only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in ‘Margaret’: one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.
I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs from ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’
Unfortunately, opera engagements tend to be made five years in advance, and I don’t really agree with that.
If you are going to take me a to a musical, you’d better give me three songs that I’m gonna like. Nobody goes to the opera for the recitative. They go for the aria.
I wrote my own pop songs and sang one of them when I went into a stupid beauty competition when I was 16. That was my public debut, and it made my mother even more determined that I should go into opera!
I never wanted to be an opera singer. I wanted to be an actress, maybe a rock singer.
I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.
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.
If I can transport audiences for the three or four hours they’re at the opera, to make them forget all of their worries, the bills they have to pay and all that, then I’ve done my job. That, for me, is very gratifying.
I had been nominated for an Academy Award for my performance as Sandy Lester, Dustin Hoffman’s neurotic, struggling actress girlfriend, in ‘Tootsie.’ Under Sydney Pollack’s direction, ‘Tootsie’ had been a runaway hit starring Dustin as an unemployed actor who pretends to be a woman in order to land a role in a soap opera.
Ballet costumes are easier that opera because they are designed for movement.
I grew up with singers. My father’s mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can’t remember a time there wasn’t music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters – George Gershwin, Cole Porter – and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.
When I directed the ‘Ring’ cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York recently, there were people texting all through the show. But theatre isn’t a communication device: it’s a communion.
I did ‘Doubt’ as a film, a play and an opera.
I enrolled in an acting workshop and my first acting role was on the TV soap opera ‘Melrose Place.’
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.
That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.
I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I’m interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don’t listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it’s in a certain category, whether it’s country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is.
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.
I don’t like soap operas. But I like to watch movies. My favourite is ‘Annapolis.’
The whole point here, and the seed that JJ Abrams laid in my mind is, is the power of curiosity enough? What happens next? That dramatic construct is what has driven soap operas and serialised novels over the course of history.
I think that baseball games are like soap operas. If you watch five in a row, you know enough to get hooked.
Rock music has always embraced – and even represented – rebellion, rowdiness, and a robust disdain for social decorum. But along with more classical art forms like theater, opera, and the symphony, it’s suffering from the distracted, smartphone-carrying audiences of the digital age.
You went to your first Broadway play or musical at some point, right? Come to opera.
Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.
I have turned down soaps operas. I want to be outside, and I want to have the gun. It is cowboys and Indians to me.
I’m straight and always have been. When our family gets together, we joke about it or throw our hands up in desperation because there is very little we can do. If we make a big fuss about correcting these rumors, it just creates more attention and turns the whole thing into a soap opera.
You can be born with the talent to be an opera star, but you’ve got to work and practice it.
I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.
Soap opera wouldn’t be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.
‘Star Wars’ is a grand soap opera, and ‘Star Trek’ is about technology, they tried to explain the reality of it, as far-fetched as it might be. And that’s why I’ve always liked the science behind the fiction.
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.
I got into cello in the fourth grade, and I played that for years. I adored playing it. I got an opera coach when I was 12 because I really wanted to learn how to sing properly. The only proper way to sing, I thought at that age, was opera.
‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, bigger even than ‘Cats’ which, in itself, I never thought we’d top.
‘iCarly’ gives me the luxury of addressing the fans directly. It was a sort of loving nudge to the fans saying, ‘We’re just a fun little sitcom to make you laugh.’ This isn’t a heavy-duty soap opera.
I have an opera coach who I went to as a teenager, when I was 15 and 16 years old. When I went to college, I forgot about it.
I’d want to play the Sydney Opera House.
I graduated from high school early so I could move to New York to do ‘A Little Night Music’ out of the New York City Opera.
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.
I was not exposed to a lot of culture. The shows we saw in high school, like ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ were thrilling. But my love affair with theater started with seeing a production of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ that my sister was in.
Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.
Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there’s a theatre element, a dramatic element. It’s right up my alley.
Political reporting is too often trivialised, treated as a soap opera based in Westminster, rather than placed in a broader social or economic context.
I don’t know, a lot of people go crazy about ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I don’t like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like ‘The Wire.’ It’s more about the state of things; it’s not about the narrative of a person.
It was the late ’70s when my parents met. My dad was a lighting director for a soap opera, and my mom was a temp at the studio. They moved into a house in The Valley in L.A., to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.
I’d love to have the time to learn to sing opera properly rather than bellowing half-formed fragments of melody in exuberant moments.
At the moment I’m enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I’m also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.
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 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!
My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It’s their fault I’ve become an actress.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
I became a set designer for opera. I’m a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.
In the early 1970s, I took singing lessons with John Hargreaves, a leading singer with English National Opera, when I was home from university.
I originally wanted to be an opera singer. I studied classical voice at the University of Washington but soon realised I didn’t have the instrument or the discipline. The road for opera singers is more difficult than for actors.
I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn’t make no difference what color they were.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
It’s better to be on a soap opera to renew your career and following than to be on any other medium.
Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night.
I live again the days and evenings of my long career. I dream at night of operas and concerts in which I have had my share of success. Now like the old Irish minstrel, I have hung up my harp because my songs are all sung.
Concert-going has become much less the thing to do, while people are still going to opera. This might be a harsh judgment, but it could easily happen that orchestras could slowly atrophy.
I’ve always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.
Since I was eight years old. I didn’t have a TV, so comic books were definitely my television, my soap operas, and all that.
I had the working class ethic. I wanted to make a living and there weren’t many opportunities for an opera singer in Yorkshire, so I went onto the club circuit.
When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I’d constantly be that guy who’d get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.
The Opera House guidelines have from time to time been amended, whether it’s for other sporting events or other causes. The guidelines have always been stretched in the part and the commercialisation of the Opera House has always been there.
Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It’s a general clean-out.
In a totalitarian state like North Korea, a group of neighbors gathering once a week to watch the latest episode of a forbidden soap opera is committing a political act, and forming, with the market traders who deliver them this treasure, a rudimentary civil society.
I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn’t have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn’t listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes.
My stepfather was quite into opera, but he’d play it when he was in a bad mood, so you’d hear this boom through the floor, Wagner, and you’d feel nervous.
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.
To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home.
Opera is full of trappings that make us go away from being human. You can’t let them do that. You can’t walk like you’re in an opera! You have to make it real. You have to just be there.
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.
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.
I like the idea of people coming to opera for the first time and finding it an enjoyable experience. I don’t like the fact that opera is seen as elitist and all black ties and that stuff.
My mother sang jazz and opera – she even performed at the Apollo on Amateur Night.
After I left college, I went to work at the Royal Opera House in London, which became a real catalyst for me because it made me realize that I was interested in cinema and in the way life is thrust at you. So I started making films.
I was playing this role on ‘Ugly Betty,’ the sweetest, nicest guy. He was a fun character to play, but I was in a Latin soap opera – where are you gonna go with a nice guy in a Latin soap opera?
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
The first time I took a plane to dance in front of an audience outside France was when I was in the Paris Opera Ballet School, and we flew to Japan.
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.
Opera is really fun.
Opera became popular in Texas the same way it did in a lot of previously isolated regions of the nation. It started with money. In the case of Texas, it was oil money, and it made a lot of people very rich, very fast.
If I can’t do an opera as well as most people, I won’t do it at all. I don’t want to touch Wagner because I think a lot of people do it a hell of a lot better than I could. I do the operas I think I can do, know something about.
If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.
‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is about love. It’s as simple as that.
I’ve never felt opera was a party I’ve been invited to, and maybe I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it.
Now, all of a sudden, every college and every university has an opera theater. Every little city has its little group.
I’d go over to my grandmother’s house, and she’d be playing opera. They loved opera. Not only did they play it on the radio, but they played it on their piano. Everybody learned how to read music and how to play.
You can’t tell the story of a 13-year-old boy who knows every lyric to ‘Phantom of the Opera’ without also referencing how much teasing he gets at school.
The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they’re doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell.
I don’t like the word rock opera, but I’m trying to write on that level that’s reserved for plays still, or novels.
A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don’t do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.
Gray means being open-minded. I always look at the world that way; I’m able to hear both sides of an argument. I don’t listen to opera, but I don’t think it’s good or bad; it’s just its own thing. I can completely appreciate it.
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
When I was little, I had this old video camera, and I set it up, and I would pretend that I was on comedy shows and soap operas and things like that.
One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.
In the Broadway world, I’ve always wanted to play Valjean in ‘Les Mis’, since I’ve already played Gavroche. I’d also like to play the Phantom of the Opera, but I haven’t really thought about any film characters. You’ve got to have a whole lot of training for the Phantom role, vocally.
I’ve been studying voice for quite a while, especially opera, for at least seven or eight years.
A practical way to travel between the stars is a must-have for space opera, and a sine qua non for our frequently vaunted future as a galactic society.
‘The Stars are Legion’ is part space opera, part thriller, about two warring families battling it out for control over a legion of organic starships.
I listen to all kinds of music myself; it can range from practically anything: Opera, Jazz, to Blues, good Pop, just about anything.
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.
‘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.
Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don’t manage that – but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.
In my teens, I saw a terrible production of ‘Die Walkuere.’ To a person of 15, it was just awful, and it put me off for many years. Eventually I became an opera-goer, if not an opera buff.
In the modern operas that ‘Miss Saigon’ and ‘Les Miz’ are, nobody breaks out into song from conventional book dialogue. Everything is sung from beginning to end, including the recitative.
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.
I was on the soap opera ‘Days of our Lives.’
One of the problems with musicals and opera is you can’t ever hear all the words.
In opera, there is always too much singing.
My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.
I’d really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.
Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.
The idea is not to have one great singer surrounded by a bunch of nit wits. When the others are good, too, that’s when you get something happening in opera.
The cynical part of the answer is that I expect to see a good deal more space opera, set far enough in the future as to be disconnected from contemporary issues.
The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm’s highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.
I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn’t perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.
I grew up with singers. My father’s mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can’t remember a time there wasn’t music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters – George Gershwin, Cole Porter – and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.
Anyone who wants to promote a car or a football tournament turns to opera. There’s a much greater public connection than the image of plush corporate boxes would suggest.
‘The Thing from Another World’ was the first movie that really scared me. But the one that made me want to make movies was ‘The Tales of Hoffman.’ That’s my favorite film of all time. It’s a fantasy film. It’s an opera. I never get tired of it.
I know that my passion is for opera, but sometimes I like also to sing songs, because there are many beautiful melodies.
Both my mother and my grandmother aspired to be opera singers. And they studied it.
In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that’s not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep.
‘Next To Normal’ is rock music. It’s a rock opera. That, definitely, has a place in popular music.
I wish there was more for minorities than sitcoms. I’d like to see a soap opera about blacks. People don’t live in isolation anymore.
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.
The activity of a singer that sings opera is similar to that of an athlete.
In my shows, I always try to incorporate music because it’s the most natural way to set a tone. So if I want to do a show about depression, I use the opera. If I want to do a show about greed, I use spoken word. If I want to do a show about the injustice that’s taking place in the world, I might play Sam Cooke.
There was always dance in opera until people forgot to keep it going.
Opera is given so little attention in the national press.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms – to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.
In the case of ‘The Housewives,’ I call the ‘Housewives’ sociology of the rich. I think it’s just fun to watch. It’s guilt-free gossiping that you can have. It’s like the modern-day soap opera, in my mind.
Every time I go to a new place, more likely than not, I end up seeing an opera there. It’s ended up being a part of travel.
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.
I think what we’ve been able to do with ‘Longmire’ is balance this procedural with a bit of a soap opera, and it’s a character study of this character, Walt Longmire, and the people around him.
I don’t find much influence in opera. It was such a different part of me.
Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have.
My grandad was an opera singer, my uncle a jazz musician; I was a boy soprano in the church choir. But the first performance with Deep Purple was something I’ll never forget. All elements were working brilliantly.
In Peru, there is no theatre that produces an annual opera season, and though there is one orchestra in Lima, it’s always struggling to survive. We shouldn’t have just one orchestra, we should have 15, we should have 50! And you should start to build this from the children.
I love ‘Threepenny Opera’; I was exposed to it as a little kid because my parents, my mom and my dad, had bonded, when they were dating, over ‘Threepenny Opera’ and introduced it to me, a child, who could barely understand it. But I immediately gravitated even from that early age.
My first time on camera was ‘One Life to Live.’ I mourn for actors coming up that the daytime soap opera is becoming extinct. It’s theater onscreen.
That’s the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don’t know if I’d have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.
Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards.
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.
It would be nice to wake up and be able to walk to the bathroom. But even when I was 20 and at the Paris Opera, I had to crawl down the stairs; it is only when I start to work and stretch that my body begins to recover again.
I had opera training for three years, and I have three albums out. I also did a Broadway show. I’m an actor that sings, so it is in my blood. It is in my system.
Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It’s equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
We got to see Sondheim shows, ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ ‘Cats’ and all sorts of stuff. When you’re 10 or 11 years old, it’s just magnificent. The story-telling, the music – it lifts you out of your seat.
Having now been on three different soap operas was more than I could have hoped for. Then going on to doing a movie and being on prime time TV, to my own show on Netflix – I couldn’t have dreamed of what this has snowballed into.
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’d hate this to get out but I really like opera.
Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.
Styx was always a theatrical band. In fact, we played City Center in 1983 with a rock opera, ‘Kilroy Was Here.’
Soap operas are like TV boot camp. You have to be able to self-direct, learn a ton of dialogue in a short amount of time, and deliver a performance in one or two takes.
I’m actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I’ve actually experienced, and I don’t think that’s very common.
I never breathe through the nose, not when I’m singing. In the opera, you don’t have so much time. That’s fine at the beginning of an opera or after somebody else has been doing an aria, and you want to get a good fresh start.
I never dreamed of writing for concert or opera. I always dreamed, if I was a composer, to write music for films.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Dumb luck brought on the move from business to acting. I had moved to New York when I was 23, in the year 2000. On a lark, I went to audition for a soap opera. I thought, ‘Hey, this will be a really fun story to tell my grandkids one day, that I auditioned for a soap!’
The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing ‘Tosca’.
The opera always loses money. That’s as it should be. Opera has no business making money.
You don’t have to make a grand, exaggerated sound to sing opera.
I’m by no means an opera buff.
Opera is for a lifetime, not just a minute.
The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.
My grandmother will watch any episode of a show I’m on, but she watches her soap operas every day. When I was on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful,’ you would have thought I had won an Oscar. She told everybody at church that I was on her favorite soap.
I was a regular on ‘Holby City,’ and I did daytime; that’s how I started off. Off in Hong Kong doing stuntman stuff, then coming back to England doing daytime soap operas.
I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.
