Top 383 Opera Quotes

‘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.’