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.
