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.
