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.
