Opera Quotes

"The foyer at Covent Garden looks like Harrods food hall has offered up its dead."
-Jonathan Miller

"Opera is an 18th- and 19th-century art that must find a 20th-century audience."
-Goeran Gentele

"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings."
-Robert Burns

"An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house."
-Maria Callas

"The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge."
-Cleveland Amory

"No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."
-W. H. Auden

"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian."
-H. L. Mencken

"I love pure music, but you get a more complete package with opera. It's theater, it's music, it's drama, it's scenic design."
-Frank Mcclain

"The opera isn't over till the fat lady sings."
-Dan Cook

"I keep to a minimum dialect, in-jokes about football (soccer) teams and soap opera characters, so as not to lose North American readers."
-Peter Robinson

"Gaming devices are growing more advanced and a great Web experience is becoming a product differentiator for gaming manufacturers. Opera is excited to work with Nintendo to deliver a unique dual screen, full Internet experience on Nintendo DS."
-Scott Hedrick

"Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform."
-Giuseppe Verdi

"We are in the process of launching a major virtual opera house tour."
-Naomi Grabel

"She's very authentic. She's involved in opera and she sees it for what it is, looking at all aspects. Like every art form, there is the pain and the joy and, of course, the peculiarities specific to that art form."
-Kathy Hotchner

"In opera, as with any performing art, to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course, but you must also be famous. The two are different things."
-Luciano Pavarotti

"It is important to give students a sense of the demand of this music, ... Operetta is more challenging than opera."
-Robert Larsen

"Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera."
-James Stephens

"The person who really knows opera is going to enjoy it. And for people new to opera, this is a good first step. They will like this."
-Kathy Hotchner

"I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand."
-Sir Edward Appleton

"In opera, there is always too much singing."
-Claude Debussy

"For a lot of people, price and the length of performances are obstacles to coming into an opera house. Also there is a sense of elitism that keeps people from coming into the doors."
-Paul Kellogg

"Every afternoon I listened to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and when I was four, I told my mother and father that it was my destiny to sing there, that I was going to sing at the Metropolitan Opera of New York City."
-Dixie Carter

"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."
-Bryn Terfel

"If you're expecting some kind of advantage because of the soap opera that was going on all offseason and through training camp and they won't be focused, that's not going to be the case. They get up for games like this."
-Ike Reese

"Baseball plays out like an opera."
-Paul Dickson

"Placido said I should try different things, ... So we came up with the idea of introducing the character of Offenbach into the opera to explain things and move the action along. They told me I couldn't change the music, but I could add my own interpretation to the book."
-Garry Marshall

"The opera singer enjoys his classical music career but looks forward to the concerts with his younger singing partner, Michael Messer, with equal anticipation."
-John Mccullers

"I have a commitment to developing young singers and exposing opera to a larger public."
-Anthony Waters