Opera Quotes
Most popular opera quotes
Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
People are wrong when they say that opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what is wrong with it.
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
The opera ain't over until the fat lady sings.
Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like the bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.
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.
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title; expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it's a language I don't understand.
Opera cuts to the chase—as death does . . . [it is] an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
Opera, n. A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants have no speech but song, not motions but gestures, and no postures but attitudes.
Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration—a blessed trinity worthy of public support.
Opera is everything rolled into one—music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down.
If you put together all the ingredients that naturally attract children—sex, violence, revenge, spectacle, and vigorous noise—what you have is grand opera.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible a plea as baseball in Italian.
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it, and that a very severe one.
In opera the text must be the obedient daughter of the music.
As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.
Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice.
Opera is just a country and western song in a foreign language.
As for operas, they are essentially too absurd and extravagant to mention; I look upon them as a magic scene, contrived to please the eyes and the ears at the expense of the understanding.
I have never encountered anything more false and foolish than the effort to get truth into opera. In opera everything is based upon the not-true.
I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.
Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.
