“ I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anarchronism, almost the equivalent of smoking. ”
- Frank Lloyd Wright- Copy
- 3.8K
“ Critics complained it wasn't opera, it wasn't a musical. You give someone something delicious to eat and they complain because they have no name for it. ”
- Rouben Mamoulian- Copy
- 1.7K
“ The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one. ”
- Jean de la Bruyere- Copy
- 97
“ Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. ”
- Lord Clark Kenneth- Copy
- 73
“ No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ”
- W. H. Auden- Copy
- 3.2K
“ I never was an opera fan — about twenty-five musically supreme masterpieces in this curious medium apart. ”
- Hans Keller- Copy
- 1.2K
“ Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it. ”
- Hannah More- Copy
- 3.2K
“ Opera once was an important social instrument — especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness… ”
- Luciano Berio- Copy
- 914
“ I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager. ”
- Edgar Allan Poe- Copy
- 3.3K
“ If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e… ”
- W. H. Auden- Copy
- 1.6K
“ I love Italian opera — it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate. ”
- D. H. Lawrence- Copy
- 861
“ No opera of Mozart's has stimulated biographers' wishful thinking in such rich measure as Die Zauberflete. It is considered his swan song, a concluding apotheosis, a return to divine simplicity. ”
- Wolfgang Hildesheimer- Copy
- 200
“ The ballet people are champagne drinkers. They are a younger, more exciting crowd than the opera people. ”
- Walter Nurena- Copy
- 686
“ I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand. ”
- Edward Victor Appleton- Copy
- 1.8K
“ We became spear carriers in a great televised opera. We were props in a show. I always felt we should have joined Actors Equity. ”
- Peter Lisagor- Copy
- 3K
“ The catalogue of miseries seems to cry out for commercial spots and a station break: the stuff of noonday soap opera. ”
- Stefan Kanfer- Copy
- 52
“ I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts. ”
- Franco Zeffirelli- Copy
- 3K
“ My passion for opera-the eternal truth of drama through music-has grown, while my interest in performance has diminished. Which is perhaps as good a reason as any other to go quietly. ”
- Lord Harewood- Copy
- 2.3K
“ Opera is an 18th- and 19th-century art that must find a 20th-century audience. ”
- Goeran Gentele- Copy
- 524
“ There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva. ”
- Josh Groban- Copy
- 3K
“ Many people never treated this as an opera, but as a musical, a kind of musical ghetto. ”
- Simon Estes- Copy
- 2.5K
“ I have always believed that God never gives a cross to bear larger than we can carry. No matter what, he wants us to be happy, not sad. Birds sing after a storm. Why shouldn't we? ”
- Rose F. Kennedy- Copy
- 2.8K
“ I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970. ”
- Virgil Thomson- Copy
- 1.5K
“ If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera. ”
- Sarah Caldwell- Copy
- 183
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