I like your opera – I think I will set it to music

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

(Referring to the piano’s natural shape) Isn’t it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them?

You couldn’t tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation.

I approached opera from the theater side, … I used to rail against the clichs of the form, all those sopranos in nightgowns dying in Act 2. So what do I have in my first...

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

I’m not glamorous, I don’t have a look, I don’t know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I’m too old.

In 1857, Bizet departed for Rome and spent three years there. He studied the landscape, the culture, Italian literature and art. Musically he studied the scores of the great masters. At the end of the...

All three of us had a vision for an exceptional opera program.

From the late Classical period and more so in Romantic and Modern opera, the weight settled into the orchestra, with the voices as a free obbligato above it, … That just drives me crazy. I...

The soap opera will continue. I wouldn’t take them off stage altogether as some people are doing.

I thought if I could get television interested in opera, it would make a kind of new thing that would allow composers to build a whole new repertoire.

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

I couldn’t ask for a more wonderful opera to end my tenure.

When I finally found that notion of Jo, I found the structure of the opera,

Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

I’ve never been to the opera; I’ve only seen opera on DVD.

Lots of opera singers are just boring.

I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.

I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years…but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the...

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. “You have to let me in,” he says. “I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?”...

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

Phantom of the Opera

Ah! Pauvre ami, comme il m’aimait!

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

None of us can choose where we shall love…

I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs from ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’

I don’t like reality shows and have never watched them, but I’m addicted to ‘Real Housewives’ because it’s authentic old-time soap opera reborn!

As a teenager I studied opera, believe it or not. But I just couldn’t catch on to it.

For the love of God, unless you’re prepping for Rigoletto at the Met, go easy on the eyeliner.

Although opera in Scotland has its unique problems, it also presents unique possibilities. If you can come up with solutions, good and well.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation. Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music of the night.

I had a year at 3 when I wanted to be a conductor in the opera.

Most people are here because they don’t want to live in a big city. They don’t care about bistros or the opera. They care about the mountains . . . and letting their kids play...

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.

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

A supreme social challenge.

There’s clearly an assumption that the Opera House principally presents opera. [Despite that] I can’t imagine an arts centre where coming to the venue is as much a part of the event as coming to...

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...

It’s in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I’m clearly dramatic.

Theatres are curious places, magician’s trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and...

We are in the process of launching a major virtual opera house tour.

The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera.

The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing ‘Tosca’.

That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could...

… My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never… let me kiss her… She used to run away… and throw me my mask!… Nor any other woman… ever, ever!… Ah, you can understand, my...