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I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.
Author:
Franco Zeffirelli
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They're getting me involved in intrigue again, and I think it follows a classic formula in a soap opera.
Author:
Michael Zaslow
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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.
Author:
Israel Zangwill
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
Author:
William Yeats
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I ride horseback - arthritic knees permitting - or listen to opera. Sometimes I cook. I used to do needlework, but it's hard on my hands now, so I only do it occasionally, but I like it. And, of course, I read.
Author:
Chelsea Yarbro
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I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things.
Author:
Tom Wopat
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Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.
Author:
Wim Wenders
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I enjoy listening to opera at home, occasionally, but I would much rather see it than just listen to it.
Author:
Sam Waterston
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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.
Author:
Mordechai Vanunu
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I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me.
Author:
Charles Townshend
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People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.
Author:
Bryn Terfel
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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.
Author:
Bryn Terfel
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I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself.
Author:
Julie Taymor
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Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.
Author:
James Stephens
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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.
Author:
Scott Stapp
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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.
Author:
Jo Stafford
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Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.
Author:
John Sousa
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Even in today's opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic.
Author:
Bobby Short
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Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
Author:
Peter Shaffer
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That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.
Author:
Gunther Schuller
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I don't know why a computer game can't be an art form just as a puppet show or an opera is. I'm still interested in computer games as something I would like to work on someday.
Author:
Fred Saberhagen
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One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.
Author:
Gioachino Rossini
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Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Author:
Terry Prachett
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I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like.
Author:
Parker Posey
-
Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.
Author:
Luciano Pavarotti
-
I want to reach as many people as possible with the message of music, of wonderful opera.
Author:
Luciano Pavarotti
-
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.
Author:
Luciano Pavarotti
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It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.
Author:
Luciano Pavarotti
-
Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.
Author:
Luciano Pavarotti
-
Opera is one of the most important art forms. It should be listened to and appreciated by everyone.
Author:
Luciano Pavarotti
-
I really wanted to be an opera soprano.
Author:
Maureen O'Hara
-
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
Author:
David Ogilvy
-
I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings.
Author:
Kate O'Brien
-
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.
Author:
Trevor Nunn
-
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
Author:
Graeme Murphy
-
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.
Author:
Hannah More
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I don't limit my taste. There's some jazz that I like and there's some opera. I've been listening to what was essentially country music, but it crossed over to rock.
Author:
Rick Moranis
-
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
Author:
Moliere
-
We're a very expensive group; we break a lot of rules. It's unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear .
Author:
Freddie Mercury
-
Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.
Author:
Gian Menotti
-
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
Author:
H. Mencken
-
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Author:
H. Mencken
-
This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.
Author:
John Mellencamp
-
The first rule in opera is the first rule in life: see to everything yourself.
Author:
Nellie Melba
-
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
Author:
Bobby McFerrin
-
It's very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.
Author:
Johnny Mathis
-
Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.
Author:
Neville Marriner
-
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
Author:
Marcel Marceau
-
I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera.
Author:
Dorothy Malone
-
An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.
Author:
Gustav Mahler
-
Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.
Author:
Chris Lowe
-
So, I lived at the Beijing Opera, I ate there, I learned a craft. And the money we made went into the company.
Author:
John Lone
-
I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth.
Author:
Ray Liotta
-
In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play.
Author:
Jerome Lawrence
-
My favorite type of music to sing would be between R and B and opera.
Author:
Stefano Langone
-
It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.
Author:
Diane Kruger
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To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama.
Author:
Junichiro Koizumi
-
The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.
Author:
Maria Jeritza
-
I don't think an opera house is ever a place that can make you entirely happy.
Author:
Bernard Haitink
-
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.
Author:
Gordon Getty
-
Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?
Author:
Lesley Garrett
-
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
Author:
Lesley Garrett
-
To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home.
Author:
Lesley Garrett
-
As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.
Author:
Lesley Garrett
-
I performed in Sydney some years ago for the Sydney Festival and I am just so pleased to be returning to the wonderful Sydney Opera House and also performing in Melbourne for the first time.
Author:
Lesley Garrett
-
I would just like to say that opera is no longer about fat people in breastplates shattering wine glasses.
Author:
Lesley Garrett
-
If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.
Author:
Judy Garland
-
The cynical part of the answer is that I expect to see a good deal more space opera, set far enough in the future as to be disconnected from contemporary issues.
Author:
John Ford
-
It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
-
It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
-
Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
-
The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
-
Opera is given so little attention in the national press.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
-
I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.
Author:
John Eaton
-
But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.
Author:
John Eaton
-
Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.
Author:
John Eaton
-
When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.
Author:
Leslie Easterbrook
-
Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.
Author:
Placido Domingo
-
But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.
Author:
Placido Domingo
-
And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.
Author:
Dietrich Dieskau
-
You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.
Author:
Dietrich Dieskau
-
A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.
Author:
William Devane
-
In opera, there is always too much singing.
Author:
Claude Debussy
-
Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night.
Author:
Richard Davis
-
I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.
Author:
Anthony Davis
-
A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
Author:
Robertson Davies
-
'Gone With The Wind' is one of the all-time greats. Read Margaret Mitchell's book and watch the film again; it's a soap opera in all its glory. It is superb and memorable.
Author:
Timothy Dalton
-
Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.
Author:
Tony Curtis
-
People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.
Author:
Noel Coward
-
If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.
Author:
Doug Coupland
-
Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
Author:
Mason Cooley
-
I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.
Author:
Joan Collins
-
I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.
Author:
Melinda Clarke
-
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
Author:
Kenneth Clark
-
I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.
Author:
Cab Calloway
-
It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.
Author:
Cab Calloway
-
What opera isn't violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can't.
Author:
Cab Calloway
-
If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.
Author:
Sarah Caldwell
-
As the director of an opera, it is my responsibility to unify the style of the particular performance, but one can certainly approach the piece from different points of view. That's what makes it interesting and keeps it alive.
Author:
Sarah Caldwell
-
Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.
Author:
Sarah Caldwell
-
If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera.
Author:
Sarah Caldwell
-
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
Author:
Robert Burns
-
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.
Author:
Jeremy Bulloch
-
Many years ago I was in another soap opera called The Newcomers which was on twice a week for three years. I really don't think I could do another stint like that again.
Author:
Jeremy Bulloch
-
At the moment I'm enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I'm also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.
Author:
Deborah Bull
-
Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.
Author:
Lindsey Buckingham
-
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
Author:
Jean Bruyere
-
Later, I even appeared in a Rock Opera with Richard Gere.
Author:
Barry Bostwick
-
When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.
Author:
Victor Borge
-
Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while.
Author:
William Bolcom
-
Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.
Author:
Andrea Bocelli
-
I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.
Author:
Ruben Blades
-
The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
Author:
Harrison Birtwistle
-
The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
Author:
Harrison Birtwistle
-
The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.
Author:
Rudolf Bing
-
A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator.
Author:
Steven Berkoff
-
It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.
Author:
Bruce Beresford
-
I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.
Author:
Cecilia Bartoli
-
We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.
Author:
Cecilia Bartoli
-
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
Author:
W. Auden
-
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
Author:
W. Auden
-
I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.
Author:
Robert Ashley
-
The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.
Author:
Dario Argento
-
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
Author:
Edward Appleton
-
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.
Author:
Cleveland Amory
