Quotes about opera

A collection of quotes on the topic of opera, likeness, people, music.

Quotes about opera

“I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.”

Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) Russian composer

MS dedication to Boris Godunov, January 21, 1874. http://www.bklynnews.com/BklynRadio/boris%20godunov-1.htm

People, Idea, Problem

“Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.”

Terry Pratchett book Maskerade

Source: Maskerade

People, Imagination

“1. sports 2. opera 3. weapons.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) American artist

Sport

“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.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 1

World, Law, Music, Understanding

“I can say with truth that I have never, even in times of greatest preoccupation with carnal, worldly and egotistic pursuits, seriously doubted that our existence here is related in some mysterious way to a more comprehensive and lasting existence elsewhere; that somehow or other we belong to a larger scene than our earthly life provides, and to a wider reach of time than our earthly allotment of three score years and ten…It has never been possible for me to persuade myself that the universe could have been created, and we, homo sapiens, so-called, have, generation after generation, somehow made our appearance to sojourn briefly on our tiny earth, solely in order to mount the interminable soap opera, with the same characters and situations endlessly recurring, that we call history. It would be like building a great stadium for a display of tiddly-winks, or a vast opera house for a mouth-organ recital. There must, in other words, be another reason for our existence and that of the universe than just getting through the days of our life as best we may; some other destiny than merely using up such physical, intellectual and spiritual creativity as has been vouchsafed us. This, anyway, has been the strongly held conviction of the greatest artists, saints, philosophers and, until quite recent times, scientists, through the Christian centuries, who have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid, and that the great drama of the Incarnation which embodies it, is indeed the master drama of our existence. To suppose that these distinguished believers were all credulous fools whose folly and credulity in holding such beliefs has now been finally exposed, would seem to me to be untenable; and anyway I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake and Dostoevsky, than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, Darwin, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (1988)

Life, Truth, Fools, Way

“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 — the colleges I mean — like an opera.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)

People, Beauty, Dreams, Singing

“High society is a poor play, a bad, boring opera, made slightly better by its staging, costumes and scenery.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Reflections

“You have taken far too much trouble over your opera. Here in England that is mere waste of time. What the English like is something that they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear.”

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) German, later British Baroque composer

Richard Alexander Streatfeild Handel (2005) p. 195, citing Anton Schmid Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1854) p. 29
In conversation with Gluck.

Time

“We went to the Opera to hear music of the vanguard, Maximilian by Darius Milhaud. We clutched our chair. But we were hurled out of it by such a hurricane of wrong notes that we found ourselves, half dead, on the stairway, without knowing how we could fall down quite so far. The composer knows the grammar, the spelling and the language; but he can speak only Esperanto and Volapuk. It is a work of a Communist traveling salesman.”

Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) French composer and teacher

Anonymous reviewer, as quoted in Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time (1965) by Nicolas Slonimsky, p. 126
About

Music, Travel, Dead

“He cut his glance toward Jace, who was walking a few paces ahead of them, apparently conversing with the cat. Clary wondered what they were talking about. Politics? Opera? The high price of tuna?”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Clary, pg. 135
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Cats

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

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Notes on Music and Opera", p. 472
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

People, Feeling, Singing

“At a very early stage I realised that it's a real problem to perform electronic music on stage because electronic instruments are not particularly convincing on a visual point of view: somebody behind his computer, it's not particularly visual. So I was inspired by the opera. And what was the opera in the 19th century? It was the idea for a musician to join and to work, to collaborate with a stage director, with carpenters, painters, people doing decors, graphic artists to have a visual prolongation, a visual correspondence to their work. That's what I tried to do with the tools of my generation: electronics and video and lights and all that.”

Jean-Michel Jarre (1948) French composer, performer and music producer

interviewed on the Danish Monitor radio programme 2005-11-30

People, Music, Idea, Problem

“A kind of music far superior, in my opinion, to that of operas, and which in all Italy has not its equal, nor perhaps in the whole world, is that of the 'scuole'. The 'scuole' are houses of charity, established for the education of young girls without fortune, to whom the republic afterwards gives a portion either in marriage or for the cloister. Amongst talents cultivated in these young girls, music is in the first rank. Every Sunday at the church of each of the four 'scuole', during vespers, motettos or anthems with full choruses, accompanied by a great orchestra, and composed and directed by the best masters in Italy, are sung in the galleries by girls only; not one of whom is more than twenty years of age. I have not an idea of anything so voluptuous and affecting as this music; the richness of the art, the exquisite taste of the vocal part, the excellence of the voices, the justness of the execution, everything in these delightful concerts concurs to produce an impression which certainly is not the mode, but from which I am of opinion no heart is secure. Carrio and I never failed being present at these vespers of the 'Mendicanti', and we were not alone. The church was always full of the lovers of the art, and even the actors of the opera came there to form their tastes after these excellent models. What vexed me was the iron grate, which suffered nothing to escape but sounds, and concealed from me the angels of which they were worthy. I talked of nothing else. One day I spoke of it at Le Blond's; "If you are so desirous," said he, "to see those little girls, it will be an easy matter to satisfy your wishes. I am one of the administrators of the house, I will give you a collation [light meal] with them." I did not let him rest until he had fulfilled his promise. In entering the saloon, which contained these beauties I so much sighed to see, I felt a trembling of love which I had never before experienced. M. le Blond presented to me one after the other, these celebrated female singers, of whom the names and voices were all with which I was acquainted. Come, Sophia, — she was horrid. Come, Cattina, — she had but one eye. Come, Bettina, — the small-pox had entirely disfigured her. Scarcely one of them was without some striking defect.
Le Blond laughed at my surprise; however, two or three of them appeared tolerable; these never sung but in the choruses; I was almost in despair. During the collation we endeavored to excite them, and they soon became enlivened; ugliness does not exclude the graces, and I found they possessed them. I said to myself, they cannot sing in this manner without intelligence and sensibility, they must have both; in fine, my manner of seeing them changed to such a degree that I left the house almost in love with each of these ugly faces. I had scarcely courage enough to return to vespers. But after having seen the girls, the danger was lessened. I still found their singing delightful; and their voices so much embellished their persons that, in spite of my eyes, I obstinately continued to think them beautiful.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), On the musicians of the Ospedale della Pieta (book VII)

Love, Marriage, Age, World

“I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience. Then you arrive in the States and it is $150 to go to an opera. Ridiculous. We have so much young talent on the streets, but because everything is commercial they finally drift away from their dream of their life.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948) Soviet-American dancer, choreographer, and actor born in Letonia, Soviet Union

The Daily Telegraph, 09/02/2004.

Life, People, Dreams, Art

“The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.”

Richard Wagner book Opera and Drama

Opera and Drama (1851)

Art, Music, Error

“I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 36
Context: Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

Music, Singing

“He was a brilliant singer and a brilliant person. Vasyl Slipak could never stay aside the injustice. When he decided to go to Ukraine, I tried to persuade him to remain in France, just willing to defend him from potential threat. But he insisted Ukraine needed him more than French opera.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

Guillaume Dussau, singer of Paris Opera, Ukrainians bid their last farewells to opera singer Vasyl Slipak, laid to rest in Lviv // UT.Ukraine Today. - 2016. - July 01. Fox News http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/02/18/ahmadinejad-obama-cant-spell-obama#ixzz1pkEko0Id/

Personality

“Thus, almost everything is imitation. The idea of The Persian Letters was taken from The Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci, Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original minds borrowed from one another. Miguel de Cervantes makes his Don Quixote a fool; but pray is Orlando any other? It would puzzle one to decide whether knight errantry has been made more ridiculous by the grotesque painting of Cervantes, than by the luxuriant imagination of Ariosto. Metastasio has taken the greatest part of his operas from our French tragedies. Several English writers have copied us without saying one word of the matter. It is with books as with the fire in our hearths; we go to a neighbor to get the embers and light it when we return home, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone”

Voltaire book Letters on the English

"Lettre XII: sur M. Pope et quelques autres poètes fameux," Lettres philosophiques (1756 edition)
Variants:
He looked on everything as imitation. The most original writers, he said, borrowed one from another. Boyardo has imitated Pulci, and Ariofio Boyardo. The instruction we find in books is like fire; we fetch it from our neighbour, kindle it as home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of M. de Voltaire (1786) by Louis Mayeul Chaudon, p. 348
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
As translated in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2008), by James Geary, p. 373
Original: (fr) Ainsi, presque tout est imitation. L’idée des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l’Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imité le Pulci, l’Arioste a imité le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres. Michel Cervantes fait un fou de son don Quichotte; mais Roland est-il autre chose qu'un fou? Il serait difficile de décider si la chevalerie errante est plus tournée en ridicule par les peintures grotesques de Cervantes que par la féconde imagination de l'Arioste. Métastase a pris la plupart de ses opéras dans nos tragédies françaises. Plusieurs auteurs anglais nous ont copiés, et n'en ont rien dit. Il en est des livres comme du feu de nos foyers; on va prendre ce feu chez son voisin, on l’allume chez soi, on le communique à d’autres, et il appartient à tous.

Home, Painting, Imagination, Light

“some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

People, Problem, Forgetting

“Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Science

“excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Box

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

David Markson (1927–2010) American writer

Sex, Learning, Reading

“I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Source: Watermelon

Life, Personality

“I loved him, but love isn't enough. All the fairy tales, the romance novels, the soap operas; they're all lies. Love does not conquer all.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book The Lunatic Cafe

Source: The Lunatic Cafe

Love

“Are you implying that our relationship is like a Spanish soap opera?”

“I’m not implying. I’m saying it.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Gunmetal Magic

“There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva”

Josh Groban (1981) American musician and actor

VH1.com, 11/23/03
Context: "The shower is my time to open up my operatic chops, because of the enormous echo. You sound five times as big in the shower, so I break into some "Nessun Dorma" [from Puccini's Turandot] or Pearl Jam. You've got to go big when you're in the shower. There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva."

Star, Singing

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

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

Guy, Singing

“Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead." - Christine, from Gaston Leroux's: The Phantom of the Opera.”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

Soul, Dead

“What's all this about yanking poor Magnus and Alec back from their vacation?" Isabelle demanded. "They have opera tickets!”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

“… For all the days of our lives," we finished and I felt a little like a character in one of my grandma's soap operas…”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Grandma

“For awhile I taped soap operas and watched them at night when I thought I might be forgetting what it was like to be human. After a while I stopped, because from the examples I saw on those shows, forgetting humanity was a good thing.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead Until Dark

Source: Dead Until Dark

Night, Forgetting

“Even from far away, I could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

People, Music

“It's a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 2, Chapter 15
The Power of Myth (1988)

Hurt

“When you decide to become an opera singer, it's a commitment that allows nothing else to interfere. Even your family - and I have a young daughter - has to take second place.”

Lucy Lawless (1968) New Zealand actress

On her decision not to pursue a career in grand opera, in favor of acting roles in television and film — reported in Times wires (April 11, 1998) "Television Q&A", St. Petersburg Times, p. 13D.

Family, Daughters

“Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 165

Imagination, Time, Housing

“With Vytautas Juozapaitis as a perfectly evil Don Giovanni, the Teatro Lirico d'Europa seduced an audience of about 850 at the Garde Arts Center Monday night. Juozapaitis, a singer with the Lithuanian National Opera, stood out as the despicable title character of this most famous of Mozart operas. He took over the stage with both his supple and strong voice as well as a stage presence that seemed so natural it was hard to look at him without thinking he was Don Giovanni.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Lee Howard, "'Don Giovanni' Delights Opera Fans at the Garde". The New London Day (April 1, 2004)

Art, Nature, Thinking, Strong

“Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it’s music, not words, that provides power.”

Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) French mime and actor

US News & World Report (23 February 1987)

Music, Mood

“I have seen here [in London] a play on Faust, the most diabolic thing imaginable. The Mephistopheles is a masterpiece of caricature and intelligence. It is Goethe's 'Faust', but adapted; the principle features are preserved. They have made it into an opera mixed with comedy and with everything that is most sombre. The scene in the church is given with the priest's chanting and the organ in the distance. Impossible to carry an effect further, in the theater.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in a letter (written in London, England) to J. B. Pierret, 18 June 1825; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 67
1815 - 1830

Imagination, Intelligence

“Since my childhood I have enjoyed reading Martial Arts fiction. I write it myself first and foremost for my own pleasure, and then for the pleasure of my readers (there is also, of course, the financial reward…). I am just a storyteller, like the professional storytellers of the Song dynasty. I believe Martial Arts fiction is like Peking Opera, or ballad-singing, or dancing, or music—its main function is to give pleasure.”

Jin Yong

As quoted in the "Translator's Introduction" to The Deer and the Cauldron: A Martial Arts Novel, Book 1, trans. John Minford (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. xi

Pleasure, Art, Music, Singing

“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.”

Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007) Italian operatic tenor

Pavarotti : My World (1995)

Art, Way

“But what have those colourful ballets to do with the opera's? Ballets, that do not concern the opera at the least. Do they not spoil all possible action, that they in their course violently interrupt?”

Joseph Martin Kraus (1756–1792) German composer

Was sollen aber die buntschäckigten Balletten in den Opern? Balletten, die auf die Oper nicht die geringste Beziehungen haben. Verderben sie nicht alle mögliche Wirkung, die sie in ihrem Gange gewaltsam unterbrechen?
32
Etwas von und über Musik fürs Jahr 1777

“… overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

God, Game, Hockey

“The pages of Euclid are like the opening bars of the music of the Grand Opera of Nature's great drama. So to say, they lift the veil and show to our vision a glimpse of a vast world of natural knowledge awaiting study.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern Indian Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

World, Music, Nature, Knowledge

“People are wrong when they say that the opera isn't what it used to be. It is what it used to be — that's what's wrong with it!”

Noel Coward Design for Living

Design for Living, Act 3, Scene I (1933).

People

“In the 8th Grade I found I had a voice for opera, so I followed that path a little, but my impulse has always been an actor, I have always liked cinema, and let's face it, opera singers are just bad actors! I didn't want to translate myself in that direction. My heroes were people like Spencer Tracy, Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Marvin, Richardson, Caine, all those sort.”

Robert Davi (1953) American actor and jazz singer

People

“I think of the classical world as a cancer patient or an AIDS patient. You know you have a limited life span. The question you now might want to ask is what would be the most important things to do now with your remaining years. I would like to think that that type of prioritizing could happen with museums, symphony orchestras, opera companies. Things really are urgent right now, and what we're doing somehow has to matter, has to make a contribution.”

Peter Sellars (1957) American theatre director

Source: Mark Swed, "For L.A., History's Knocking", Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1996

Life, World, Question, Thinking

“Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the
opera in cutaways
for the last two days and nights..?
Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments
With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know
what our Father Homer wrote…”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

Fish, Bee, Night

“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Hate, War, World, Home

“Since I was a child, I’ve used my imagination to escape from life. At the same time, my imagination has plagued me with both reality-based anxieties as well as anxieties based entirely in the imagination, such as the fear of Hell I was taught to have by the Catholic Church. Paired with a talent for literary composition, a talent that it took me over ten years to refine, I became a writer of horror stories. To my mind, writing is the most important form of human expression, not only artistic writing but also philosophical writing, critical writing, etc. Art as such, especially programmatic music such as operas, seems trivial to me by comparison, however much pleasure we may get from it. Writing is the most effective way to express and confront the full range of the realities of life. I can honestly say that the primary stature I attach to writing is not self-serving. I’ve been captivated to some degree by all forms of creativity and expression—the visual arts, film, design of any sort, and especially music. In college I veered from literature to music for a few years, which is the main reason it took me six years to get an undergraduate degree in liberal arts. I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. Since my instrument is the guitar, I know every form and style in its history and have written the classical, acoustic, and electric forms of this instrument. I think because I have had such a love and understanding of music do I realize, to my grief, its limitations. Writing is less limited in the consolations it offers to those who have lost a great deal in their lives. And it continues to console until practically everything in a person’s life has been lost. Words and what they express have the best chance of returning the baneful stare of life.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Wonderbook Interview with Thomas Ligotti http://wonderbooknow.com/interviews/thomas-ligotti/

Love, Life, Pleasure, Fear

“I love the way Law and Order doesn’t always put their heroes on the side of good. And sometimes they win, sometimes they lose and sometimes for the wrong reasons. I also think it’s interesting that there is a series that has remained story-driven in its, what, sixtieth season, right? If not for them, I would argue that all shows eventually become soap operas about the lives of the characters. Law And Order does what it does and does it well. It may simply be that you’re mistaking consistency for blandness, how ’bout that, fella?”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

Response to interviewer declaring Law and Order "bland" in Ain't It Cool News interview (17 July 2003)

Love, Law, Way, Thinking

“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 (1935–2007) Italian operatic tenor

Pavarotti : My World (1995)

Art

“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness

“Can you hear me when I sing?
You're the reason I sing.
You're the reason the opera is in me
Well, hey now
Still got to let you know
A house just don't make a home
Don't leave me here alone”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own"
Lyrics, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004)

Home, Singing, Housing

“The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

L'on voit bien que l'Opéra est l'ébauche d'un grand spectacle; il en donne l'idée.
Aphorism 47
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit

Idea

“You ought to be thankful for the little things
But little things are all you seem to give
You're always putting off what we can do today
Soap opera says you've got one life to live
Who's right, who's wrong?”

Janet Jackson (1966) singer from the United States

What Have You Done for Me Lately
Control (1986)

Life

“The Opera House is a splendid edifice, and I wish to take nothing away from it, but my heart belongs to the Harbour Bridge. It's not as festive, but it is far more dominant – you can see it from every corner of the city, creeping into frame from the oddest angles, like an uncle who wants to get into every snapshot. From a distance it has a kind of gallant restraint, majestic but not assertive, but up close it is all might. It soars above you, so high that you could pass a ten-storey building beneath it, and looks like the heaviest thing on earth. Everything that is in it – the stone blocks in its four towers, the latticework of girders, the metal plates, the six-million rivets (with heads like halved apples) – is the biggest of its type you have ever seen. This is a bridge built by people who have had an Industrial Revolution, people with mountains of coal and ovens in which you could melt down a battleship. The arch alone weighs 30,000 tons. This is a great bridge.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Pages 80-81
In a Sunburned Country (US), Down Under (UK) (2000)

People, Mountain, Heart, Housing

“Carthon, one of the poems, was translated into French as early as 1762 while the collected works followed suit in 1777. Diderot loved them. Voltaire parodied them. Ossianic plays, operas, and mimes were written. They influenced or attracted Mme. de Staël, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset. Napoleon became a fervent admirer after he had read the poems in the Italian translation by Cesarotti.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Henry Okun, "Ossian in Painting", in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 30 (1967) p. 329.
Criticism

Love, Reading

“And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), p. 317

Dreams, Memory, Past, Cry

“I did not come to know part II of 'Faust' until long after I made my illustrations, and even then only very superficially. It struck me as an ill-digested work, of little interest from the literary standpoint, but among those most calculated to inspire a painter owing to the mixture of characters and styles it contains... You asked what gave me the first idea of the Faust lithographs. I remember that about 1821 I saw the designs made by Retch [ Retzsch] and found them rather striking; but it was above all the performance of a dramatic opera on Faust that I saw in London in 1825 which stirred me to do something on the subject. The actor.... was a perfect Mephistopheles; he was fat, but that in no way diminished his nimbleness and his Satanic character.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix' letter to Philippe Burty, 1 March 1862; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 76
Delacroix describes the source of his series Faust lithographs
1831 - 1863

Way, Idea, Parting, Perfection

“It’s like a soap opera. It’s certainly an identity crisis. Gordon wants to be like Maggie, but he doesn’t want to be like Tony. Tony also wanted to be like Maggie, but Maggie only wanted to be like Ronnie. Now Dave, he wants to be like Tony, but he doesn’t want to be like William, or Iain, or Michael, and certainly not like Maggie either. Confused? You must be, but you can be clear on this: I don’t want to be like any of them.”

Menzies Campbell (1941) British Liberal Democrat politician and advocate

Leader's speech http://www.libdems.org.uk/conference/brighton-2007-menzies-campbell-leaders-speech-part-1-of-3.7749.html, Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton, 20 September 2007.

“To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Postcard from Sydney'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

Time, Housing

“Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible a plea as baseball in Italian.”

George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) American drama critic and magazine editor

Clinical Notes, George Jean, Nathan, January 1926, American Mercury magazine https://books.google.com/books?id=k330MmVjym8C&q=&quot;Opera+in+English+is+in+the+main+just+about+as+sensible+a+plea+as+baseball+in+Italian&quot;&pg=PA107#v=onepage,

“So long as it doesn't get to the point where you don't remember whose opera you're listening to, I'm willing to experiment.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

As quoted in Newsweek, Vol. 103, (1984), p. iv

“Dear God, here it is finished, this poor little Mass. Is this sacred music which I have written or music of the devil? I was born for opera buffa, as you well know. A little science, a little heart, that's all. Be blessed, then, and admit me to Paradise.”

Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) Italian composer

Bon Dieu; la voilà terminée, cette pauvre petite messe. Est-ce bien de la musique sacrée que je viens de faire, ou bien de la sacré musique ? J'étais né pour l'opera buffa, tu le sais bien! Peu de science, un peu de coeur, tout est là. Sois donc béni et accorde-moi le Paradis.
Epigraph to his Petite Messe Solennelle (1863). Translation from Emanuele Senici (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (2004) p. 23.

God, Music, Science, Heart

“One of the reasons I enjoy going to the Opera is the spectacle of an audience enraptured. Their emotions are engaged, their passions brought to the fore, they become highly sensitive.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Passion

“The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us -- somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot… on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Way, Housing, Sea

“The Mozart Festival Opera's production of Don Giovanni made the three hours fly. The miming between Stefano de Peppo and Vytautas Juozapaitis as Don Giovanni was great physical comedy that had the audience laughing out loud. Juozapaitis possessed the voice, swagger and stage presence to match and dominate Leporello, and his costumes are among the best I've seen. I think Mozart would have approved.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Christopher Hyde, "Mozart would have approved", Portland Press Herald (March, 2005) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_mozart_review.htm

Thinking, Flying

“The opera-glasses she stole from the bookcase so that each morning she could look through them down into the street in order to make people bigger and bring them close to her in order to feel less lonely.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 263

People, Feeling

“It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and this magnifies all details of a performance, all exaggerations. In the theater, you can get away with a very large, very grand phrase. For the microphone, you have to tone it down. It's the same as making a film, your gestures will be seen in close-up, so they cannot be exaggerated as they would be in a theater.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

On making studio recordings
Callas : The Art and the Life (1974)

Sense, Time, Housing

“Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Demea to Philo, Part X
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Life, Pleasure, World, Disease

“An oratorical style often has the same drawbacks as those operas in which the music prevents you from hearing the words. Here the words prevent you from seeing the thoughts.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Music

“The climax of absurdity to which the art may be carried, when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher… His landscape, of which he was evidently fond, is pastoral; and such pastorality! the pastoral of the Opera house.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Notes of Six Lectures on Landscape Painting (1836), C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843), p. 343
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Art, Fashion, Nature, Housing

“You've got enough in here that people who get hold of this — like AP or any of the state-controlled media — they're going to focus on the soap opera aspects of your book and they're going to ignore what is truly one of the most substantive policy books I've read.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

On Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life, The Rush Limbaugh Show, November 20, 2009 http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200911130014

People, Books, Reading

“Strange as it may seem to those who have read much of the screwball side of Hollywood life, I have never had to fight against an impulse to jump into a swimming-pool while dressed for the opera.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

How Do I Stay Normal in Hollywood (1942)

Life, Reading, Fight

“[Stendhal] was small, ugly and obsessed by physical beauty in others, and he spent most of his time in salons and opera houses, pursuing aristocratic hostesses and singers. After the fall of Napoleon, he retired to Italy, adopted his pseudonym and began to write. He was a sexual freebooter who “found a notion of obtaining happiness from a virtuous woman wholly inconceivable.””

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

At 59, unmarried, syphilitic and obscure, he dropped dead in a Paris street.
"Homage to QWERT YUIOP".
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Beauty, Time, Housing, Dead

“At its climaxes this Nazi revolution was always half a Wagner opera. The other half was cunning conspiracy.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), pp. 41-42

“Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Beyond a Boundary
Beyond a Boundary (1963)

Dance

“Thank you. How-DY! Whoops, wrong opera house. How do you like the play, Mr. Lincoln? Duck!”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

A Night at the Met (1986)

Housing

“If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day: to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model. This is now understood indifferently well – at least by dressmakers. In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the 'Prophète', or the Hugenots' hymn in the opera of that name.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

In a letter to 'The World', London 22 Mai, 1878; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 186
1870 - 1903

Flowers, Tree, Painting, Indifference

“The people you step over when you come out of the opera.”

George Young, Baron Young of Cookham

On the homeless. "Today", BBC Radio 4, 29 June 1991, [Culture and Sustainability in European Cities: Imagining Europolis, A place in the city, François, Matarasso, Svetlana, Khristova, Milena, Dragićević Šešić, Nancy, Duxbury, Routledge, Abingdon, 2015, 136, 978-1-138-77841-2]

People

“He who knows the surface of the earth and the topography of a country only through the examination of maps.. is like a man who learns the opera of Meyerbeer or Rossini by reading only reviews in the newspapers. The brush of landscape artists Lorrain, Ruysdael, or Calame can reproduce on canvas the sun's ray, the coolness of the heavens, the green of the fields, the majesty of the mountains…but what can never be stolen from Nature is that vivid impression that she alone can and knows how to impart--the music of the birds, the movement of the trees, the aroma peculiar to the place--the inexplicable something the traveller feels that cannot be defined and which seems to awaken in him distant memories of happy days, sorrows and joys gone by, never to return”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Los Viajes" in La Solidaridad (15 May 1889)- translated from the Spanish by Nick Joaquin

Music, Travel, Feeling, Mountain

“This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
Umberto Eco, Milan Italy December 2004 translated by Allesandra Bastagli, p. vi-vii
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Life, People, Lie, Secret

“Not just songs by Madonna and action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; it includes 1,700 symphony orchestras, opera attended by 7.5 million people every year, and museums that are visited by 500 million annually, almost all American museums, where entrance is quite often free, owe their existence and funding to private sponsors.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 109

People, Star

“That uncountable myths and legends and ecclesiastical operas and dirges have at their core, if not in their trappings, near identical mechanisms, performances, and outcomes is proof most solid of the centrality of the panhuman subconscious—or superconscious—experience of the myriad and manifold wonders and terrors of the cosmos.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Appendix (p. 525)
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004)

“No matter how close and familiar the temple or cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevating contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan—and perhaps even to that of their masters. Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion. In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 63-64

Life, People, Truth, World

“The opera world was shocked! But the image is very classical. It's taken from Botticelli's portrait of Venus, who's standing in a seashell with her hair covering her body. It's very sensual. It represents the vulnerable side of me. Although I'm not wearing any clothes, it comes across very well.”

Sarah Brightman (1960) British soprano, musical theatre actress, and dancer

The Straits Times (Singapore) (2001); On the promotional photos for her Classics CD.

World, Clothes

“Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Yseult and in it there is a theme called Love Death theme. It is so sensual, so sexual that he was criticized for having introduced sex into music. And that was quite a few years before the appearance of Elvis Presley!”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Love, Death, Music, Sex

“The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 38

God

“How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Question

“They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.
It could rain in a room this big.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

Game, Time

“I am convinced that the decisive factor in dramatic effect will be a smaller orchestra, which does not drown out the human voice as does a large orchestra…The orchestra of the opera of the future is the chamber orchestra which, by painting in the background of the action on the stage with crystalline clearness, can alone realise precisely the intention of the composer with regard to the vocal parts. It is after all an important desideratum that the audience should not only hear the sounds but should also be able to follow the words closely.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

On composing and conducting (page 39-40) (1929).
Recollections and Reflections

Decision, Future, Parting, Painting

“We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, Youth, World

“The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites … There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once.”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Q&A: Daniel Barenboim http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10044601/Proms-2013-Daniel-Barenboim-interview.html, 2 November 2012.

Way, Problem

“Meyerbeer's approach to opera may seem cynical. His music is not, like Donizetti's, an immediate expression of the sentiments of his characters but a calculated manipulation of the audience.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 11 : Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art

Music

“A deep, deep sadness. You know there's a theologian named Michael Novack who's quoted as saying that 'a community is better off losing its opera house, or its museum, or its CHURCH' — here's a theologian speaking — 'than its ball team'. Brooklyn has never been the same since the Dodgers were taken away.”

George Plimpton (1927–2003) journalist, writer, editor, actor

In Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball discussing his reaction to and opinion of the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles for the 1958 MLB season.

Sadness, Quotes, Communication, Housing

“The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by “buffs” and “fans” of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.
They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: The Culture We Deserve (1989), p. 118

People, World, School, Star

“Edward Smith: Why is it more of a pleasure to do 30 or 40 pictures than to do just one?
Andy Warhol: Then I can, uh, listen to my soundabout which looks just like the thing that I'm wearing now, and you can listen to opera and stuff like that.
Edward Smith: Does that mean you don't have to think when you're painting?
Andy Warhol: No, you can listen to really good music.
Edward Smith: So, what, painting is an excuse to listen to really good music?
Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

1975 - 1987, BBC interview (1981)

Pleasure, Music, Thinking, Painting

“Nobody can predict the future, but there is nobody in my generation who wants to be on the board of a symphony orchestra or an opera company and raise the kind of money that's needed. I think that the energy that in the 19th century went into opera is, in the 20th century, going into films. Films have that same over-the-top, overwhelming, high impact--all of the senses knocked out--and vast popular following, with stars who are larger than life. Well, that's what opera did in the 19th century.”

Peter Sellars (1957) American theatre director

Source: Mark Swed, "For L.A., History's Knocking", Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1996

Life, Money, Star, Thinking

“Long live the politico-satrical-parodistic opera!”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Letter to Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, 5 June 1916. They had been discussing the new first act of Ariadne auf Naxos. A Working Friendhip: The correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, Vienna House, New York (1961). Page 251.
Other sources

“Wild Things is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it. Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-things-1998 of Wild Things (20 March 1998) <br class="br">Reviews, Three star reviews

Sex, Way