Quotes about opera
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“The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) English composer

Note in the score to The Poisoned Kiss (1936).

“Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“Nakata let his body relax, switched off his mind, allowing things to flow through him. This was natural for him, something he'd done ever since he was a child, without a second thought. Before long the borders of his consciousness fluttered around, just like the butterflies. Beyond these borders lay a dark abyss. Occasionally his consciousness would fly over the border and hover over that dizzying, black crevass. But Nakata wasn't afraid of the darkness or how deep it was. And why should he be? That bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already. Nakata understood this well. In that world there was no writing, no days of the week, no scary Governor, no opera, no BMWs. No scissors, no tall hats. On the other hand, there was also no delicious eel, no tasty bean-jam buns. Everything is there, but there are no parts. Since there are no parts, there's no need to replace one thing with another. No need to remove anything, or add anything. You don't have to think about difficult things, just let yourself soak it all in. For Nakata, nothing could be better.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Ten

World, Nature, Thinking, Silence

“The masses once dined on opera and Shakespeare.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

State of the Art (2000)

“A resolution to attend theatres or operas is an absolute disqualification for Holy Orders.”

Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873) Bishop in the Church of England

Quoted in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 74

“If you put together all the ingredients that naturally attract children - sex, violence, revenge, spectacle and vigorous noise - what you have is grand opera.”

Judith Martin (1938) American etiquette expert

Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

Children, Sex, Revenge, Nature

“Strange, but when he closed his eyes he had an image of the hotel above them restored to its former grandeur. A concierge and porter in the lobby. Someone behind the desk waiting to take his key. Sintra in an evening gown. They’d be about to take a motored vehicle to the opera. The streets would be busy with merchants and people coming home from work. The buildings, the storefronts, would be bright and cheery with lights. Like it had been in those mayfly beautiful moments between wars, before the Rising.”

Jeff VanderMeer book Finch

Source: Finch (2009), p. 325

War, People, Beauty, Home

“Matiushin's sound [composer of the Futurist opera: 'Victory over the Sun', Malevich did the stage design] shattered the object-word. The curtain was torn, by the same token tearing the scream of consciousness of the old brain. [1917]”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 266
1910 - 1920

Tear, Sun, Victory

“The Don's difficult role never seemed to tax Juozapaitis excellent dramatic voice. Throughout the opera listeners were charmed by his great expressive range as he moved with ease from comic exchanges with Leporello to tender love sings.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Martha Fawbush, "Bravo Concerts opens with excellent performance of Mozart classic". Asheville Citizen Times (October, 2003)

Love, Singing

“With the reopening of the school and church, and the building of an opera house, the spirit of these people would have a new light. I think it would please me to see a light at the end of the tunnel after 125 years.”

David Woodard (1964) American writer, conductor and businessman

San Francisco Chronicle (Mar. 13, 2005)

People, School, Thinking, Light

“The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. The corps de ballet were already calling me "the Phantom of the Opera," an intriguing sobriquet which appealed to me very strongly, until I realized that it would mean signing my ransom notes P. T. O. One did not wish to descend to the ridiculous!
O. G. I became and O. G. I have remained.
But I still liked to think of myself as the Phantom.”

Susan Kay Phantom

Erik (p. 360)
Phantom (1990)

Idea, Thinking

“What do you think of Puccini?
[ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ]
No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

Quoted in Lord Harewood The Tongs and the Bones (1981) p. 133.

Music, Thinking

“What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation — a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. "What is too silly to be said may be sung" — well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.”

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

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness; "What is too silly to be said may be sung" is a commonly used translation or paraphrase of lines from Act I, Scene ii of the play The Barber of Seville by Pierre de Beaumarchais, which was the basis of famous operas.

People, Way, Fashion, Understanding

“Bad boys have long fascinated audiences as well as storytellers, whatever the medium. Such rebels, often without causes beyond self-gratification, have been at the center of much of contemporary popular culture. One of the paradigms for such dramatized morality tales is Mozart's magnificent "Don Giovanni," whose musical and theatrical turns evoked awe and laughter and terror from the more that 1,500 music fans who on Saturday night flocked to Lawrence's Lied Center for the Mozart Festival Opera production. The libertine is thoroughly disreputable. Nonetheless, we look on in fascination because of his devilish smile, dashing good looks, ready wit, and the audacity of his hyper-inflated ego. If you can imagine a young Jack Nicholson with mustache, cape and a flair for sword play, you've got it. Lithuanian baritone Vytautas Juozapaitis gave the Don appropriate swagger and voice. He also brought a comic twist that gave the roué a touch of the trickster. Stepping out of character for a second in the midst of a briskly paced recitative, he paused, turned, and looked up at the supertitled English translation as if to check his lines. It was a joke shared by all. The pleasure of performing, even in the opera's most dramatic moments, was evident.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Chuck Berg, "Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' triumphs", Topeka Capital Journal (February, 2007) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_mozart_review.htm

Pleasure, Smile, Music, Imagination

“The source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment. An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially exerted in the name of supreme Good… Consider only Mozart's Don Giovanni at the end of the opera, when he is confronted with the following choice: if he confesses his sins, he can still achieve salvation; if he persists, he will be damned forever. From this viewpoint of the pleasure principle, the proper thing to do would be to renounce his past, but he does not, he persists in his Evil, although he knows that by persisting he will be damned forever. Paradoxically, with his final choice of Evil, he acquires the status of an ethical hero - that is, of someone who is guided by fundamental principles beyond the pleasure principle and not just by the search for pleasure or material gain.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

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The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Pleasure, Search, Laughter, Evil

“When I sing, I close my eyes. If I see a feather, everything is fine. Without this image in my mind, the sound is not 'truthful' enough and I must begin again. I have to. I first had this feeling, this instinct with Phantom of the Opera and since then have always listened to it.”

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

The Trees They Grow So High, (1988)

Truth, Feeling, Singing

“I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered that he thought I, or at least some essential if somewhat abstract principle within me, was worth saving.I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happened to resemble the backstage of an opera house.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 203).

Soul, Nature, Reality, Sense

“My wife and child and I were on a camping trip and we stopped in Virginia City. In the Opera House, I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

On his initial inspiration for the novel Bid Time Return (1975), as quoted in Behind the Scenes of Somewhere in Time (1980) http://erasofelegance.com/OldFiles/Movies/sitmovie.html"

Love, Guy, Time, Housing

“There is a paradox at the heart of Chopin's style, in its unlikely combination of a rich chromatic web of polyphony, based on a profound experience of J. S. Bach, with a sense of melody and a way of sustaining the melodic line derived directly from Italian opera. The paradox is only apparent, and it is never felt as such when one hears the music. The two influences are perfectly synthesized, and they give each other a new kind of power.”

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

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 5 : Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

Music, Way, Sense, Heart

“I remember when I began singing, in 1961, one person said, "run quick, because opera is going to have at maximum 10 years of life." At the time it was really going down. But then, I was lucky enough to make the first Live From the Met telecast. And the day after, people stopped me on the street. So I realized the importance of bringing opera to the masses. I think there were people who didn't know what opera was before. And they say "Bohème", and of course "Bohème is so good."”

Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007) Italian operatic tenor

As quoted in Opera News (1998), and The New York Times (7 September 2007) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/arts/music/06pavarotti.html?ei=5090&en=863a6b2459941ec6&ex=1346731200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Life, People, Thinking, Singing

“I’ve spent a lot of time in London over the last few years and I liked the idea of the Mughal emperor Babur meeting with modern-day disaffected youth and talking to them about their actions. He was a sharp literary critic who could be very sweeping and cruel about poetry if he thought it was bad poetry, and he said some fantastic things that I quoted word for word in the opera. I read the Baburnama – the memoirs of Babur – and quoted lines from it. “Writing badly will make you ill.” What a beautiful thing to say. I read that book and I thought, how dramatic! If he had been a figure in western history it would have been an opera. War, murder, love, tragedy, poetry. It always jumped out at me as something worth doing.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

Love, War, Books, Youth

“Producers of opera nowadays usually make the mistake of translating each particular orchestral phrase into terms of a movement on the stage. In this matter one should proceed with a maximum of caution and good taste. There is no objection to bringing life to into the production by changes of position and new nuances of acting during repetitive passages of music, especially in arias. Preludes of one or two bars frequently, and especially in Mozart, clearly express some gesture on stage. But each trill on the flute does not represent a wink on the prima donna, nor every delayed chord on the strings a step or gesture. Whole passages, especially in the finales, are pure concert music and are best left undisturbed by “play acting.””

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

Recollections and Reflections

Life, Music, Change

“It is not always a matter of wild ovations and legendary performances. Sometimes you are just happy to get through an opera without trouble.”

Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007) Italian operatic tenor

Pavarotti : My World (1995)

Happiness

“As Bertolt Brecht puts in his Threepenny Opera: What is the robbery of a bank compared to the foundation of a new bank?”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

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The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“So, I was to talk about "Opera as Related to Literature", was I not? And because the subject is so vast, I have wandered here and there, trying to illuminate, as if with a candle, a vast chamber full of fascinating corners, mysterious with mirrors, and echoing with some of the loveliest music ever written. I have not succeeded on any high level, but then, I never expected to do so. But perhaps I have thrown out an idea or two which you would like to consider for yourselves.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Opera for the Man Who Reads Hamlet (1989).

Music, Literature, Idea

“This evening heard Carmen on the radio, and reflected how hard it was to vamp a man while singing at the top of one's voice. That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a head of stream while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of verisimilitude.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

God, People, Secret, Problem

“Like gladiator games and pyramid building, opera has always been a gloriously money-losing proposition. It is the most extravagant of arts, requiring the constant support of kings, dictators, plutocrats, and town councils. Box-office success is no solution. San Francisco Opera loses money at every sold-out performance. Sane business practices simply don’t suffice. Composer Richard Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was the ideal operatic angel — very rich and certifiably insane. Mel Brooks’ shyster producer Max Bialystock need not have mounted Springtime for Hitler to score a surefire loss. Aida would have done just fine.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Drama at the Opera House," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/eoperahouse.htm San Francisco Magazine (September 2001) <br class="br">Essays

Money, Art, Angels, Game

“Literature, the strange entity so called,—that indeed is here. If Literature continue to be the haven of expatriated spiritualisms, and have its Johnsons, Goethes and true Archbishops of the World, to show for itself as heretofore, there may be hope in Literature. If Literature dwindle, as is probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of spiritual legerdemain, analogous to rope-dancing, opera-dancing, and street-fiddling with a hat carried round for halfpence, or for guineas, there will be no hope in Literature.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

World, Hope, Literature, Dance

“The express pulled into the Stazione Termini in Rome five minutes ahead of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of luggage, and gave directions. The priest’s Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases; he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer.”

James Blish book A Case of Conscience

Source: A Case of Conscience (1958), Chapter 14 (p. 171)

Way, Learning, Time, Reading

“You've paid the money and now you are seated at the opera and the performance has begun. If you sleep and snore through it, who cares?”

Harbhajan Singh Yogi (1929–2004) Indian-American Sikh Yogi

Remark (14 July 1975), as quoted in Transitions to a Heart Centered World : Through the Kundalini Yoga and Meditations of Yogi Bhajan (1988) by Guru Rattana and Ann M. Maxwell, p. 107
Context: Life is like a movie. You go to a movie, give them your money and they give you a seat and start the film for you. Between eating popcorn and drinking Coca cola, you fall asleep. Now, you didn't pay your $5.00 to sleep in that chair did you? In exactly the same way, through previous karma, life is gained here. It is paid for! (You have earned it!) With Guru's grace, you did the Bhakti, and then God granted you a human body. It is earned, paid for and the title is clear. You can make it or mar it. It's your business. You've paid the money and now you are seated at the opera and the performance has begun. If you sleep and snore through it, who cares?

Money, Sleep

“I didn’t write Fahrenheit 451 about us. I wrote it about Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler. … I may not even talk about book banning if I don’t feel like it. I don’t prepare anything ahead. I have a dozen subjects to talk about because I write plays and poetry and essays, short stories and novels and screenplays and teleplays and operas. I’ll get lost, and the audience will have a wonderful time. And I’ll get a standing ovation, and they’ll go home.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected (1994)

Books, Feeling, Home, Time

“I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera—uninterrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding—or it is rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad…”

Arkady Martine (1985) Science fiction author

On how her writings wrestle with the concept of colonialism in “AN INTERVIEW WITH ARKADY MARTINE” http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/an-interview-with-arkady-martine/ in Stage Horizons (2019 Feb 25)

Bad luck, Feeling, Evil

“The most meaningful toys are not materialistic at all. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died penniless, but his toys were his symphonies, concertos, operas, quartets, and sonatas that have delighted millions of people for hundreds of years and will continue to light up the world.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

People, World, Light

“Delacroix was right. It is the struggle that matters. Not the outcome. I was where I should have been that Saturday in front of the Paris Opera House. Yes, our cries were not heard.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Housing

“Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community. (…) Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belong with the theatre, ballet, opera and dance.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 196

Art, Communication, Relation ships, Dance

“Vasyl was supposed to become my vocal adviser in my future project. For three years Slipak was a soloist at the Grand Opera. He got solo parts, but he also wanted to have concert practice, that is why he chose a sort of freelance. Mind you, when the war in the east of Ukraine broke out, his vocal career was on the rise. Characteristically, Vasyl did not give up his career, he would be active as a volunteer, then he would return from Ukraine to France to give concerts and appear in performances, and then again he would go to Ukraine, which he loved above all. And then again more concerts, and again back to the front.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017 <br class="br">Nicolas Krauze, conductor, the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe (France). “He loved Ukraine above all”. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 7 March. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/he-loved-ukraine-above-all

Love, War, Making love, Appearance

“Since Russia started its aggressive actions against Ukraine he quit his European career and returned to Ukraine (as a volunteer soldier) to defend his homeland. He died in the ranks of the nationalist group Right Sector at the frontline in the Donetsk region. His nom de guerre was Myth – a shortened version from Mephistopheles (the Faust opera). He was not a professional soldier, he was a singer…”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

Yuri Butusov, journalist. Paris Opera singer Vasyl Slipak shot dead by Russian sniper in Donbas // UaPosition. - 2016. - June 29. http://uaposition.com/latest-news/ukrainian-opera-singer-shot-dead-by-enemy-sniper-in-donbas/

“Monkey opera is not belonging to the Zhang family, it belongs to China and the whole world.”

Liu Xiao Ling Tong (1959) Chinese actor

(zh-CN) 猴戏不姓章，属于中国，也属于世界。

Source: [六小龄童回故乡讲座诠释对“章氏猴戏”情感, http://ent.people.com.cn/GB/n1/2018/0928/c81372-30319084.html, People's Daily Online, 11 January 2019, 28 September 2018]

World, Family

“The Italians have got opera, the Spanish have got flamenco dancing. What have we got? Weight Watchers.”

Victoria Wood (1953–2016) British comedian

Source: https://inews.co.uk/light-relief/jokes/victoria-wood-jokes-146280

Dance

Quotes about opera page 2

Quotes about opera
page 2