OPERA QUOTES II

quotations about opera

Opera quote

Opera may have some practical tips to offer to anyone who is feeling drained and hoarse, literally and figuratively. There's a difference between raising your voice to make yourself powerfully heard, and degenerating into mere screaming: It's the difference between communicating your message to many people and driving away your audience.

ANNE MIDGETTE

"How to survive the next four years on social media? Opera can help.", Washington Post, February 10, 2017


Opera is a type of drama whose integral existence is determined from point to point and in the whole by musical articulation. Dramma per musica.

JOSEPH KERMAN

Opera As Drama

Tags: Joseph Kerman


Opera is the reflection of our historical reality, and this mirror breaks in those places where the image is split with a sudden incongruity.

CATHERINE CLEMENT

Opera, or, The Undoing of Women


I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

D. H. LAWRENCE

letter, April 1, 1911

Tags: D. H. Lawrence


An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Lives of the English Poets

Tags: Samuel Johnson


In opera, there is always too much singing.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Debussy: Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers


Don't sing an aria
To someone who can't
Sing one back.

KENNETH KOCH

The Collected Poems


Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

LUCIANO BERIO

London Observer, February 5, 1989

Tags: Luciano Berio


How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

GIOACCHINO ROSSINI

attributed, Forbes, 1992


People are wrong when they say 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


Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

GIAN-CARLO MENOTTI

Time, May 1, 1950


The aim of Opera has ever been, and still is today, confined to Music. Merely so as to afford Music with a colourable pretext for her own excursions, is the purpose of Drama dragged on -- naturally, not to curtail the ends of Music, but rather to serve her simply as a means.

RICHARD WAGNER

Opera and Drama

Tags: Richard Wagner


More than any other theatrical form, opera is subject to the vagaries of managing a company whose principal tool is a particularly fragile one: the human voice.

HERVÉ LACOMBE

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century


Opera is as popular today as it has ever been throughout its four- hundred-year history. No longer a luxury for the upper classes, it has descended from the solemn pedestal of elitism to the floorboards of the masses.

JEAN GRUNDY FANELLI

preface, Opera for Everyone: A Historic, Social, Artistic, Literary, and Musical Study


Without Puccini, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even drearier place than the evening news would have us think.

WILLIAM BERGER

Puccini Without Excuses


I think the music of an opera, like its poetry, is nothing more than a new artistic way of embellishing words, and one that should not be used to excess.

HONORÉ GABRIEL RIQUETTI

attributed, An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music


The absurdity of opera lies in the fact that rational elements are used and three-dimensional reality is aimed at while at the same time everything is neutralized by the music.

BERTOLT BRECHT

"The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre", 1930

Tags: Bertolt Brecht


The paradox of designing an opera is that while you have to use existing materials on this Earth (the only ones available), you aim at achieving an emotional impact and creating an atmosphere that is of another world.

GEORGE TSYPIN

George Tsypin Opera Factory: Building in the Black Void


No, no, you have driven me mad! When I think that I had only one object in life: to give my name to an opera wench!

GASTON LEROUX

The Phantom of the Opera


Bed is the poor man's opera.

ITALIAN PROVERB