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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Opera Quotes

We see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera.

– Bram Stoker

Dracula, Chapter 14. Professor Van Helsing sees great value in old beliefs. He says that many beliefs that are put forward as modern are really old ideas dressed up.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

– H. L. Mencken

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

– Harrison Birtwistle

I was an acting opera singer, and that’s one of the reasons I left opera.

– George Gaynes

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

– H. L. Mencken

What isn’t for everybody shouldn’t be for anybody: the world’s opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.

– Howard Jacobson

An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.

– Gustav Mahler

The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.

– James Gray

I was on a Swedish soap opera when I was 10.

– Joel Kinnaman

The English National Opera does have some terrific productions, which are accessible, and they’re not too ridiculously expensive.

– John Hurt

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

– John Marshall

Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.

– Jacqueline Novogratz

Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.

– Joan Baez

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that’s it.

– John Mellencamp

In opera, there is always too much singing.

– Claude Debussy

I’d really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

– Bruce Beresford

The jewellery I wear on stage in the opera house is not real, but the bling-bling I wear in concerts? Those are real!

– Anna Netrebko

Lots of opera singers are just boring.

– Anna Netrebko

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.

– Carlisle Floyd

‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is about love. It’s as simple as that.

– Andrew Lloyd Webber

‘Amores Perros’ is rock, ’21 Grams’ is jazz, ‘Babel’ is an opera, and ‘Biutiful’ is a requiem.

– Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

‘Phantom of the Opera’ started in my little 100-seater converted church in Britain with a stage where we did what we did. But it was the score itself was what made it.

– Andrew Lloyd Webber

The activity of a singer that sings opera is similar to that of an athlete.

– Andrea Bocelli

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

– Carlisle Floyd

Ballet costumes are easier that opera because they are designed for movement.

– Azzedine Alaia

I’ve always said, I prefer the opera to the soap – those extreme characters and circumstances.

– Anthony Geary

Later, I even appeared in a Rock Opera with Richard Gere.

– Barry Bostwick

More and more, we’re used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.

– Daniel Barenboim

I like folk songs, but ten horses couldn’t bring me to a concert or an opera.

– Fritz Lang

To be a famously successful opera singer. I wanted that since I was eight.

– Danielle de Niese

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