OPERA QUOTES II
quotations about opera
Don't sing an aria
To someone who can't
Sing one back.
KENNETH KOCH
The Collected Poems
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
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
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
An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Lives of the English Poets
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
GIOACCHINO ROSSINI
attributed, Forbes, 1992
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
In opera, there is always too much singing.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Debussy: Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Bed is the poor man's opera.
ITALIAN PROVERB