quotations about opera
[Opera is] the changing audible perception of a supersensible realm.
GARY TOMLINSON
attributed, The Legacy of Opera
Exposing impressionable young men to the glories of opera on their first evening at home with you tended to put the kiss of death on things.
ANTHONY MCDONALD
Getting Orlando
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
RICHARD BENCHLEY
attributed, Music of the Great Composers: A Listener's Guide to the Best of Classical Music
I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.
DAVE BARRY
Dave Barry Talks Back
The Opera is the most artificial of all things.... It does not subsist as an imitation of nature, but in contempt of it; and, instead of seconding, its object is to pervert and sophisticate all our natural impressions of things.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
The Opera
Opera is, after all, the most artificial and artful of all the performance arts, the least likely to reflect "real life." It merely embeds the conventions of its time, and we need not get worked up about its prejudices or the values it transmits. In fact, the argument is made that one should not seek "values" at all in such a luxuriant art form; or as Taruskin sums up his position, "Great music sanitizes whatever it touches."
CARYL EMERSON
"The Boris Plot on Stage: Karamzin, Pushkin, and Musorgsky as Historical Thinkers", Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature, and Society
Every opera is stylized; if it were not, it wouldn't be an opera.
DAVID B. HINTON
The Films of Leni Riefenstahl
For all sorts of reasons opera -- even comic opera -- is usually no laughing matter.
TOM SUTCLIFFE
Believing in Opera