Great Opera Quotes

#1. I'd love to do 'Werther.' It's a great opera, and the music's so beautiful.

Stephen Costello

#2. The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

Stewart Copeland

#3. For me, few things are more compelling than watching a great opera.

David Rubenstein

#4. I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.

Maurice Sendak

#5. A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator.

Steven Berkoff

#6. Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

Eleanor Robson Belmont

#7. Is as if the music is another character or as if it was a part of this great opera. I also through about this project as a structure or as a sculpture made out of colors, rhythm, characters, and brush strokes, but with every single one of these always supporting one another.

Alex Abreu

#8. As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.

Lesley Garrett

#9. For so long, I hadn't really heard Margo - I'd seen her screaming and thought her laughing - that now I figured it was my job. To try, even at this great remove, to hear the opera of her.

John Green

#10. I think the opera is one of the great cultural jewels of Los Angeles.

Eli Broad

#11. I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao ... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

Frank Gehry

#12. I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

#13. My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.

Amy Bloom

#14. My grandmother's life had been one long opera. There had been drama, heroes, villains, improbable twists, all that. But most of all there had been love, great big waves of it, crashing ceaselessly against the rocks of life, bearing us all back to grace.

Alex George

#15. In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

Renee Fleming

#16. It would be great to do a rock opera, but using more low-fi technology. I love shitty-sounding records.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#17. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.

Oscar Wilde

#18. In opera, as with any performing art, to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course, but you must also be famous. The two are different things.

Luciano Pavarotti

#19. [Opera] does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.

George Richard Marek

#20. My mother was devoted to helping people - with my father's money! - who had great voices but didn't have the financial means to study music. He and my mum gave away dozens of music scholarships, and my mum opened a school in town, introduced opera to children and created fantastic programmes.

Salma Hayek

#21. I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

J. D. Souther

#22. I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.

Gunther Schuller

#23. The favorite thing I like to do is nothing. I'm such an expert at doing nothing. I have a boat. I make training films for the Coast Guard. I listen to a great deal of opera.

Charles Nelson Reilly

#24. When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

Leslie Easterbrook

#25. Sessioning is simply the process of showing your player an exit for a play session. It might seem counterintuitive, but it appears in a great number of successful F2P titles. It is, to reuse the soap opera analogy, a cliffhanger.

Will Luton

#26. I think one of the great strengths of 'The Flash' is just how close everyone is on the show. They tend not to have these raging conflicts, like what we keep giving everybody on 'Arrow.' That show is more of a soap opera, and I don't say that derogatorily.

Andrew Kreisberg

#27. I cried for it. That's how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.

Jack Kerouac

#28. I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.

Jennifer Damiano

#29. 'All My Children' taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera!

Eva LaRue

#30. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Patti Smith

#31. I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It's a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it's a great date or something that's just hugely romantic.

Renee Fleming

#32. Order in a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid.

Suzanne Curchod

#33. My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.

Skylar Grey

#34. The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.

Maria Jeritza

#35. I love the way Monteverdi's opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.

Charles Hazlewood

#36. 'Macbeth' is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie - such as some of the special effects and bits of film - to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.

Dario Argento

#37. I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.

Jacqueline Carey