Top 100 Opera Music Quotes
#1. Even from far away, I could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music.
Rick Riordan
#2. Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.
Garth Greenwell
#3. Your iPod is whispering in your ear. It was keeping you company, but now it's like a good friend turned bad [ ... ] It is turning your life into a dark, looping rock opera.
Meg Jay
#4. Giovanni always had music running through his head. Moments he experienced in life recalled for him scenes from operas. [Giovanni Tempesta]
Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
#5. I think the power of opera has been shifted from the music to the director, because this is a very visual age that we live in.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#6. My favorite type of music to sing would be between R and B and opera.
Stefano Langone
#7. I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera.
Graham Parker
#9. Wagner thought Rossini unserious; Rossini thought Wagner 'lacked sun'. Wagner also became the butt of a phrase Rossini had used down the years to describe musicians about whom he had certain reservations - "He has some beautiful moments but some bad quarters of an hour!
Richard Osborne
#10. If it's about what I like, I like opera as a music and deathstep and dubstep.
Deyth Banger
#11. Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.
Diane Paulus
#13. Humans have created too many beautiful songs to settle on one particular genre. Whether techno or opera, it doesn't matter, as long as it has that certain edge, that something that makes it more. You just have to be able, or simply in the mood, to listen to it.
Natalie Herzer
#14. 'Lollipop Opera' is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It's utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It's like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.
John Lydon
#15. I sing a mixture of everything from opera, folk music, Broadway. It's a mix of things.
Katherine Jenkins
#16. In a film score, the last thing you want to do is take people out of the movie. The music is secondary. In opera, the music is the main event.
Stewart Copeland
#17. I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.
Anthony Davis
#18. Music and opera are a big part of my life.
Ailyn Perez
#19. ( ... ) The new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Specch, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.
James Joyce
#20. Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
Bobby McFerrin
#21. I'm a lover of all sorts of music, which makes me a chameleon when it comes to performing anything, whether it's opera or whatever. As long as it's good and it feels good, I'm going to cling to it.
R. Kelly
#22. I beg you, help me, in angelic charity,
Pray my efforts will reflect your mastery!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#23. Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.
Renee Fleming
#24. I would advise all young musicians to not only experience and play chamber music, but to go to operas, speak to the singers, to explore and expand your horizons.
Wu Han
#25. I had this exceptional classical music voice. If I'd followed a true path for my talent, I would have ended up being an opera singer.
Lesley Manville
#26. My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Wole Soyinka
#27. I love comedy and drama equally and music too. I just sort of follow my nose to whatever seems really exciting at the time. Eventually, I might want to do a rock opera.
Jack Black
#28. I would like to see more African-American singers as part of our opera companies. If you take music and the arts out of the public schools, then you're going to lose a lot of people that you might have discovered were talented, very early.
Jessye Norman
#29. I don't much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There's something about Wagner that's just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman's singing a song.
Philip Kerr
#30. When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of music.
Andrea Bocelli
#31. Music has always played a big part in my life and, believe it or not, in my soap opera career.
Kassie DePaiva
#32. I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.
Jess Row
#33. I'd go over to my grandmother's house, and she'd be playing opera. They loved opera. Not only did they play it on the radio, but they played it on their piano. Everybody learned how to read music and how to play.
Linda Ronstadt
#34. I have always loved music and singing, and I am open to listen to any type of music. Regardless of my mood, my heart is always set racing when I listen to opera. When I decide which music I want to hear, my choice is almost invariably an opera recording.
Andrea Bocelli
#35. I graduated from high school early so I could move to New York to do 'A Little Night Music' out of the New York City Opera.
Anna Kendrick
#36. I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!
Charles Lamb
#37. 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
#38. The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public.
Giacomo Puccini
#39. Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation. Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music of the night.
Charles Hart
#40. You could live without the opera singer, but not without the services of the baker. On this ground you might say that the baker performs a greater service; but no lover of music would agree.
Bertrand Russell
#42. Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.
John Philip Sousa
#43. 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
#44. One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
Lesley Garrett
#45. No more can this Angel teach her,
Yet, this guiding wing shall not forsake ...
E.A. Bucchianeri
#46. The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
H.L. Mencken
#47. Opera is the most complete art form. It includes drama, acting, technology (lighting), art (the sets), dance, and the epitome of the human voices. But mostly, go for the glorious music. The arts are crucial to the life of every community.
Karen DeCrow
#48. It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.
Bruce Beresford
#49. I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.
Brittany Murphy
#50. Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.
Neville Marriner
#52. Every year I go to Broadway to see a musical - I like the music. I saw 'Mamma Mia;' I saw 'Les Miserables;' I saw 'Phantom of the Opera' like six, seven times.
Rafael Nadal
#53. Behind every wall and every mirror and every vent, I hear sounds: breathing, rustling, footsteps, and murmurs. I try to tell myself it's just mice making their nests behind the barriers, but since when do rodents whisper?
A.G. Howard
#54. Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.
Haruki Murakami
#55. Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.
Sarah Caldwell
#56. I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing.
Cheryl Mendelson
#57. I don't limit my taste. There's some jazz that I like and there's some opera. I've been listening to what was essentially country music, but it crossed over to rock.
Rick Moranis
#58. Music in general and lately opera in particular fills my soul with hope and inspiration.
China Forbes
#59. Opera - above and beyond anything else - is about the music, and it should be about the music.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#60. 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
#61. That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.
Mordechai Vanunu
#62. My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.
Amanda Eliasch
#63. The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.
Yo-Yo Ma
#64. It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.
Luciano Pavarotti
#65. I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.
Donna Leon
#66. 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
#67. The opera ... is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H.L. Mencken
#68. The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.
Richard Wagner
#69. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy.
Henry Miller
#70. 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
#71. I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.
Rivers Cuomo
#72. He offered his love ... she could not bother,
She gives her love to the other! The other!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#73. I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.
David Sanborn
#74. I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
William Mapother
#75. When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.
Bruce Beresford
#76. I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.
Tod Machover
#77. Close your eyes and let music set you free.
Charles Hart
#78. Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."
Jeff Britting
#79. Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.
Shane Koyczan
#81. It's in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I'm clearly dramatic.
Mariah Carey
#82. I enjoy all forms of music - pop, classical and opera.
Stephen Hawking
#83. And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
#84. Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.
Sarah Caldwell
#85. I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music ... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.
Lady Gaga
#86. No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
#87. I took opera lessons. I can't read music to save my life, but I would just copy and get away with it. I think that they thought I could read music, but I can't. I would just listen.
Alex Winston
#88. Music helps to forget
This forsaken tomb,
That is my abode
Cellars down
Far below
Under the ground, ...
E.A. Bucchianeri
#89. In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.
Bruce Beresford
#90. Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!
Dave Brubeck
#91. I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.
Brian Eno
#92. Opera is music AND drama. I'm prepared to sacrifice the beautiful note for the meaningful sound any time ... I can make a pretty tone as well as anyone, but there are times when the drama of a scene demands the opposite of a pretty sound.
Beverly Sills
#93. I'd love to do 'Werther.' It's a great opera, and the music's so beautiful.
Stephen Costello
#94. Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
Edward Abbey
#95. My mum's an opera singer: I grew up watching her get swept up in music and transform herself into characters. She taught me that music is a lifelong journey, and that with every day and every song and every gig you learn something new.
Katie Noonan
#96. 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
#97. A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.
Rabih Alameddine
#98. I want to reach as many people as possible with the message of music, of wonderful opera.
Luciano Pavarotti
#99. I think that our lyrics are definitely dark, but I know for a fact that we pull our inspiration from a million different influences. We listened to everything growing up. Our music isn't just 'opera metal' or 'gothic pop' it's just Evanescence.
Evanescence
#100. The Phantom is not famous for forgiveness.
A.G. Howard
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
