Top 100 Quotes About The Opera
#1. When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.
Bruce Beresford
#2. Antsy, adj.
I swore I would never take you to the opera again.
David Levithan
#3. 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
#4. As Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.
Alan Bradley
#5. Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.
Philip Johnson
#6. Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!
BEWARE!!!!!
Yrs Sincerely,
The Opera Ghost
Terry Pratchett
#7. I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was 'The Phantom of the Opera' with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.
Dario Argento
#8. Smoked sausage and a jolly tupping. Ale and folly. Fickle bosoms and bar fights. That is the sum of experiences my souls gathered from their lives. Why do I attract all the unsophisticated fancy men? For once could one love the opera and his mother?
- Lucinda Myer, b. 1702-d. 1808
Amber Kizer
#9. I never step upon a stage without asking myself whether I will succeed in finishing the opera. The fact is that a conscientious singer is never sure of himself or of anything. He is ever in the hands of Destiny.
Enrico Caruso
#10. My greatest experiences in the theatre and the most religious experiences in my life - of which going to the opera is one for me - have been with the Romantic composers' repertoire: it's Wagner, it's Strauss, Verdi, Puccini. That era gets me every time.
Rufus Wainwright
#11. When I am on the opera stage, I am playing someone else. In recitals, I even have the chance to talk to the audience, which is something you don't get to do in opera.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#12. Rock pools, so-named because they have been hammered out of rocks at the ocean's edge, are one of Sydney's defining characteristics, along with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, though not as well known.
Raymond Bonner
#13. In January 2006, Phantom of The Opera broke the record for the longest-running show in Broadway history, overtaking Cats and reminding us what real entertainment is about: candles, dry ice, big hair, and the sort of synthesized chord progressions only achieved by a collapse at the keyboard.
Emma Brockes
#14. [W]hat with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business.
But Newport represented the escape from duty ...
Edith Wharton
#15. Why the hell do women always have to bring back up? It's not as if I'm going to molest her at the opera.
Poppet
#16. I had a year at 3 when I wanted to be a conductor in the opera.
Nina Arianda
#17. I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.
Cecilia Bartoli
#18. I was 6, and I was in the opera 'Carmen.' My dad sang opera and got me into the children's chorus. I was super fat at the time and didn't make eye contact with anyone. I knew I loved acting ever since.
Owen Benjamin
#19. The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
Harrison Birtwistle
#20. The roughest make-up I ever wore was for 'Phantom of the Opera' because the phantom's face was all disfigured, and he's trying to pass in public so he can attend his beloved opera. That was make-up over make-up.
Robert Englund
#22. The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.
James Gray
#23. Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night.
Richard H. Davis
#24. Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera ... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.
Elizabeth Bowen
#25. My aunt Marcia Cope-Hart was in 'Phantom Of the Opera' in San Francisco for quite a few years when I was growing up, so we would go into the city a lot to see her.
James Snyder
#26. Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime.
Shia Labeouf
#27. He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie.
Walter Kirn
#28. His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'24
Andrew Roberts
#29. I go to the opera. It's mostly my wife that's a bigger fan, I'd say, than I am. I like the big opera. I want a lot of people on stage, elephants and marching stuff, and the modern stuff I don't care for.
John Roberts
#30. I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.
Cab Calloway
#31. I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock.
Terry Teachout
#32. The opera isn't over until the fat lady sings.
Dick Motta
#33. You can't tell the story of a 13-year-old boy who knows every lyric to 'Phantom of the Opera' without also referencing how much teasing he gets at school.
Tim Federle
#34. If you look at Marriage of Figaro or Butterfly or Traviata, all of those elements are in there. I also have to have a very specific location in mind. The physical environment of where the opera takes place is very key - the "sound world."
Jake Heggie
#35. In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.
Victor Hugo
#36. The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
Claude Debussy
#37. I leaned across the table towards the crumb-thrower. "Do that again," I said, loud enough to be heard over the opera singer, Dolly, my mother, and the smell of the breadsticks, "and I will sell your firstborn child to the devil.
Maggie Stiefvater
#38. I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.
J.D. Salinger
#39. Since I was a child I've loved going to the opera, theatre and ballet.
Christian Lacroix
#40. Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
Graeme Murphy
#41. 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
#42. My dream is to be played everywhere, not only at the Opera.
Erik Satie
#43. The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
Jean De La Bruyere
#44. H is for Hardware store: I'd rather go to the hardware store than the opera. And I like the opera.
Marlene Dietrich
#45. The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.
Rudolf Bing
#46. I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world ... plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera.
Edward R. Tufte
#47. Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead. - Christine, from Gaston Leroux's: The Phantom of the Opera.
Gaston Leroux
#48. You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
#49. I hop onto the stage and joke-sing: "The Phaaaanntom of the Opera is there, innnnnside your mind." I attack the curtain with a flourish and sing on, "innnnside your mind.
Anne Eliot
#50. the very judicious plan of dividing the two acts of the opera with a ballet,
Alexandre Dumas
#51. You hear about Broadway your whole life, and I learned what it meant to work on Broadway in 'The Phantom of the Opera.'
Aaron Lazar
#52. I remember once saying in a television interview that the only things I hadn't been in were the opera and the ballet. Two days later, I got a call from Lord Harewood, of the English National Opera, saying "Would you like to be in 'Ariadne auf Naxos?'"
Donald Sinden
#53. People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home.
Martin Amis
#54. I'm an obsessive musical theatre person, so some of the most formative albums for me were, you know, the 'Phantom Of The Opera' soundtrack or 'Into The Woods.'
Allison Williams
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. She was trapped with a telepathic cat that wanted to go to the opera, in an elevator that had passed dungeon in favor of a lower floor - hell.
Nina Bangs
#59. '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
#60. Excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous
Leo Tolstoy
#61. I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs from 'The Phantom of the Opera.'
Mallory Jansen
#62. If I'm going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.
Jaime Winstone
#63. King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.
Mason Cooley
#64. The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.
Dario Argento
#65. Are you suggesting that we reopen the Opera with a murder as an added attraction?
Eric Taylor
#66. For a while, I couldn't decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I'm glad that I chose the latter because I wasn't a very good singer.
Christoph Waltz
#67. Note that both of these papers [the New York Post and the New York Daily News] are big sellers in a city whose residents like to go around saying they'd never live anyplace else on account of they'd miss the opera.
Dave Barry
#68. Hey you! I told you to slow that nag down! Because of you, I almost heard the opera!
Groucho Marx
#69. 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
#70. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and the building doorman. ou no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing aid calibrations. pg 269
Dominic Smith
#71. Room service? Send up a larger room.
[A Night at the Opera]
Groucho Marx
#72. Musicians ought to reclaim some of the power in the houses of production. The opera houses are run either by managers or by stage directors, never by musicians.
Laurence Equilbey
#73. Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.
Wim Wenders
#74. Ah,it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not,then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,which think themselves new; and which are yet but old,which pretend to be young like fine ladys at the opera.
Bram Stoker
#75. I went with him to the Opera Orchestra, even though the programs were so boring and dragged on so long that I feared I might actually black out and topple into the aisle.
Anonymous
#76. So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).
Philip Kitcher
#77. Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
Margaret Atwood
#78. Much later in life, though, Gracie made a major contribution to the opera world. She stayed out of it.
George Burns
#79. I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized.
David Cronenberg
#80. She was destroyed many years ago, La Belle, on the cobblestones of the alley beside the opera house ...
Anne Rouen
#81. I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more
Donald Barthelme
#82. Hey yogurt, if you're so cultured, how come I never see you at the opera?
Stephen Colbert
#83. My poor sister was forced to be in the plays that I would write. We would go to my grandma's retirement building and perform 'Phantom of the Opera.'
Lindy Booth
#84. You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
David Markson
#85. 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
#86. I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.
Fanny Burney
#87. I feel like it's a real shame that my generation doesn't make an appearance at the opera.
James Gray
#88. Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.
Alex Ebert
#89. Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go.
John Green
#90. It's not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may "get the girl" - but usually only with a pickax.
Andrew Davidson
#91. I've never been to the opera; I've only seen opera on DVD.
Gemma Arterton
#92. '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
#93. My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.
Bar Paly
#94. An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.
Maria Callas
#95. My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.
Francis Ford Coppola
#96. I hate the opera. I think I must have a tin ear. No matter how hard I concentrate it still sounds like a bunch of Italian chefs screaming risotto recipes at each other.
Aristotle Onassis
#97. The opera ... is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H.L. Mencken
#98. Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.
Hannah More
#99. A few days later we went to the opera together to watch my beloved Siegfried. It was a pleasure for me to listen to it beside the man who had become my hero.
Andre Maurois
#100. The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
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