Singing Opera Quotes

#1. I got last-minute rush seats to Baz Luhrmann's 'Boheme,' and my favorite singer, Ekaterina Solovyeva, was playing Mimi that day. My face got burned off when she sang the aria 'Donde Lieta Usci.' The woman was technically sobbing and singing opera at the same time. I don't know how you do that.

Nina Arianda

#2. But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

Placido Domingo

#3. 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

#4. The word 'theatrical' makes me cringe, because it suggests a performance is staged, put on, rehearsed. And while all this is true for an opera, I believe the act of singing and performing should always be honest, raw, guttural.

Zola Jesus

#5. Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.

Gioachino Rossini

#6. There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva

Josh Groban

#7. Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

Bruce Beresford

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I was singing when I was five years old. My sister and I both had the talent from mom and dad, and she was in opera and I was into pop and uh, rhythm and blues, anything, I was about a four octave singer.

Carl Gardner

#11. It was nothing like Roxanne singing, where it seemed that everyone's heart would have to wait until she finished before it could beat again.

Ann Patchett

#12. The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.

Claude Debussy

#13. I want to be known by people who are knowledgeable about opera, who appreciate bel canto singing, people who have more sensitivity.

Alfredo Kraus

#14. Alexia was not a particularly musical person, and her husband, a noted opera singer in his human days, had once described her bath time warbling as those of a deranged badger.

Gail Carriger

#15. 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

#16. I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall.

Katherine Jenkins

#17. 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

#18. Italians are fantastic people, really. They can work you over in an alley while singing an opera.

Don Rickles

#19. Wherever you walk, stand or sit, do it with self-confidence and be firmly convinced: I am a singer! Being tentative is one of the deadly theatre sins.

Marita Knobel

#20. As a young singer, you have to get experience somehow, to try things out and grow as a singer. They way you do that is by going through the ranks and singing at companies like Opera Birmingham. It's a perfect place to foster a career.

Susanna Phillips

#21. And my singing, I don't think I could sing Wagner or opera, but I could probably carry a tune. I was in a musical once, but it was never performed.

Wallace Shawn

#22. I studied classical opera, so I was always singing in Italian and German and French.

Wang Leehom

#23. When I do operas, I'm not really singing very classically. I have a classical background as far as being a pianist and an oboist, but my voice isn't really classical in the operatic sense. But I certainly have a classical sensibility, so I'm comfortable being in that world.

Jason Graae

#24. My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.

Alexander Chee

#25. I quit my job in the bank when I was 19. I took a chance. I went to Milan to study opera and singing. My father really supported me economically.

Marcello Giordani

#26. I have no desire to become a crossover artiste, singing with microphones. I believe in opera; that it is something that young people would love if they had a chance to hear it.

Anna Netrebko

#27. 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

#28. I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.

Ruben Blades

#29. I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

Edgar Allan Poe

#30. I had four or five years in school training as a soprano. I fell into pop singing because of economics. I got out of high school and had to go work, and they weren't hiring opera singers.

Jo Stafford

#31. In opera, there is always too much singing.

Claude Debussy

#32. For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume ... to do something with your body. When singing in concert, you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural.

Andrea Bocelli

#33. My grandma did opera singing for the better part of her life; she used to sing all over the place. My grandpa was a sax player, and he used to travel all over the place, too.

Mac DeMarco

#34. Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit.

Andrea Bocelli

#35. As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.

Zola Jesus

#36. The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.

Marianne Faithfull

#37. It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly.

Audrey Niffenegger

#38. Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.

Diane Paulus

#39. 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