Bruce Beresford Quotes

But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.

The point of opera is that people are moved by the emotions and music.

Then came the choreography... the impact of music and choreography tends to really emphasize an overall feeling of what you really want out of the program.

To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama.

Opera - above and beyond anything else - is about the music, and it should be about the music.

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.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while.

Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime.

One of the things I love about opera is that it's the combination of all the art forms, and certainly the world of fashion is a big deal in it.

Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn't.

Music is the strongest form of magic.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don't manage that - but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.

I change the language with which I use my voice. In opera, I know I have an orchestra behind me; I have to communicate to people very far from me.

Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.

Each song, you're telling a story and acting.

We've mastered the art of making pretty music that makes you want to die.

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

My No. 1 piece of advice, especially for someone who's an actor-singer-dancer - a triple threat, they're called! - people say, 'What's the most important?' I always say acting. Without knowing why you're singing or what you're singing about, it's just noise. And without knowing why you're moving your body, it's just flailing of arms.