Opera Experience Quotes

When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being - it's beyond belief.

After 'Spelling Bee,' I started landing more jobs... I got 'Candide' at New York City Opera.

In my teens, I saw a terrible production of 'Die Walkuere.' To a person of 15, it was just awful, and it put me off for many years. Eventually I became an opera-goer, if not an opera buff.

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

If you are going to take me a to a musical, you'd better give me three songs that I'm gonna like. Nobody goes to the opera for the recitative. They go for the aria.

I'd been trained in choral, gospel, and a little bit of opera.

Opera needs to be a total escape from real life. To relate to what we're going through today is fine and dandy, but it's really about being transported and completely swept away by a romantic notion.

The Metropolitan Opera, of course, is the gold standard in opera. The Met experience includes the huge stage, the vast audience, the elaborate sets. Anyone who saw 'Faust' there - I did - knows exactly what hell is like, complete with fire, smoke and terror.

For the first time I go to La Scala, for each thing, for each rehearsal, my knees were shaking. But the audience was very fine with me.

Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.

I had a schoolmaster who was a supernumerary at Glyndebourne Opera, and through, I got a job as a walk-on in Peter Hall's production of 'Don Giovanni' there in 1975 or 1976.

Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

I was a super once - an extra - in 'Die Fledermaus,' and was seated within three feet of Placido Domingo. I had never heard a voice of that beauty so close up. It felt as if an electric shock were running through me.

When you realize that the uncut 'Porgy and Bess' started me off, that I'd have the opportunity to do a ton of 'Stoppard,' 'Hairspray,' that I'm able to do 'Il Trittico' at the Met - how do I top that?

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Professionally, I did a couple of operas when I was in school, when I was 18.

I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.

I guess my first professional experience was when my church choir director told my mother that I had a gift with my voice and said that I should think about auditioning, at 11 years old, for the chorus of our regional opera company.