Operatic Performance Quotes

Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.

The emotion is the music and the script is the libretto.

Opera is a musical scenery, a musical atmosphere in which the characters move and talk.

Galás is a great artist with a very powerful voice.

Hey you! I told you to slow that nag down! Because of you, I almost heard the opera!

I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.

OPERA, n. A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no postures but attitudes.

The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna.

When you say you're doing an opera, it's like when you're a seven-year-old and say, 'I'm off to Washington, Dad.' You kind of go, 'Sure. Sure you are, son.'

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.

I did not want to be the accompanist to an operatic star. But I was at a very high level for a 16-year-old, and I maintained that. So really good, but more impressive than classically trained. So I had to take a crash course in classical technique because I really wanted to get away with playing this character [in Florence Foster Jenkins] without people saying, "That's not really accurate."

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

I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. One of my closest friends is a composer, Paul Moravec, and a few years ago, Paul and I were at lunch, and I said to him, "you really have to write an opera." So, he says very casually to me, "I'll do it if you write the libretto." Well, little did I know that the within a couple of years we would end up getting a commission from the Santa Fe Opera to write an opera together, "The Letter," which turned out to be the most successful commissioned opera in the history of the Santa Fe Opera.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

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.

There isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.

When I'm about to train a new opera, I first listen to how Jussi Björling did it. His voice was unique and it's his path that I want to follow. I would more than anything else wish that people compared me with Jussi Björling. It's like so I'm striving to sing.

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

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.

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.

Much later in life, though, Gracie made a major contribution to the opera world. She stayed out of it.

It's a crazy soprano, and singing as a man as a woman. But for many years, I was on the road in Chicago as Mary Sunshine, so I can do that. I didn't think there was any way I was going to get it - it was so far out of my comfort-zone.

I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful - also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice.

I had to learn all the pieces backward and forward [to play it in "Florence Foster Jenkins"]. We practiced on weekends. It was very much like being in school, except it was with Meryl Streep. Like, I would go to her apartment and we would practice Mozart's "Queen of the Night."

The word 'operatic' is often misused to mean over the top, where someone is over-emoting. And that does a terrible disservice because 'operatic' to me means a commitment and a belief to the emotion of the moment that is sincere.