Opera Quotes

That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale.

E.A. Bucchianeri

None of us can choose where we shall love...

Susan Kay

I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

H. L. Mencken

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

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

W. H. Auden

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

W. H. Auden

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

Jean de la Bruyere

I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.

Franco Zeffirelli

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. On Lohengrin

Mark Twain

I never was an opera fan -- about twenty-five musically supreme masterpieces in this curious medium apart.

Hans Keller

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Kenneth Clark

I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

Luciano Berio

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

Hannah More

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, Maria Callas, 1981

If I weren't reasonably placid, I don't think I could cope with this sort of life. To be a diva, you've got to be absolutely like a horse.

Joan Sutherland

A supreme social challenge.

Cleveland Amory

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

Robertson Davies