quotations about opera
Making opera is a risky, expensive business, which is why most large companies stick to the well-tested repertoire.
BILL RANKIN
"Calgary Opera breaks new ground in reviving Canadian work Filumena", The Globe and Mail, February 0, 2017
The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.
JOSH LANYON
A Dangerous Thing
We have all encountered the superficial allegiances of opera buffs, their cults of divas and heldentenors, and we all have also known people who on some visceral and unselfconscious level reject altogether the notion of sung drama. But difficulty in appreciating opera as serious drama is not the burden of sycophants and the naive alone. Instead we each contend with it, reaching our own more or less uneasy compromises with the genre. We struggle in some part of ourselves to restrain the skepticism that can shatter the spell of its music drama. We strive to accommodate the breach of verisimilitude inherent in its singing talk.
GARY TOMLINSON
"Pastoral and musical magic in the birth of opera", Opera and the Enlightenment
Parsifal is the kind of opera that starts at 6 o'clock. After it has been going three hours you look at your watch and it says 6:20.
DAVID RANDOLPH
attributed, The American Treasury
As for operas, they are essentially too absurd and extravagant to mention; I look upon them as a magic scene contrived to please the eyes and the ears at the expense of the understanding.
PHILIP STANHOPE
letter to his son, January 23, 1752
I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.
FANNY BURNEY
Evelina
Opera is like amateur golf. Most of the time it's pretty awful, but on those rare occasions when everything falls into place and you make a great shot, it feels amazing.
MATT DOBKIN
Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured But Confused
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
Characters
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.
CLEVELAND AMORY
NBC Television, April 6, 1961
Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
After the Quake
Much later in life, though, Gracie made a major contribution to the opera world. She stayed out of it.
GEORGE BURNS
Gracie
Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.
DIMITRIS MITA
attributed, goodreads
The opera ... is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H. L. MENCKEN
letter to Isaac Goldberg, May 6, 1925
Opera is certainly different from other art forms, but to say it's better only adds to the elitist mystique that keeps most people away.
MATT DOBKIN
Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured But Confused
I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years ... but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the passion of youth. And I live again. I feel something.
J. J. BROWN
Vector: A Modern Love Story
[Opera] does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.
GEORGE MAREK
attributed, The Magic of Opera
Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.
HELEN MACDONALD
H is for Hawk
Half the time, you don't know what an opera is truly telling you until you've lived with it a few decades.
DAVID PATRICK STEARNS
"Can new Metropolitan Opera boxed set redeem Philly composer's epic flop?", Philly, February 10, 2017
[Opera is] the changing audible perception of a supersensible realm.
GARY TOMLINSON
attributed, The Legacy of Opera
I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.
MARK TWAIN
Autobiography of Mark Twain