OPERA QUOTES
quotations about opera
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN
Time Magazine, December 29, 1961
The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Opera's Second Death
Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.
ANONYMOUS
Opera is always regarded as the most expensive of the performing arts. It often absorbs the lion's share of government subsidy to them, though it is the least widely attended.
RUTH TOWSE
A Handbook of Cultural Economics
In certain ways sleep is useful. It is an excellent way of listening to an opera.
JAMES STEPHENS
The Crock of Gold
The opera isn't over till the fat lady sings.
ANONYMOUS
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. MENCKEN
attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
Opera cuts to the chase--as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
JULIAN BARNES
Levels of Life
Opera is like an oyster; it must be swallowed whole or not at all.
SPIKE HUGHES
Nights at the Opera
People's reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don't, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.
J. F. LAWTON
Pretty Woman
Once you realize that opera is in fact flawed, and that opera is an art form both to be admired and to poke fun at, then I think you're more likely to get over any hesitation you may have.
MATT DOBKIN
Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured But Confused
Going to the Opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.
HANNAH MORE
letter to her sister, 1775
Nightfall, going to the opera. Changing worlds. Trading the working world for one of fantastic, fleeting leisure. Climbing giant staircases. Bronze women proffer fake torches, ceilings full of goddesses and gods ... in this architecture can be read a whole, no longer existent, world. The ghosts of a society wander here in a dream.
CATHERINE CLEMENT
Opera: The Undoing of Women
In an opera, the poetry must be the obedient daughter of music.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
letter to his father, October 13, 1781
Opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Love in the Time of Cholera
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
MOLIÈRE
attributed, The Moderate Soprano
There isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.
MARK TWAIN
Bite-Size Twain: Wit and Wisdom from the Literary Legend
If there's one good thing to be said about opera, it's that it makes a man appreciate all other forms of entertainment so much more.
MARK LAWRENCE
Prince of Fools
We are living in operatic times. Forget what you've heard about opera being remote and elitist. Opera is also the art form that, perhaps more than any other, specializes in heightened emotion, and in finding ways to communicate it.
ANNE MIDGETTE
"How to survive the next four years on social media? Opera can help.", Washington Post, February 10, 2017
Every theatre is an insane asylum, but an opera theatre is the ward for the incurables.
FRANZ SCHALK
attributed, Losing the Plot in Opera: Myths and Secrets of the World's Great Operas