Quotes: Opera

It’s very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn’t there. And I don’t blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

I don’t limit my taste. There’s some jazz that I like and there’s some opera. I’ve been listening to what was essentially country music, but it crossed over to rock.

The opera always loses money. That’s as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that’s what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn’t know it.

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.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.