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The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one. -- Jean de la Bruyere
We recognize the touch of the Opera ghost. -- Gaston Leroux
I'm Opera Singer. I can sing Brecht, Weil. -- Nina Hagen
Opera is for a lifetime, not just a minute. -- Kiri Te Kanawa
Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me. -- Luciano Pavarotti
I'm a true opera buff. Operas make the best stories. -- Andrea Davis Pinkney
Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world. -- Haruki Murakami
Opera is given so little attention in the national press. -- Carlisle Floyd
Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming. -- Peter Boyle
Later, I even appeared in a Rock Opera with Richard Gere. -- Barry Bostwick
My dream is to be played everywhere, not only at the Opera. -- Erik Satie
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong. -- Terry Pratchett
Opera singers, we're not muscle men; you have to be careful about your work. -- Ildar Abdrazakov
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian. -- H. L. Mencken
Opera is a musical scenery, a musical atmosphere in which the characters move and talk. -- Erik Satie
I was nostalgic even as a young man. Preferred listening to Opera not Bing Crossby. -- Ruskin Bond
Are you suggesting that we reopen the Opera with a murder as an added attraction? -- Eric Taylor
I'd love to come to Australia. I'd love to walk about the Sydney Opera House. -- Nik Wallenda
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. -- Robert Benchley
The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money. -- Rudolf Bing
The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love. -- Dario Argento
Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions. -- Sarah Caldwell
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. -- W. H. Auden
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater. -- Graeme Murphy
After 'Spelling Bee,' I started landing more jobs... I got 'Candide' at New York City Opera. -- Lauren Worsham
Opera is one of the most important art forms. It should be listened to and appreciated by everyone. -- Luciano Pavarotti
I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs from 'The Phantom of the Opera.' -- Mallory Jansen
Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?) -- Edward Abbey
I've always gravitated towards opera, and the Royal Opera House is quite possibly the greatest opera house on earth. -- Rufus Wainwright
Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story. -- Diane Paulus
Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone. -- George Bernard Shaw
Opera is an exclusive art form, so it cannot be that popular. I just do what I love to do. -- Anna Netrebko
King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us. -- Mason Cooley
Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead." - Christine, from Gaston Leroux's: The Phantom of the Opera. -- Gaston Leroux
Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate. -- Elizabeth Bowen
Opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge. -- Cleveland Amory
Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose? -- Lesley Garrett
Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice. -- Beverly Sills
The Opera reminds me of my tax audit. It was in a language I didn't understand. And it ended in tragedy. -- Jeff MacNelly
But Opera Man, I go, 'Oh, crap! Why didn't I think of that?' Because I could sing fake opera pretty good. -- Jon Lovitz
Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night. -- Richard H. Davis
Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley. -- Shane Koyczan
Soloist are inspiring in Opera and perhaps even in small entreprenurial ventures, but there is no place for them in large corporations. -- Norman Ralph Augustine
Why, in the Peking Opera, are women's roles played by men?...Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act. -- David Henry Hwang
Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health. -- David Edelstein
Dare to be honest and fear no labor. ... Opera is where a man gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. -- Robert Burns
We used to have front-row seats for the Grand Opera House pantomime every year, and once the dame May McFettridge got me up on-stage. -- Rachel Tucker
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 graduated from high school early so I could move to New York to do 'A Little Night Music' out of the New York City Opera. -- Anna Kendrick
[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 Richard Marek
At the moment I'm enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I'm also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science. -- Deborah Bull
Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit. -- Andrea Bocelli
I'm an obsessive musical theatre person, so some of the most formative albums for me were, you know, the 'Phantom Of The Opera' soundtrack or 'Into The Woods.' -- Allison Williams
Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards. -- Robert Gottlieb
I can go from one extreme to another, from playing at the Sydney Opera House on the Songbook tour to shows with Soundgarden at Voodoo Fest, all in a week. -- Chris Cornell
I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life. -- Gunther Schuller
Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic. -- John Darnielle
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. -- Richard Wagner
'Phantom of the Opera' started in my little 100-seater converted church in Britain with a stage where we did what we did. But it was the score itself was what made it. -- Andrew Lloyd Webber
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time. -- Bobby McFerrin
Americans, they have an incredible operatic tradition: the Metropolitan Opera House is - if not the most prestigious - one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world for over 100 years. -- Jose Carreras
Opera stars know that biology is destiny. Sometime in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears. -- Michael A. Walsh
Rock pools, so-named because they have been hammered out of rocks at the ocean's edge, are one of Sydney's defining characteristics, along with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, though not as well known. -- Raymond Bonner
Every year I go to Broadway to see a musical - I like the music. I saw 'Mamma Mia;' I saw 'Les Miserables;' I saw 'Phantom of the Opera' like six, seven times. -- Rafael Nadal
I performed in Sydney some years ago for the Sydney Festival and I am just so pleased to be returning to the wonderful Sydney Opera House and also performing in Melbourne for the first time. -- Lesley Garrett
Even when I rehearse down in the bowels of the Metropolitan Opera, you can't help but think why The Phantom of the Opera was inspired by what happens in the bowels of the opera house. -- Susan Stroman
Opera needs to be a total escape from real life. To relate to what we're going through today is fine and dandy, but it's really about being transported and completely swept away by a romantic notion. -- Rufus Wainwright
I'm still wondering about the Phantom in the chair, you know at the end of Phantom [of the Opera], so I guess that's my sort of idiocy. I still haven't figured out how they do that. -- Katherine Shindle
If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it. -- Margaret Fuller
My mother sent me to dance and drama classes when I was young, and then I got a stage role in 'Set To Partners' when I was 12, followed by Benjamin Britten's 'Let's Make An Opera.' -- Shirley Eaton
Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing. -- Lisa See
Opera is full of trappings that make us go away from being human. You can't let them do that. You can't walk like you're in an opera! You have to make it real. You have to just be there. -- Charles Nelson Reilly
One of the most wonderful memories in my life was when I sang at the Opera House in Sydney. I will never forget that. It is one of the most beautiful Houses I have ever sung in my life. -- Nana Mouskouri
It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created. -- Bruce Beresford
My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voice - so I do consider it an opera. -- Tod Machover
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
Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements, and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. -- David Ogilvy
In opera, there is always too much singing. -- Claude Debussy
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive. -- Moliere
It's in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I'm clearly dramatic. -- Mariah Carey
I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music. -- Anthony Davis
The first rule in opera is the first rule in life: see to everything yourself -- Nellie Melba
It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else. -- Carlisle Floyd
I want to reach as many people as possible with the message of music, of wonderful opera. -- Luciano Pavarotti
We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi. -- Cecilia Bartoli
It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera. -- Luciano Pavarotti
I would just like to say that opera is no longer about fat people in breastplates shattering wine glasses. -- Lesley Garrett
What opera isn't violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can't -- Cab Calloway
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand. -- Edward Victor Appleton
I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts. -- Franco Zeffirelli
We're a very expensive group; we break a lot of rules. It's unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear . -- Freddie Mercury
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
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. -- Edith Wharton
In opera, as with any performing art, to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course, but you must also be famous. The two are different things. -- Luciano Pavarotti
I don't know why a computer game can't be an art form just as a puppet show or an opera is. I'm still interested in computer games as something I would like to work on someday. -- Fred Saberhagen
To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama. -- Junichiro Koizumi
Shameless self-publicity works, of course: living your life as a soap opera. -- Chris Lowe
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral. -- H. L. Mencken
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it. -- Hannah More
I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house. -- Alvar Aalto
Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money. -- Wim Wenders
Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime. -- Shia LaBeouf
I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy. -- Alan Dershowitz
I always believed 'The Fly' to be a classic opera story. It's a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice. -- Howard Shore
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera. -- William Butler Yeats
I'm just a normal person. It's not like I come home and think about opera. My thoughts are about completely other things. Shoes! Dresses! Expensive ones: with a pretty silhouette, beautiful fabrics. -- Anna Netrebko
My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer. -- Tunde Adebimpe
Burton Cummings joining the Guess Who in January 1966 changed my life forever. It's been a rocky affiliation, no doubt. One journalist once described our relationship as the longest running soap opera in Canadian history. That may be a bit oversimplified. -- Randy Bachman
I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture. -- Frank Gehry
I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera. -- Javier Bardem
Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime. -- Andrea Bocelli
Tiles, the best furniture, fabrics, bath fixtures, bronze - just leaf through any design magazine and you immediately understand they're all 'Made in Italy.' We have the premier opera house in the world, La Scala, and behind the Nobel given to CERN is the research of many Italians. -- Lapo Elkann
Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. -- Camille Paglia
My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. Yes, it's got hard stuff in it, but so does 'Les Miserables' and 'Phantom of the Opera.' -- Marsha Norman
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today. -- Willie Nelson
The opera ghost really existed -- Gaston Leroux
I am a living soap opera. -- Virginia Graham
Bed is the poor man's opera -- Italian Proverb
I would love to sing opera. -- Leona Lewis
Life is an X-rated soap opera. -- John Irving

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