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Quotes about opera
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A supreme social challenge. (Amory Cleveland)
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. (Amory Cleveland)
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, Brnnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni. (Amory Cleveland)
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. (Amory Cleveland)
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Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. (Amory Cleveland)
A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera. (Amory Cleveland)
I never was an opera fan -- about twenty-five musically supreme masterpieces in this curious medium apart. (Amory Cleveland)
Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian. (Amory Cleveland)
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it. (Amory Cleveland)
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. (Amory Cleveland)
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers. (Amory Cleveland)
The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin] (Amory Cleveland)
I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts. (Amory Cleveland)
People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it. (Amory Cleveland)
I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth. (Amory Cleveland)
Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming. (Amory Cleveland)
I have also just finished three weeks on a soap opera in England. The soap opera is a rather famous one called Crossroads. It was first on television 25 years ago, and it has recently been brought back. I play the part of a businessman called David Wheeler. (Amory Cleveland)
The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge. (Amory Cleveland)
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