One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.
Opera Quotes
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.
That’s the wonderful thing about grand opera: you can do anything you want as long as you sing it!
I haven’t heard anything like that since the orphanage burned down. (when asked what he thought of an opera he’d just attended)
I don’t mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don’t understand.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
The golden age of opera, from Mozart to Verdi, coincided with the golden age of liberal humanism, of unquestioning belief in freedom and progress… To say that operas are more difficult to write does not mean that they are impossible. This would only follow if we should cease to believe in free will and personality […]
An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.
At the opera in Milan with my daughter and me, Needleman leaned out of his box and fell into the orchestra pit. Too proud to admit it was a mistake, he attended the opera every night for a month and repeated it each time.
