(274 quotes found)
“If an opera cannot be played by an organ grinder, it's not going to achieve immortality.”
Sir Thomas Beecham
“I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.”
Sir Edward Appleton
“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
W. H. Auden
“The ballet people are champagne drinkers. They are a younger, more exciting crowd than the opera people.”
Walter Nurena
“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.”
Noel Coward
“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings”
Ed Gardner
“The first rule in opera is the first rule in life: see to everything yourself.”
Nellie Melba
“In opera, there is always too much singing.”
Claude Debussy
“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
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
C. Wright Mills
