Opera House Quotes:

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

- H. L. Mencken

source: 1925 Letter to Isaac Goldberg.

topic: Funny, Music, House, Opera House

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

topic: Imagination, Long, House, Opera House, Opera Singers

Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

- Eleanor Robson Belmont

source: Eleanor Robson Belmont (1957). “The Fabric of Memory”

topic: Spiritual, Blessed, Inspiration, Opera House

I want to get out of the major opera houses.

- Renee Fleming

topic: House, Want, Opera, Opera House

I don't think an opera house is ever a place that can make you entirely happy.

- Bernard Haitink

source: "Haitink lays down operatic baton on his 75th birthday". Interview with Martin Kettle, www.theguardian.com. March 5, 2004.

topic: Thinking, House, Opera, Opera House

I'd love to come to Australia. I'd love to walk about the Sydney Opera House.

- Nik Wallenda

topic: Australia, House, Opera, Opera House

I've always gravitated towards opera, and the Royal Opera House is quite possibly the greatest opera house on earth.

- Rufus Wainwright

topic: House, Opera, Royal, Opera House

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

- Bruce Beresford

topic: Song, Art, Numbers, Opera House

I belong to the givers. I want to give a little happiness even if I haven’t had much for myself. Music has enriched my life and, hopefully - through me, a little - the public’s. If anyone left an opera house feeling more happy and at peace, I achieved my purpose.

- Maria Callas

topic: Giving, House, Feelings, Opera House

The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.

- Martin Filler

topic: Cities, League, House, City Planning, Opera House

Fitzcarraldo is a mad dreamer. He's willing to sacrifice everything in order to make his vision of an opera house. That metaphor of pulling the boat over the mountain is so integral to anyone making any creative effort. It's that universal Sisyphean struggle.

- Sam Pressman

topic: Struggle, Sacrifice, Order, Opera House

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

topic: Beautiful, Memories, House, Opera House, Wonderful Memories

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

- Esa-Pekka Salonen

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Ideas, House, Trying, Opera House, New Talent

And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.

- Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

topic: Doors, House, Unity, Opera House, Nothing New

People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.

- Bryn Terfel

topic: Thinking, People, House, Opera House

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

topic: House, Challenges, Television, Opera House, New Challenges

In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that's not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep.

- Jeffrey Tate

source: "Jeffrey Tate: 'I've had to fight all my life'". interview with Tom Service, www.theguardian.com. October 13, 2011.

topic: Europe, Two, House, Opera House, House Music

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

topic: House, Opera, Week, Opera House

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

- Jo Nesbo

topic: Museums, Water, House, Tall Ships, Harbour

After I left college, I went to work at the Royal Opera House in London, which became a real catalyst for me because it made me realize that I was interested in cinema and in the way life is thrust at you. So I started making films.

- Sam Taylor-Wood

source: "New Again: Sam Taylor-Johnson". Interview with David Furnish, Lauren Lieb, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 23, 2013.

topic: Real, College, House, Opera House

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

topic: Years, House, Opera, Opera House, Sydney

I have a lot of projects I get asked for, but the opera house really is my house - my home. It's where I feel comfortable and confident and I get to explore these big human stories and dramas and collaborate with extraordinary people, great talented artists and administrators and other people who are passionate about it and support it. It's like working with a great big family - the family you love and enjoy being with all the time.

- Jake Heggie

source: Source: www.broadwayworld.com

topic: Drama, Home, Artist, Opera House

I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sundays and, if I was lucky, another at the Opera House on Monday after school.

- David Wenham

source: "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Teacher, Monday, Drama, Opera House, Drama Class

[Rock 'n' roll] is still a primitive form and there's no way you can get away from that. It's one of the primitive art forms and that's why it's good and that's why it's lasted...you know, it hasn't become sophisticated and it's not in the opera house.

- Van Morrison

source: Source: ritchieyorke.com

topic: Art, Rocks, House, Opera House

I think it's the responsibility of a major opera house not only to cultivate debate and get people thinking, but also to be interfaced with things that challenge them. To challenge its audience and not just deliver things that they know, even though some of those things are wonderful.

- Wayne McGregor

topic: Responsibility, Thinking, People, Opera House

A lot of performers don't want to leave the circuit, the European opera house circuit, partly because most singers don't sing many concerts, or at least not while they are in their prime.

- Renee Fleming

topic: House, Opera, Want, Opera House

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

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Thinking, House, Opera, Opera House

It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and this magnifies all details of a performance, all exaggerations. In the theater, you can get away with a very large, very grand phrase. For the microphone, you have to tone it down. It's the same as making a film, your gestures will be seen in close-up, so they cannot be exaggerated as they would be in a theater.

- Maria Callas

source: "Callas : The Art and the Life". Book by John Ardoin, 1974.

topic: Opera House

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

topic: Thinking, Vacation, People, Opera House, Parthenon

Musicians ought to reclaim some of the power in the houses of production. The opera houses are run either by managers or by stage directors, never by musicians.

- Laurence Equilbey

source: "There Will Be Joy". Interview with Lydia Perović, logger.believermag.com. August 1, 2013.

topic: Running, House, Musician, Opera House

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

- Donna Leon

topic: Book, Talking, Ideas, Opera House, Escalation

Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.

- Philip Johnson

topic: Years, People, House, Opera House

Museums just seem to have this borrowed cachet—if I want to seem cultural, I will design something cultural. I resist the idea that culture is only opera houses or theatres. Culture is your entire life around you: toilets, the bus, the kerb or the dump where you drag your waste. Culture has come to mean the arts, but it’s swimming pools as well.

- Thomas Heatherwick

topic: Art, Mean, Swimming, Opera House, Swimming Pool

Once, when we were playing at the Apollo Theater, Holiday was working a block away at the Harlem Opera House. Some of us went over between shows to catch her, and afterwards we went backstage. I did something then, and I still don't know if it was the right thing to do—I asked her for her autograph.

- Ella Fitzgerald

topic: Block, Holiday, House, Opera House, Harlem

They crested a rise, and there it was, in the hollow between rolling hills—a low, square building, ghostly gray in the moonlight. "Is that it?" asked Hamilton. "It probably isn't the local opera house," groaned Ian.

- Gordon Korman

topic: Squares, House, Rolling, Opera House, Rolling Hills