OPERA QUOTES IV

quotations about opera

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

PETER SHAFFER

Amadeus

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Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

RICHARD BENCHLEY

attributed, Music of the Great Composers: A Listener's Guide to the Best of Classical Music


Exposing impressionable young men to the glories of opera on their first evening at home with you tended to put the kiss of death on things.

ANTHONY MCDONALD

Getting Orlando


I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

DAVE BARRY

Dave Barry Talks Back

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The Opera is the most artificial of all things.... It does not subsist as an imitation of nature, but in contempt of it; and, instead of seconding, its object is to pervert and sophisticate all our natural impressions of things.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

The Opera

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Opera is, after all, the most artificial and artful of all the performance arts, the least likely to reflect "real life." It merely embeds the conventions of its time, and we need not get worked up about its prejudices or the values it transmits. In fact, the argument is made that one should not seek "values" at all in such a luxuriant art form; or as Taruskin sums up his position, "Great music sanitizes whatever it touches."

CARYL EMERSON

"The Boris Plot on Stage: Karamzin, Pushkin, and Musorgsky as Historical Thinkers", Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature, and Society


For all sorts of reasons opera -- even comic opera -- is usually no laughing matter.

TOM SUTCLIFFE

Believing in Opera


Every opera is stylized; if it were not, it wouldn't be an opera.

DAVID B. HINTON

The Films of Leni Riefenstahl