A Quote by W. H. Auden

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, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

W. H. Auden

Quote Topics

Being Bores Common Cost Each Even Fact Feelings General Great Having History Human Human Will Imitation Insist Life Music Only Opera Ourselves Particular Passionate Quality Real Real Life Roles Rooted State Them Whatever Willful Willfulness Would

Quote Author

W. H. Auden
English - Poet
February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

W. H. Auden

Religion is not an imitation of Jesus or Mohammed. Even if an imitation is good, it is never genuine. Be not an imitation of Jesus, but be Jesus, You are quite as great as Jesus, Buddha, or anybody else. If we are not ... we must struggle and be. I would not be exactly like Jesus. It is unnecessary that I should be born a Jew.

Swami Vivekananda

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

J. M. Coetzee

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

Judith Butler

You feel touched by a movie in a good or bad way or you have a strong reaction to something that's totally artificial, to an imitation of life. But that imitation of life that you see on the screen can affect you almost as if it was real.

Gaspar Noe

When inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learned without experiencing it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.' I answered you: 'Isolde.' Isolde. The world became a word.

Jeanette Winterson

Imitation has to be avoided. Understanding should be the only law, never imitation.

Rajneesh

If you are to do justice to [the great roles], you must fly up to them - rather than dragging them down to you - by expanding your range of knowledge and strengthening your imagination. Your imagination must become as real to you as your memories and feelings. What you take into yourself about psychology, politics, sociology, history and so on, will allow you to reach places in yourself you didn't know existed. No line, no image, no thought can be left general. Each must be specific and personal. Your work is not complete until this is so.

Harold Guskin

I had a schoolmaster who was a supernumerary at Glyndebourne Opera, and through ,I got a job as a walk-on in Peter Hall's production of 'Don Giovanni' there in 1975 or 1976.

Richard McCabe

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

Theodor W. Adorno

[My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .

Barbara Hepworth

I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would never have written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker would have never played anything but swing music.

Charlie Parker

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

Tod Machover

There is a quality of murky grandeur we give ourselves in having our own feelings, recoiling, separate from other things... To feel that we can care for ourselves without seeing our feelings as objects, and liking them as objects, is to be wrong about our care for ourselves.