Top 1200 Opera Singers Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

My degree was in opera.

There's a lot of great singers out here.

People talk about Frank Sinatra all the time - and they should talk about Frank - but he had the greatest arrangers. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards.

The way I see it, all the popular singers are strippers.

All blues singers are great liars.

There's a kind of a line between music and math, so I guess I got the music gene, thank goodness. But my mother wasn't too thrilled. She wanted me to go to university and get a degree or do something, and my father, he liked opera so he wasn't too thrilled either, because he wanted me to be an opera singer and I didn't have - as he said, I don't really have the strength to do that.

I am inspired by all kinds of players and singers.

It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing smaller projects.[The opera] Akhnaten fits in with Gandhi and Einstein, so that forms a trilogy in a way.I picked people who were these kind of larger than life characters, who kind of changed the world they lived in by almost the force of their personality and their inventiveness. People that I think not only do I admire but I think they're admirable people.

Opera is really fun.

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.

What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician?

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

I'm a fan of real singers. I just gravitate towards that.

I've been through a lot of beef with other singers, but it's all verbal.

What's an opera if everyone is dead in it?

I have always loved soul singers.

So many great singers we know have come from the church.

I think I'm making a difference for a lot of young singers.

For all my songs, I keep changing singers till I am not happy.

Lead singers, they're their own breed.

Sleep is the apple a day, really, for singers.

We're going to be the best in the league at something. We're deep in anthem singers.

There are so many people in this world that have the look and have talent, and yet they keep putting out this teenybopper singers that have no vocal capability at all. Sometimes I think there's no real music anymore. We don't have singers like we did back in the day. Music is supposed to convey a message. Music is supposed to make you feel a certain way. Now, I don't want to hear about big bootie shaking on the floor. Music just isn't what it used to be. I think that with the times changing, labels do actually need to get that and stop signing all these crap artists.

I wouldn't know anything about opera music if it wasn't for Bugs Bunny. That was my entire introduction to opera music. I wouldn't know anything about classical music if it wasn't for "Fantasia." They didn't have to do that stuff. They chose to base this ridiculous, funny, intriguing, creative story on this beautiful classical music. It's the combination of the high and the low that I thought was very cool. But I had no concept of it as a kid.

The Opera House guidelines have from time to time been amended, whether it's for other sporting events or other causes. The guidelines have always been stretched in the part and the commercialisation of the Opera House has always been there.

The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.

The singers who are the most honest are the ones who become immortalized.

I don't believe in karaoke. Let's let the singers sing.

As for singers, I'm fond of Mohit Chauhan.

Oh, man, pop singers are terrible actors. We're all bad.

I love to sing with great singers.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.

Guitar players never listen to lead singers.

I have trouble watching singers because they are so sincere.

It's always been my goal to have backing singers.

All great singers copy someone else in the initial stages.

I'm an opera lover.

There are no Soul singer Wilson Pickett singers in disco.

I couldn't stand the politics in opera.

A lot of bad behavior in singers is caused by nerves.

When people are training to become singers, they all have moments when they hit a wall.

I have never had plastic surgery, and there are many pop singers who have.

I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.

All singers, no matter how gifted, should always try to go improve. And all students begin in the same place despite the level of their talent. It's like bodybuilding: All people who train use similar exercises no matter how naturally physically endowed a person may be. I have worked with many of the most brilliant singers in modern music and it's always the case that they have a great deal of under-realized potential no matter how amazing their abilities.

I'm the only person in my family who can't sing. My grandmother was an opera singer and all of her kids were in church five days a week - or between church and vocal lessons at Carnegie Hall. But my mom had her first studio experience recording on my album. She's used to having to fill the room, so she had to adjust to the microphone and not sing opera.

First, my frame of reference for the Britten opera shifted. I'd always thought of Britten's approach in Death in Venice as another exploration of the plight of the individual whose aspirations are at odds with those of the surrounding community: his last opera returning to the themes of Peter Grimes. As I read and listened and thought, however, Billy Budd came to seem a more appropriate foil for Death in Venice.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

Background singers who are any good have to be great imitators.

I'm by no means an opera buff.

I like R&B. I listen to music, not singers.

I am one of the few singers who has reinvented oneself with every song.

In our country, singers are known as the voice of actors.

A film is made for actors and actresses, not for singers.

A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.

I'm under no illusion. There are lots of male singers out there with raspy voices.

Every opera, because every opera is a unique slice of a particular perspective, historical perspective and psychological perspective if not musical style, and so forth, they all present different challenges. Some can be musically very challenging, some can be psychologically more challenging. There is always something that requires a pretty specific amount of energy and attention.

We're entertainers, not just singers!

I like to YouTube a lot, and try and find unknown singers.

There are so many great singers out there.

I love to conduct opera.