Top 1200 Opera Singer Quotes & Sayings

I have so much respect for the big opera singers that I never dare to say I'm a singer.

The activity of a singer that sings opera is similar to that of an athlete.

As a young singer, you have to get experience somehow, to try things out and grow as a singer. They way you do that is by going through the ranks and singing at companies like Opera Birmingham. It's a perfect place to foster a career.

I had classical training but I don't consider myself an opera singer though.

I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.

I have never called myself an opera singer. Other people do, but I always call myself a classical singer. I'd love to do opera, but I'm still too young and I don't want to do it until I'm ready. I realise that when I do that it's going to be... up for discussion, shall we say, so I want to get it right.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.

The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.

When I was very young I wanted to be an opera singer, a ballet dancer... The people I loved were a little different.

The only thing I daydreamed about was being an opera singer. But I was so skinny and so pathetic that that sort of wasn't going to happen.

My father was an opera singer who constantly tried to persuade me not to enter into an artistic career.

My sister is an opera singer. I grew up going to her recitals. This whole time, I'm like, 'She's the singer. I'm just strumming along and yelling.'

My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.

In the early 1970s, I took singing lessons with John Hargreaves, a leading singer with English National Opera, when I was home from university.

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were

I know I'm an opera singer, but we're actors, too.

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.

Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice.

I had this exceptional classical music voice. If I'd followed a true path for my talent, I would have ended up being an opera singer.

I really thought I wanted to be a musical-comedy star, but I lived in Phoenix and didn't want to go all the way to New York and be that far away from home. So I thought maybe I'd be a rock 'n' roll singer or an opera singer.

My family was very musical. My brother is an opera singer; my parents both sang.

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.

I think every singer should be able to jump in for a singer who has been sick, for instance, and learn an opera in two days. I know people who can do it.

I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!

I originally wanted to be an opera singer. I studied classical voice at the University of Washington but soon realised I didn't have the instrument or the discipline. The road for opera singers is more difficult than for actors.

In opera tradition, when opera die-hard fans, there is a replacement of singer or singer wasn't at his or hers vocal best, doing something, they boo. Especially now that they pay hundreds of dollars for the ticket.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.

I had the working class ethic. I wanted to make a living and there weren't many opportunities for an opera singer in Yorkshire, so I went onto the club circuit.

I'm Opera Singer. I can sing Brecht, Weil.

I wanted to be an opera singer since I was a very little girl.

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

My mom was an opera singer. She did all the classical music, and I heard it. I know every opera. I know every classical piece of music.

I don't have a rock voice. I have to force it. I am like an opera singer.

For a while, I couldn't decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I'm glad that I chose the latter because I wasn't a very good singer.

That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.

I think I've been influenced by everything I've ever heard. The first thing I ever heard was my grandma, who was an opera singer. The first song I ever learned was the 'Nessun Dorma' from Puccini's 'Turandot.' My father was a big band singer, so I used to hear him walking around the house singing standards all the time.

When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being - it's beyond belief.

My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.

We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.

My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.

I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let's say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.

I was an acting opera singer, and that's one of the reasons I left opera.

One of my sisters wanted to be an opera singer. So, we spent a few dollars to try to train her, because Italian people would like to have an opera singer in the family. But she's got trouble coughing, let alone singing. One day, she was in the shower singing 'Madame Butterfly,' three days later the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor.

I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.

My mother was an opera singer and my father is a clarinet player, composer and conductor.

Then I trained as an opera singer for four years before I started singing professionally as a pop act.

When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being - its beyond belief.

I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

I never socialized with singers. It's very dangerous if you work with opera... I don't think that in 30 years a singer has entered my apartment.

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.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being an opera singer like Maria Callas or a jazz singer like June Christy or Chris Connor, or approaching songs with the kind of mystical lethargy of Billie Holiday, or championing the downtrodden like Lotte Lenya. But I never dreamed of singing in a rock-and-roll band.

To be a famously successful opera singer. I wanted that since I was eight.

I am singing in an operatic voice for the public, to bring something more to Rock and Roll. Because in a Rock and Roll performance, the singer talks to the public whereas in Opera the singer only talks to a character, inside a story. The public sees this as a picture, I want to transport this picture into the room where the public is.

I was going to be a singer. If I hadn't been in my profession, I was going to be an Opera singer. That's from a young kid. I had all these records from all those famous Opera singers. I wanted to be an Opera singer - that was my whole thing and physical fitness got in the way, thank God.

I never wanted to be an opera singer. I wanted to be an actress, maybe a rock singer.

The idea is not to have one great singer surrounded by a bunch of nit wits. When the others are good, too, that's when you get something happening in opera.

It's in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I'm clearly dramatic.

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.