Top 1200 Opera Singing Quotes & Sayings

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

There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva.

The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.

Italians are fantastic people, really. They can work you over in an alley while singing an opera.

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 never breathe through the nose, not when I'm singing. In the opera, you don't have so much time. That's fine at the beginning of an opera or after somebody else has been doing an aria, and you want to get a good fresh start.

There was something in the bel canto, not just opera, but a certain style of Italian singing that I responded to deeply.

I have always loved music and singing, and I am open to listen to any type of music. Regardless of my mood, my heart is always set racing when I listen to opera. When I decide which music I want to hear, my choice is almost invariably an opera recording.

I want to be known by people who are knowledgeable about opera, who appreciate bel canto singing, people who have more sensitivity.

I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.

I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.

In preparing my thesis, I have had the pleasure of collecting testimonies from colleagues such as Placido Domingo but also from singing teachers and musicologists. The entire course of study has confirmed what I already thought, that the value and meaning of opera singing, at the beginning of the third millennium, remain intact.

I have no desire to become a crossover artiste, singing with microphones. I believe in opera; that it is something that young people would love if they had a chance to hear it.

You start singing by singing what you hear. So everyone, when they first start singing, they naturally are singing like whatever they're hearing, because that's the only way you learned how to sing. So when I was growing up on Lauryn Hill, when I started singing her songs, I literally trained my voice to be able to do runs.

And my singing, I don't think I could sing Wagner or opera, but I could probably carry a tune. I was in a musical once, but it was never performed.

The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.

When I was general director of City Opera, we were pioneers in the practice of projecting supertitles so that American audiences finally could know what all the singing was about.

Opera singing is in every way of inestimable value; a real heritage for all mankind that has been reached over centuries of studies, attempts, flights of the spirit.

I love singing and performing. I'm always singing. Even if I'm at school or in the car, I'm always singing. My mom said ever since I could talk, I was singing.

I love singing opera, but the world surrounding it is not me. I want to be barefoot. I want to be in control of my own career. I want to put on a show. In the opera world, you wait for people to call you until you get to a certain level. In the folk world, it's a lot easier to have control from the beginning.

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

The voice muscle doesn't last forever. I have a lot of friends who are classical and opera singers. My friend Beverly Sills stopped singing in her 50s, so I'm careful with mine. But I'll keep going as long as it lets me.

I trained with a guy named Tito Gobbi, who was the Marlon Brando of the opera world. Tito Gobbi was the greatest singing baritone in the opera world and I studied in Florence, Firenze, with him. That was my first love, as it was Frank Sinatra's, oddly enough.

As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.

For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume ... to do something with your body. When singing in concert you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural.

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.

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

But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

I loved singing. But can you imagine my voice in an opera house?

The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.

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.

I studied classical opera, so I was always singing in Italian and German and French.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

College football, acting, opera singing - I approached them all in the same obsessive way.

The only thing that really inspired me for singing was the movie and musical 'Phantom of the Opera.' I went to see it in the theaters, and I loved it so much. And when I got home, I started singing the songs around the house, and my mom thought I was really good, so she asked me if I wanted to do a talent competition. And I said, 'Yes, definitely.'

I felt that I really couldn't be creative with opera. You're supposed to sound this way here. You're supposed to crescendo here. You're supposed to do that. I had no sense of identity while singing that kind of music.

I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. One of my closest friends is a composer, Paul Moravec, and a few years ago, Paul and I were at lunch, and I said to him, "you really have to write an opera." So, he says very casually to me, "I'll do it if you write the libretto." Well, little did I know that the within a couple of years we would end up getting a commission from the Santa Fe Opera to write an opera together, "The Letter," which turned out to be the most successful commissioned opera in the history of the Santa Fe Opera.

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.

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 quit my job in the bank when I was 19. I took a chance. I went to Milan to study opera and singing. My father really supported me economically.

I was singing when I was five years old. My sister and I both had the talent from mom and dad, and she was in opera and I was into pop and uh, rhythm and blues, anything, I was about a four octave singer.

Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.

Opera Australia has a mix - it produces new work, it produces from the classical repertoire and, particularly in more recent years, it's done those blockbuster musicals which are very lucrative for it and reach an audience that classic opera or a new opera perhaps wouldn't reach, like South Pacific for example.

I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.

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.

For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume... to do something with your body. When singing in concert, you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural.

Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.

I want to write theater pieces, opera, or some kind of amalgamation where there is singing, music and theater.

The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job.

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.

I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.

Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.

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.

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.

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.

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.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

I had an amazing French teacher in high school - it was the one class that I enjoyed. And I studied opera for 11 years, so I did a lot of singing in French.

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 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.