Quotes & Sayings About Opera Singing

I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall. — Katherine Jenkins

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

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality. — Alexander Chee

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. — Mordechai Vanunu

Alexia was not a particularly musical person, and her husband, a noted opera singer in his human days, had once described her bath time warbling as those of a deranged badger. — Gail Carriger

I don't much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There's something about Wagner that's just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman's singing a song. — Philip Kerr

He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe's, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies' shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy — Michael Chabon

Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals. — David Ebershoff

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. — Andrea Bocelli

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. — Andrea Bocelli

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. — Patti Smith

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. — Wallace Shawn

In opera, there is always too much singing. — Claude Debussy

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

I told Hugh Hefner, "I have this crazy boyfriend." And Hef was like, "You're not going anywhere with a crazy boyfriend," and so he put me in a mansion in Bel-Air with an opera singing Chinese maid, and I was driving a Bentley, and a friend of mine came by and was like, "What is going on? Why are you living in this mansion?" And I was like, "Isn't this what happens when people move to LA? — Pamela Anderson

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it. — H.L. Mencken

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write. — Garth Greenwell

I had four or five years in school training as a soprano. I fell into pop singing because of economics. I got out of high school and had to go work, and they weren't hiring opera singers. — Jo Stafford

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. — Maria Jeritza

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

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

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. — Carl Gardner

Wherever you walk, stand or sit, do it with self-confidence and be firmly convinced: I am a singer! Being tentative is one of the deadly theatre sins. — Marita Knobel

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. — Andrea Bocelli

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. — Klaus Nomi

He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses, and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moaning of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And the time was gone forever. — Denis Johnson

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. — Anna Netrebko

Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool. — Gioachino Rossini

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. — Marcello Giordani

Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I always wanted to be a comedian. I loved comedy since I was a little kid, and while I was at university I started doing stand up shows. Once I realized that I was good at it I quit college and left although I had six months left. I went to England. I could have done the last six months but I realized that I was better at standup comedy than I was at singing opera. — Jim Jefferies

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

It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly. — Audrey Niffenegger

We sang a lot of church music. We were very active Baptists. Supposedly, I started singing when I was being given a bath - at 14 months or something like that. My mother and dad both swore that was true, but I'm sure it wasn't very good ... We always had the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons. — Jim Foglesong

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

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

The word 'theatrical' makes me cringe, because it suggests a performance is staged, put on, rehearsed. And while all this is true for an opera, I believe the act of singing and performing should always be honest, raw, guttural. — Zola Jesus

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. — Andrea Bocelli

I got last-minute rush seats to Baz Luhrmann's 'Boheme,' and my favorite singer, Ekaterina Solovyeva, was playing Mimi that day. My face got burned off when she sang the aria 'Donde Lieta Usci.' The woman was technically sobbing and singing opera at the same time. I don't know how you do that. — Nina Arianda

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.' — Jackie Evancho

My grandma did opera singing for the better part of her life; she used to sing all over the place. My grandpa was a sax player, and he used to travel all over the place, too. — Mac DeMarco

When I do operas, I'm not really singing very classically. I have a classical background as far as being a pianist and an oboist, but my voice isn't really classical in the operatic sense. But I certainly have a classical sensibility, so I'm comfortable being in that world. — Jason Graae

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. — Susanna Phillips

Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn't yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing breaks, bicycles with unoiled wheels - and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow. I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill. — Helen Macdonald

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. — Pat Cooper

I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today. — Willie Nelson

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. — Zola Jesus

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

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

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. — Christoph Waltz

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you. — Heather O'Neill

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. — Brittany Murphy

When you sing opera you are very far from the people, you are onstage, and between you and the people there is the orchestra. So you have to launch your emotions very, very far. When you sing pop, you are singing very close - the microphone is very close to your mouth. You can whisper your emotions into the microphone. — Andrea Bocelli

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. — J. D. Souther

It was nothing like Roxanne singing, where it seemed that everyone's heart would have to wait until she finished before it could beat again. — Ann Patchett

I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager. — Edgar Allan Poe

As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive. — Anne Rice

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg. — Giancarlo Esposito

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