OPERA
I can set a newspaper to music
( Rameau )
Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.
( Rossini )
Oh how wonderful, truly wonderful, opera would be if there were no singers!
( Rossini )
In opera, there is always too much singing.
( Debussy )
No good opera plot can be sensible,
for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
( W. H. Auden )
I'd hate this to get out, but I really like opera.
( Ford Frick )
Wagner’s art can never completely die.
It will suffer that inevitable decay,
the cruel mark of time on all beautiful things;
yet noble ruins must remain, in the shadow of which
our grandchildren will brood over the past splendor of this man, who,
if he had been a little more human, would have been altogether great.
( Debussy )
Parsifal is one of the loveliest monuments of sound
ever raised to the serene glory of music.
( Debussy )
Parsifal – the kind of opera that starts at 6 o’clock
and after it’s been going for three hours,
you look at your watch and it says 6:20.
( David Randolph )
It [Lohengrin] is poison – rank poison.
( London Music Critic )
I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.
( Moritz Hauptman )
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
( Mark Twain )
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
( Joseph Addison )
An exotic and irrational entertainment.
( Samuel Johnson, on opera )
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back,
and instead of dying, he sings.
( Robert Benchley )
I am obliged to write an opera in fourteen days.
I give you a week to do your share, but I warn you:
we have a German prima donna, a tenor who stutters,
a buffo with a voice like a goat, and a worthless French basso.
Still we must cover ourselves with glory.
( Donizetti, to Felice Romani, his librettist, about L’Elisir D’Amore )
The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all,
but it is the most difficult to play.
( Richard Strauss )
No operatic star has yet died soon enough for me.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
Wagner’s art is sick … Wagner is a great injury to music.
( Friedrich Nietzsche )
This is a stupid Punch-and-Judy show,
which is much too poor for children over seven years of age;
moreover, it is not music.
( Leo Tolstoy, on Siegfried )
Don Giovanni is the most humane and tolerant piece
about sacred and profane love that anybody has ever written.
( Virgil Thompson )
You know Verdi’s musical system: there has not yet been an Italian
composer more incapable of producing what is commonly called a melody.
( Paris Critic )
If I weren’t reasonably placid, I don't think I could cope with this sort of life.
To be a diva, you've got to be absolutely like a horse.
( Joan Sutherland )
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.
( Rossini )
Verdi is a musician of decadence. He has all its defects,
the violence of the style, the incoherence of ideas,
the crudity of colors, the impropriety of language.
( P. Scudo )
