The banging and slamming and b...

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

~Mark Twain~

No good opera plot can be sens...

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

~Wystan Hugh Auden ~

If music in general is an imit...

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brnnnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

~Wystan Hugh Auden ~

I never was an opera fan -- ab...

I never was an opera fan -- about twenty-five musically supreme masterpieces in this curious medium apart.

~Hans Keller~

I never can hear a crowd of pe...

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~

I love Italian opera -- it's s...

I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

~D. H. Lawrence~

How wonderful opera would be i...

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

~Gioacchino Antonio Rossini~