I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.
I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.
Just send the emails and talk to people. Spend all your money on nail polish and opera tickets.
Ever since 1980, sci-fi has generally been more Bladerunner than Star Wars. People talk about Star Wars being the most influential movie of all time and creating the blockbuster along with Jaws and that sort of thing, but really there's not been a space opera that anyone can go and see.
What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.
Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.
Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.
I'm still wondering about the Phantom in the chair, you know at the end of Phantom [of the Opera], so I guess that's my sort of idiocy. I still haven't figured out how they do that.
That's opera! I just love it. It just thrills me! And it's very different than theatre, and sometimes it can be frustrating because when you come in the first day of rehearsals obviously you're an opera fan, right?
But the stuff that I do is more like all the comic roles like in The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus and I just did this Offenbach operetta at the LA Opera. I love it. I just love it. For me, it's like a great mesh of musical theatre and my classical oboe background to be standing on these huge stages with a full orchestra and all the opulence. I'm a complete sucker for the over-the-topness.
The operas that I do are more in the operetta world, but I've gotten to do them in all of these major opera companies so it's been really wild. And I feel comfortable in that world because I went Cincinnati Conservatory and I hung out with all those kinds of people, I love hanging out with them and I understand them and their "diva-osity."
I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.
It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
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.
Life is not an opera. Scenes belong on the stage.
Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music and provides concrete examples of some of the best ways to present the music in the widest variety of settings-radio, TV, recordings, movies, concert halls, festivals, solo, small ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, opera, Broadway shows.... You name it, he did it!
I would advise all young musicians to not only experience and play chamber music, but to go to operas, speak to the singers, to explore and expand your horizons.
Excepting a religious ceremonial, there is no occasion where greater dignity of manner is required of ladies and gentlemen both, than in occupying a box at the opera. For a gentleman especially no other etiquette is so exacting.
The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny-uncultured-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.
When you say you're doing an opera, it's like when you're a seven-year-old and say, 'I'm off to Washington, Dad.' You kind of go, 'Sure. Sure you are, son.'
You'll find in Africans a fantastic amount of heavy space opera and so on, going on ... which makes the colored African very, very interesting to process because he doesn't know why he goes through all these dances ... and why he feels so barbarous.
I would love to sing opera.
I was keenly aware that I didn't want to draw on too many typically doomed aspects of the fated singer. Whether it's Judy Garland or Norma Desmond, there is this tragic quality to older women that one can revel in, and you want it to be more three-dimensional than that. So it was important for the character to be strong and resilient, because there are so many victims in opera.
I've had my ups and downs, and I definitely have a sense - in America, especially - that once you've made your mark and gotten your Rolling Stone piece and your Grammy nomination, that they're on to the next piece of meat, and they don't necessarily like to follow the twistsand turns of an artistic career. Throwing an opera at them is something they have to notice. There's nothing subtle about it.
The operas I listen to aren't in English, and I want to listen to my opera after I'm done with it. I want to have the desire to play it on the stereo. To me, the language is part of the mystery.
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