Browsing Topic Best Opera Singers Quotes

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.

I just adored Peter Medak, the director. He’s such a character, but he was so much fun. Some directors come in and they truly get angry about things.Peter was still in a fantastic mood. He’s a delightful person. He threw a big party at the end of the pilot, which was so sweet. And his wife is an opera singer. He’s just a very warm, crazy beautiful individual.

I wasn’t cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

Lots of opera singers are just boring.

Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom’s an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.

You could live without the opera singer, but not without the services of the baker. On this ground you might say that the baker performs a greater service; but no lover of music would agree.

It’s quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

Some may say that I couldn’t sing, but no one can say that I didn’t sing.

When you are up close to an opera singer, hearing this incredible volume of noise coming from a human being – its beyond belief.

I had classical training but I don’t consider myself an opera singer though.

There were a few things that went into it. When you’re doing something you’re trying to be your audience at the same time, so if somebody tells me that this is a movie about retired opera singers, you think ‘maybe I’ll wait for it to come to DVD’. You’re not rushing off to see it.

You’re always in a tunnel that you can’t see the end of. But there’s something that took place on this movie that I don’t think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians… and these people the phone hadn’t rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver.

When I was very young I wanted to be an opera singer, a ballet dancer… The people I loved were a little different.

I walked out of the theater and started crying. My wife asked me, ‘Why are you crying?’ I said, ‘Because I can’t do that.’ I didn’t know how he did it. I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s like this feat, this Rodin sculpture to me. It’s like hearing an opera singer and the tears go down your face because it’s not human what they’re doing. It’s like sounds of heaven.

A ghost who, on the same evening, carries off an opera-singer and steals twenty-thousand francs is a ghost who must have his hands very full!

Tom [Courtenay] and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on the dresser, so that’s how it started. It’s a wonderful documentary. It’s called Tosca’s Kiss and Mr Hardwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was. It was made in 1983 and Verdi, who was rich and successful, toward the end of his life decided to build a mansion for himself in Milan, where he lived, and he stipulated that when he died opera singers and musicians – because he knew so many who were no longer playing at the Scala and some were poor – could live there.

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

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.

A cabaret song has got to be written – for the middle voice, ideally – because you’ve got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.

It’s very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.

I don’t have a rock voice. I have to force it. I am like an opera singer.

I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.

Looking back, you realize that everything would have explained itself if you had only stopped interrupting.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

It’s in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I’m clearly dramatic.

I don’t know what happens to me on stage. Something else seems to take over.

I’m Opera Singer. I can sing Brecht, Weil.

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.