I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.
Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.
Unfortunately, opera engagements tend to be made five years in advance, and I don't really agree with that.
I know the world of opera so intimately: historical sweep, sharply defined characters, not too rational an explanation of what's going on. It's a feast.
I had no interest at all in opera or singing. I saw my fellow students struggling with their scores, laboring to memorize operatic roles, and I thought, 'That's not for me!'
I like folk songs, but ten horses couldn't bring me to a concert or an opera.
Knowing constitutional law helps one at the opera. The trial in 'Billy Budd,' as example, invokes the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In the '80s, everyone wanted to be in opera. It was groovy.
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.
Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
Opera is given so little attention in the national press.
Opera needs a major makeover; the large opera houses are too in thrall to their conservative patrons.
I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.