If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.
The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays. . . is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.
It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.
I conclude that the Wagnerian operas which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services.
Opera needs to be a total escape from real life. To relate to what we're going through today is fine and dandy, but it's really about being transported and completely swept away by a romantic notion.
I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
I do not understand where the idea came from that opera is only for privileged people, I am as happy singing before 70,000 people at the Millennium Stadium, as I am in front of a few hundred in a small concert hall.
I was nostalgic even as a young man. Preferred listening to Opera not Bing Crossby.
The opera ghost really existed
If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me.
Order in a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid.
I think every singer should be able to jump in for a singer who has been sick, for instance, and learn an opera in two days. I know people who can do it.
My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
I want to get out of the major opera houses.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things.
I want to carve out a serious period of time to focus on the next opera without any distractions. And to do that you need money.
The catalogue of miseries seems to cry out for commercial spots and a station break: the stuff of noonday soap opera.
I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.
I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.