Opera Quotes

I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18. ~ Zola Jesus

Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me. ~ Toni Servillo

In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire. ~ Bruce Beresford

Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music. ~ John Philip Sousa

Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word.

This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves "so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside."

The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one wit ~ Martin Laird

A Man lives off his head.
His head won't see him through.
Inspect your own
What lives on that?
At most, a louse or two ... ~ Bertolt Brecht

Fucking H!" the vampire shouted, shaking his free left fist. He enunciated the g very clearly and projected his voice from his diaphragm, like a trained opera singer. "It's fuckin' A, not H, but yeah, Leif, go ahead, let's throw down." Leif paused and frowned. "Do you not mean we should throw up?" "No. See, when you throw up you're vomiting, but when you throw down you're starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet." "Ohhhh," he said. "I thought you were speaking literally. ~ Kevin Hearne

It was the tale of a woman scorned, a woman locked in battle over her man, her money, her children, and her rights as a long-term wife. It was a morality tale of Biblical proportions, involving adultery and covetousness, all of it wrapped in a great big flag emblazoned with the almighty U.S. dollar - and concluding in what, on the face of it, appeared to be a most blood-curdling case of stark, premeditated murder in the first degree. Shooting them in their sleep? No soap opera writer could have concocted better. ~ Bella Stumbo

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision. ~ Stewart Copeland

He reminded me of the typical soap-opera star. His words were fake, his smile was fake, and his very presence affected me like nails on a chalkboard. ~ Jamie McGuire

People's reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don't, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul. ~ J. F. Lawton

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door. ~ Caroline Leavitt

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you. ~ Heather O'Neill

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable. ~ Joshua Ferris

I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room. ~ Bruce Beresford

Misty Copeland is making history. During American Ballet Theatre's current season at the Metropolitan Opera House, Copeland will alight on that storied Lincoln Center stage, making her New York debut as the Swan Queen in the iconic masterpiece Swan Lake - a crowning achievement for any dancer, regardless of the color of her skin. ~ Heather Watts

Feel sorry for yourself.
Sure, your tiny steel-ribbed mother told you never to do that,
But who the hell is going to do it for you?
"Piangi, piangi," the old man in the opera tells Violetta.
"Cry, honey, cry." Do it right.
Do it yourself. ~ Lise Menn

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas. ~ Garth Greenwell

The Idoni Primor's gaze fell on Eren immediately. Her head tilted in idle curiosity while a fingertip dipped into a crystal bowl beside her. "I know your face, anarch."

She brought her fingertip to her mouth and sucked it dry of gods only feared what hypnol. "You have been a most troublesome little asi of late. Have you come here to repent, to fall to your knees and beg to be allowed to return to the fold? Fair warning - you'll be on those knees for a while. ~ G.S. Jennsen

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something. ~ Chester Bennington

I think it's the responsibility of a major opera house not only to cultivate debate and get people thinking, but also to be interfaced with things that challenge them. To challenge its audience and not just deliver things that they know, even though some of those things are wonderful. ~ Wayne McGregor

Alex thrust her hand and half her arm into the labyrinth of light.
Her stare blanked, and in the halo of the matrix her eyes and glyphs blazed so radiantly she looked as if she were being consumed by a primordial fire.

"She just stuck her hand into Machim Command's central server matrix!"

Caleb smiled, watching on in blatant awe. "She does that. ~ G.S. Jennsen

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. ~ Oscar Wilde

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.

It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.
It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.

The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.
As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.

There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.
Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly...

Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.
Nanny grinned.
'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over. ~ Terry Pratchett

Sessioning is simply the process of showing your player an exit for a play session. It might seem counterintuitive, but it appears in a great number of successful F2P titles. It is, to reuse the soap opera analogy, a cliffhanger. ~ Will Luton

The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands. ~ Maria Jeritza

All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf.... ~ Andrei Makine

I like the plain, old-fashioned churches, built for use, not show, where people met for hearty praying and preaching, and where everybody made their own music instead of listening to opera singers, as we do now. I don't care if the old churches were bare and cold, and the seats hard, there was real piety in them, and the sincerity of it was felt in the lives of the people. I don't want a religion that I put away with my Sunday clothes, and don't take out till the day comes round again; I want something to see and feel and live by day-by-day, ~ Louisa May Alcott

Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.
'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'
Having written this, she laughed.
She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.
("After The Theatre") ~ Anton Chekhov

I think one of the great strengths of 'The Flash' is just how close everyone is on the show. They tend not to have these raging conflicts, like what we keep giving everybody on 'Arrow.' That show is more of a soap opera, and I don't say that derogatorily. ~ Andrew Kreisberg

Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino's most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

My auntie Anne took me to 'Phantom of the Opera' in London. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. ~ Lisa O'Hare

I feel like it's a real shame that my generation doesn't make an appearance at the opera. ~ James Gray

Lieutenant Mortas is the black sheep of the family--I thought you knew that. ~ Henry V. O'Neil

Ohan, as your doctor, I have to remind you that your body has only had to digest nutrient paste for some time, adopting other foods will take some adjustment.' His cheeks puffed wide. 'But as your - as your friend, there is no way I'd rather spend my afternoon than cooking a meal for you. With you, even, if you'd like. ~ Becky Chambers

You can't tell the story of a 13-year-old boy who knows every lyric to 'Phantom of the Opera' without also referencing how much teasing he gets at school. ~ Tim Federle

If there was anything the last year had taught her - if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Metigen War had taught her - it was that perspective was everything.

If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story. ~ G.S. Jennsen

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

A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

I'd never seen the King of Cats fight before. He was suddenly everywhere, made of nothing but fangs and claws and fury, snarling like a chainsaw trying to sing opera. Our witless assassin never stood a chance. ~ Seanan McGuire

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera ... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I'm by no means an opera buff. ~ Kenneth Branagh

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it. ~ Sarah Caldwell

In Europe, I'm recognized on the street sometimes. And that's cool, because I don't have to live there and deal with it every day. Unless you're Stephen King - a great writer, by the way, and anyone who says different knows nothing about the craft - you're more likely to be recognized in America if you play in a soap opera than if you're a novelist. ~ George Pelecanos

Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an enormous belly and a chaplainbass;a homosexual architect with a beard,two night club porters,and a lawyer who sold Jewish refugees visas for a Central American Republic,which on arrival turned out to be non valid. ~ Arthur Koestler

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like. ~ Parker Posey

I remember watching the Three Tenors at the World Cup in 1990, and it was amazing. They made opera accessible to the man in the street. ~ Anton Du Beke

Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king. ~ Edmund Morris

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. ~ Wu Han

Music and opera are a big part of my life. ~ Ailyn Perez

Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?
(Three Penny Opera) ~ Kurt Weill

Your every emotion goes right over the top with a big audience. It's either laughter or tears, with no in-between. Those tigers in zoos, they must have a big opera all the time. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones. ~ Patti Smith

He raised his wine for a toast. "To the Exquisite Nightmare. ~ A.G. Howard

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! ~ Billy Taylor

I only use my sick days for hang-overs and soap opera weddings. ~ Kate O'Brien

He wasn't going to be able to deactivate the field, which meant there was only one choice.

He'd realized early on that his arcane, profoundly alien passenger came with a cost, possibly one too high to pay and get out the other side free and clear. He'd pay it nonetheless and without complaint if the diati would only come through for him now.

Caleb closed his eyes. ~ G.S. Jennsen

I want a shower the size of the Sydney Opera House, because you know damn well I sing in the shower. And I might as well make millions off my cleanliness. ~ Jarod Kintz

I'm very musically inclined. My parents were opera singers. As a young child, I could hear operas and I knew if they were sad, or if they reminded me of something, or they brought back a memory. ~ Sandra Bullock

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. ~ Gaston Leroux

So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film). ~ Philip Kitcher

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. ~ David Hockney

I was going to be a singer. If I hadn't been in my profession, I was going to be an Opera singer. That's from a young kid. I had all these records from all those famous Opera singers. I wanted to be an Opera singer
that was my whole thing and physical fitness got in the way, thank God. ~ Jack LaLanne

I shall sit down,' replied the cat, sitting down, 'but I shall enter an objection with regard to your last. My speeches in no way resemble verbal muck, as you have been pleased to put it in the presence of a lady, but rather a sequence of tightly packed syllogisms, the merit of which would be appreciated by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella, and, for all I know, Aristotle himself.'
Your king is in check,' said Woland.
Very well, very well,' responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.
And so, donna,' Woland addressed Margarita, 'I present to you my retinue. This one who is playing the fool is the cat Behemoth ... ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

The sovereign people, legislators, and reformers, see in public offices, to speak plainly, only opportunities for pecuniary advancement. And, because it regards them as a source of profit, it decrees the eligibility of citizens. For of what use would this precaution be, if there were nothing to gain by it? No one would think of ordaining that none but astronomers and geographers should be pilots, nor of prohibiting stutterers from acting at the theatre and the opera. The nation was still aping the kings: like them it wished to award the lucrative positions to its friends and flatterers. Unfortunately, and this last feature completes the resemblance, the nation did not control the list of livings; that was in the hands of its agents and representatives. They, on the other hand, took care not to thwart the will of their gracious sovereign. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us. ~ Mason Cooley

When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance. ~ Victor Borge

There's a kind of a line between music and math, so I guess I got the music gene, thank goodness. But my mother wasn't too thrilled. She wanted me to go to university and get a degree or do something, and my father, he liked opera so he wasn't too thrilled either, because he wanted me to be an opera singer and I didn't have - as he said, I don't really have the strength to do that. ~ Olivia Newton-John

I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide. ~ Mark Twain

It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space. ~ B.J. Novak

What's difficult to understand about German opera? It's always the same. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl gets devoured by horrible winged creature with claws. ~ Susan Wiggs

I don't much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There's something about Wagner that's just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman's singing a song. ~ Philip Kerr

I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues. ~ Brittany Murphy

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun. ~ Brian W. Aldiss

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [ ... ] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten. ~ Oliver Sacks

He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie. ~ Walter Kirn

I don't want to blend," Etalon whispered. "I want to belong. ~ A.G. Howard

To sing opera, one needs two things: the voice and the passion - and above all, the passion. ~ Andrea Bocelli

Opera is full of trappings that make us go away from being human. You can't let them do that. You can't walk like you're in an opera! You have to make it real. You have to just be there. ~ Charles Nelson Reilly

Hey you! I told you to slow that nag down! Because of you, I almost heard the opera! ~ Groucho Marx

Where were we a year ago, Bink?" "In Vienna." "In Vienna, swiving opera singers." They shared a moment of silent recollection. "And now you're an earl. A man of responsibility. You'll want a wife. ~ Alina K. Field

The Anadens have a somewhat different perspective on death."

"On account of not having to deal with it, sure. Personally, I think their little immortality contrivance has destroyed the value of life for them."

"It brought you back."

"Thus I reserve the right to be hypocritical on this particular topic. ~ G.S. Jennsen

Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama. ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

(Referring to the piano's natural shape) Isn't it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them? ~ Victor Borge

Alone for a few precious seconds, he drew in a deep breath. He stood on a ruined street in a ruined city. Destruction stretched for kilometers in every direction, all caused by a single man for whom vengeance had devolved into madness. ~ G.S. Jennsen

If I were anyone else ... your opera singer ... the woman across the hall ... would you have apologized?"
He looked confused. "No ... but you are neither of those women. You deserve better."
"Better," she repeated, frustrated. "That's just my point! You and the rest of society believe that it's better for me to be set upon a pedestal of primness and propriety - which might have been fine if a decade on that pedestal hadn't simply landed me on the shelf. Perhaps unmarried young women like our sisters should be there. But what of me?" Her voice dropped as she looked down at the cards in her hands. "I'm never going to get a chance to experience life from up there. All that is up there is dust and unwanted apologies. The same cage as hers" - she indicated the woman outside - "merely a different gilt. ~ Sarah MacLean

Opera stars know that biology is destiny. Sometime in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears. ~ Michael A. Walsh

He pointed to the burning building as sirens heralded the approach of emergency personnel. "This is your job - this is your life. Blood and death and pain and vengeance and justice. And sometimes it sucks, but it's worth it."

Caleb sighed, but not in resignation. "I know this is the job, and it is worth it. But I refuse to believe it's my life. Not only and not forever."

Samuel pinched the bridge of his nose and waved dismissively with his other hand. "F***ing romantic. ~ G.S. Jennsen

Ah,it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not,then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,which think themselves new; and which are yet but old,which pretend to be young like fine ladys at the opera. ~ Bram Stoker

I think it's important to have a blend just as we need to have by the way a mix of different opera companies and different arts companies. ~ George Brandis

For me, few things are more compelling than watching a great opera. ~ David Rubenstein

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. ~ Karen DeCrow

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. ~ Rufus Wainwright

What tragedies, what passions, what crimes had surrounded the idyll of Raoul and his sweet and charming Christine! ... What had become of that wonderful, mysterious artist of whom the world was never, never to hear again? ... ~ Gaston Leroux

True beauty lies not upon gilded veneers,
But found in the soul within. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Bidding the wizard farewell, he turned to his daughter, who held up her finger
and said, "Daddy, look - one of the gnomes actually bit me!"
"How wonderful! Gnome saliva is enormously beneficial!" said Mr. Lovegood, seizing Luna's outstretched finger and examining the bleeding puncture marks. "Luna, my love, if you should feel any burgeoning talent today - perhaps an unexpected urge to sing opera or to declaim in Mermish - do not repress it! You may have been gifted by the Gernumblies!"
Ron, passing them in the opposite direction, let out a loud snort. ~ J.K. Rowling

I want you to take off the mask, Erik, do you hear me? I want you to take it off right now.
-Luciana ~ Susan Kay

What about concerts and opera performances? Nowadays these bring him little pleasure [...] These people have no interest in classical music - they would much prefer operettas or films with Marika Rokk[...]
How can he possibly enjoy music under such circumstances? What good is it to invite the finest musicians and conductors of the Reich to Prague, when they must perform for such uneducated audience, who applaud only dutifully and never with enthusiasm. And, of course, the artists sense this immediately; they have a well-developed instinct about their audiences. Therefore, they play and sing any old way, without distinction. ~ Jiří Weil