Pastoral Resources

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.

I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

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

I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

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.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.

A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator.

There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.