Opera Composer Quotes

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

Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.

Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.

Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.

I had been reading a fabulous book [The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker] about [Giuseppe] Verdi, whom I adore.

Wagner is the Puccini of music.

For me Wagner is impossible... he talks without ever stopping. One can't just talk all the time.

I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

I didn't grow up imagining myself as an opera composer. Only once in my entire adolescence did I attend an opera. I went and saw Aida at the old Met, didn't understand a thing about it, and thought it was pretty awful. But I think I had it in my genes without even realising it.

I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.

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.

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.

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

I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.