Opera

(171 votes)   A supreme social challenge.

Cleveland Amory
American Animal Rights Activist

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(47 votes)   If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brnnnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(46 votes)   I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

Edgar Allan Poe
1809-1845, American Poet, Critic, short-story Writer

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

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(32 votes)   I never was an opera fan -- about twenty-five musically supreme masterpieces in this curious medium apart.

Hans Keller

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(30 votes)   Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

H. L. Mencken
1880-1956, American Editor, Author, Critic, Humorist

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(29 votes)   I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

D. H. Lawrence
1885-1930, British Author

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(29 votes)   The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

Mark Twain
1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer

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(25 votes)   Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.

Luciano Berio
1925-, Italian Composer

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(19 votes)   How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini
1792-1868, Italian Composer

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