The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.
I've always gravitated towards opera, and the Royal Opera House is quite possibly the greatest opera house on earth.
But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.
I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It's a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it's a great date or something that's just hugely romantic.
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.
Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit of sacrifice. All this is well worth it because opera offers such deep sensations that they will remain in a heart for a lifetime.
Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while.
Any opera is interesting if the characters are worth seeing.
Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.
Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.