[Opera] does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.

Nightfall, going to the opera. Changing worlds. Trading the working world for one of fantastic, fleeting leisure. Climbing giant staircases. Bronze women proffer fake torches, ceilings full of goddesses and gods ... in this architecture can be read a whole, no longer existent, world. The ghosts of a society wander here in a dream.

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.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That’s not love, it’s just rubbish.

The aim of Opera has ever been, and still is today, confined to Music. Merely so as to afford Music with a colourable pretext for her own excursions, is the purpose of Drama dragged on -- naturally, not to curtail the ends of Music, but rather to serve her simply as a means.

Opera is a type of drama whose integral existence is determined from point to point and in the whole by musical articulation. Dramma per musica.

The opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings.