opera

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

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts.

A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.

Opera is as it is because we fundamentally crave romance. We want plumes and velvet somewhere in our lives.

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.

Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama.

Decisions ought to be made in favor of our Heavenly Father. That's why-after prayer-I came home to sing with the Tabernacle Choir rather than with the Metropolitan Opera Company.

In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of the grand passion than of a grand opera.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

Puccini's personal life was an interesting one. He was exceedingly fond of hunting, smoking, attractive woman, mechanical devices of any kind, and acquiring houses. He died in 1924 from a heart attack while undergoing treatment for throat cancer. He was 65 years old. A national state of mourning was declared in Italy. Despite torrential rain, mourners lined the streets of Milan in tribute to the composer of some of the most popular works in the history of opera. Puccini chose to write about the everyday rather than the heroic. He understood the little things of life and portrayed them with sensitivity. Another reason for his popularity was his ability to write glowing melodies --- intimate, tender, passionate melodies. He understood the power of melody to express the deepest emotions, and his orchestral writing was eloquent. He was not only a highly skillful musician, but a poet who understood the significance of the smallest details, and a dramatist who possessed an innate sense of pacing and timing. While he was in the process of composing La Boheme, he wrote that his style was "poetry and again poetry - tenderness mixed with pain; sensuality; a drama surprising and burning; and a rocketing finale."