top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Opera quotes
"Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations."
"Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers."
"A great opera house isn't run by a director, but by a great administrator."
"I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them."
"We're a very expensive group; we break a lot of rules. It's unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear ."
"If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role."
"The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge."
Explore more quotes by Harrison Birtwistle
"I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism."
"People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me."
"I'm not a music lover in the sense that I look for something to have on. I've never had that attitude to music."
"Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it."
"I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change."
"When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11."
bottom of page