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"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."
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"If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I really wanted to be an opera soprano."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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 ."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't think an opera house is ever a place that can make you entirely happy."
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Personal Development
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"The story of Willie Stark fascinated me because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons."
Success
"What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds."
Music
"There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music."
Music
"The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do."
America
"If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it."
American
"Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast."
Composer
"People in very high places suddenly fall, and we are always surprised because we don't factor in the basic element that they're humans and, therefore, they are flawed and have weaknesses."
People
"It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience."
Music
"I think anything that is expressed directly and as honestly as possible will last."
Will
"If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!"
Success
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