Music with Ease > Opera > Opera Quotes > Giacomo Puccini Quotes

Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion.
-- Puccini, quoted in M Carner, Puccini (1974)

Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals.
-- George Bernard Shaw, writing of the première of Manon Lescaut in London, 1894

Shostakovich: What do you think of Puccini?
Britten: I think his operas are dreadful.
Shostakovich: No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.
-- Quoted in Lord Harewood, The Tongs and the Bones (1981)


Related Resources

Quotable Opera: Aria Ready for a Laugh?

What they said when they were not singing.

Here are hundreds of quotes that highlight the wit, wisdom and lunacy of the opera world. Luminaries Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Caruso, Ruffo, Chaliapin, Melba, Sills, Callas, Toscanini, Beecham and other more recent personalities have had lots to say about opera, themselves and each other.

There are venomous quotes from critics and emotional outbursts by performers and listeners. One hapless society matron tried complimenting soprano Eileen Farrell at a reception in her honor with "My dear, you reminded me so much of Kate Smith." The comparison so rattled the diva Farrell that she blurted out, "Well, kiss my ass!" and stormed out.

Austrian conductor Franz Schalk is noted for the most emblematic words about opera life: "Every theatre is an insane asylum, but an opera theatre is the ward for the incurables."

This book will be a delight for aficionados of opera.

Buy a copy from Amazon.com


Opera Antics and Anecdotes

Opera singers are just like other people, only more so. Often unseen by their public and fans, they erupt in glorious, dazzling displays of human cussedness, using biting banter, one-up-manship, and even sabotage to deal with their main frustration, which is, of course, each other. The irreverent atmosphere backstage is often hilariously in contrast with the reverent hush out front. In terms of chaos on stage, yells from the balcony and intermission twaddle in the foyer, you'll meet dimwitted audience members, meatball tenors, vain soprano fatsos, stilletto-tongued conductors and old-time impresarios and general managers who didn't know their brass from their oboe. The Viennese conductor Franz Schalk said, "Every theater is an asylum, but an opera theatre is the ward for incurables."

Buy a copy from Amazon.com