Zitat des Tages von Beverly Sills:
I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o'clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn't that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn't wait for it to begin.
This joyfulness that I felt when I sang, and this need to communicate with people, these are my two strongest points. I've always been a people person. I love people; I like to be with people, and when I got on stage, I was home free.
You can't imitate; all our faces are constructed differently... and the vocal cords; otherwise, we'd all sound alike. I don't think anybody should ever teach by imitating.
There is a growing strength in women but it's in the forehead, not the forearm.
My voice had a long, nonstop career. It deserves to be put to bed with quiet and dignity, not yanked out every once in a while to see if it can still do what it used to do. It can't.
I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
Art is the signature of civilizations.
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
My parents never told me about Papa's lung cancer or the desperate nature of the operations he was about to undergo, which were a last-ditch effort to contain the spread of his cancer.
I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up.
I never breathe through the nose, not when I'm singing. In the opera, you don't have so much time. That's fine at the beginning of an opera or after somebody else has been doing an aria, and you want to get a good fresh start.
When I was general director of City Opera, we were pioneers in the practice of projecting supertitles so that American audiences finally could know what all the singing was about.
