I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things.

I did I Love My Wife on Broadway in 1978, and then went into television land. Now things are starting to come together in the way I thought they might when I was a kid.

There's a guy at the record company who's 30, and he says, I would not listen to these songs except in this context. Somehow the recording process, the arrangements, make it more accessible.

I listen to Steely Dan. I really like Steely Dan.

I'm facing upstage, with my back to the audience, and the spotlight comes up on my back as I start singing.

When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.

I have no experience performing that music live in front of an audience. So that remains to be seen. I'm very excited to see what that's going to be like.

There were a couple of years when I wanted to be a football player, but I really always wanted to be a singer.

With Schubert, a lot of the melodies are very simple, but he's in this groove. He's in touch with his heart.

As I've gone along, I felt like I was discovering an aspect of my voice that I didn't know was there: an ability to interpret a song in a way that makes it more accessible.

The country experience was more of a departure. When you consider my education and my upbringing, you can see that was more of country rock outgrowth of my popular music aspirations.

When you're doing the traditional musicals, singing songs that are 40 and 50 years old, you realize there's a reason why those musicals are hits. These are amazing songs!

I've made it clear to my agents that I want more interesting stuff.

It's amazing to hear, as a voice matures and then starts to decline, what kind of emotion is still conveyed by a really good vocalist.

I think now I'm being taken a little more seriously. That's pure conjecture on my part.

I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.

I would just like to say that opera is no longer about fat people in breastplates shattering wine glasses.

I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera.

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

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like.

Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.

I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth.

Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.

I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me.

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.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.

But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I was emotionally and physically punched in the stomach. This is not a place where you go and deliver the lines and then you come back. It's kind of a life-changing experience. But it can't get better than this for any actor - this is like an opera.

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

But nevertheless, it's music ultimately that matters in opera, and opera is a piece of music reaching out as a vision in sound reaching out to the world.

When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

I ride horseback - arthritic knees permitting - or listen to opera. Sometimes I cook. I used to do needlework, but it's hard on my hands now, so I only do it occasionally, but I like it. And, of course, I read.

Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.