Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Interpretation
Opera is a complex art form that relies on many elements coming together successfully, highlighting the beauty in things going right despite potential chaos.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett emphasizes the intricate nature of opera as an art form that involves the seamless collaboration of numerous components, such as music, singing, acting, and stagecraft. He suggests that the successful execution of an opera is akin to a miracle, as it depends on many factors that could easily go awry, yet when they align, the result can be a spectacular and harmonious production.
In practice
Using this quote during a theater appreciation class to discuss the challenges of producing a performance.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
I want to make films without a single clear message, and films that are as close as possible to what it feels like to be alive. At least to me.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
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