Daily Inspiration Quote by Sam Waterston

Opera, in Sam Waterston's telling, isn’t a soundtrack; it’s an event. The line has the mild, conversational humility of someone admitting a preference rather than making a proclamation, but it quietly draws a boundary between passive consumption and full-bodied encounter. “Occasionally” does a lot of work: he’s not posturing as an aficionado, he’s saying he’s human. He dips in at home, like most of us do with high culture when it’s available on demand. The real pleasure, though, is “see it.” Not “attend it,” not “hear it live” - see it.

That emphasis reads like an actor’s credo smuggled into a comment about music. Opera is famously overdetermined: voice, orchestra, bodies, costumes, lighting, staging, the social choreography of the audience itself. Waterston is pointing to the medium’s totality. At home, you can admire technique; in the theater, you feel the risk. A high note is no longer an artifact but a feat occurring in real time, attached to a sweating human being whose face tells you what the libretto can’t.

There’s also an implicit critique of how culture gets flattened by convenience. Recordings make opera portable, but they also sand down its strangeness - the scale, the spectacle, the fact that it’s supposed to swallow you for three hours. Waterston’s preference is less about snobbery than about liveness: the belief that art, at its best, is something you meet, not something you queue up.