Success Quote by Terry Prachett

Opera, in Pratchett's hands, stops being a lofty art form and becomes a high-wire act performed by exhausted professionals praying the rigging holds. The line is funny because it flips the usual romance of opera: not the triumph of genius, but the temporary suspension of disaster. It’s the kind of joke that lands with anyone who’s ever watched an opening night from the wings, or tried to get a complicated project over the finish line without a single cable snapping.

The intent is affectionate demystification. Pratchett isn’t sneering at opera’s grandeur; he’s puncturing the myth that grandeur is effortless. By defining opera as “a large number of things” that “amazingly fail to go wrong,” he spotlights the invisible labor that culture often airbrushes out: stagehands, dressers, orchestra librarians, understudies, conductors wrangling egos, and singers battling physics in real time. The subtext is that beauty is a logistical miracle, and the miracle is mostly management.

Context matters: Pratchett’s broader comedic project is to reveal the machinery behind institutions people treat as sacred - monarchy, religion, academia, the arts - and show that they’re held together by fallible humans, routines, and luck. The phrasing “amazingly” carries the cynicism and the love in equal measure: yes, it’s absurdly fragile, but that fragility is why it’s thrilling. Opera “happens” not because it’s inevitable, but because enough people keep catastrophe at bay for one enchanted night.