Daily Inspiration Quote by Noel Coward

Coward skewers opera with the elegance of someone who knows exactly how tradition can curdle into complacency. The line works because it flips a familiar lament on its head: instead of mourning decline, he suggests the real crisis is stasis. Opera hasn’t degraded; it has fossilized. The punch is in the deadpan logic of it - “It is what it used to be” - a sentence that sounds like praise until the trapdoor opens on “That is what’s wrong with it.”

The intent isn’t simply to dunk on a genre. Coward is diagnosing an arts culture that confuses reverence with vitality. Opera, in his framing, is trapped by its own museum glass: canonical works, ritualized performance styles, a social aura that can feel like inherited etiquette. By the mid-20th century, when Coward’s sensibility was ascendant, modernism and popular entertainment were pressuring “high” forms to justify themselves as living art rather than prestige artifacts. Coward, a playwright who thrived on speed, wit, and contemporary manners, has little patience for a stage language that insists on behaving as if the world hasn’t changed.

The subtext is also a jab at audiences. If opera remains “what it used to be,” it’s partly because patrons want it that way: a dependable pageant of cultural capital. Coward’s cynicism lands because it targets the comfort of repetition, the way institutions protect their glory by embalming it, then calling the result timeless.