Creativity Quote by Lesley Garrett

Garrett is doing a kind of cultural boundary-setting, and she does it with the plainspoken certainty of someone who’s spent a career being asked to justify opera to a skeptical modern world. “What people really should be able to be confident in” sounds like reassurance, but it’s also a gentle scolding: stop treating classical training as just another “genre preference.” She’s asking for deference, not merely appreciation.

The phrase “standards of music-making” is the key move. She’s not arguing that classical music is inherently more moving; she’s arguing that its discipline is measurably superior. “Elite” and “the best” are deliberately provocative words in a culture that flinches at hierarchy, especially in the arts, where authenticity is often prized over technique. Garrett leans into that discomfort. The subtext is that we’ve flattened taste into personal vibes, and in the process lost a shared language for excellence.

Context matters: as a crossover-era British soprano and broadcaster, Garrett has lived in the gap between conservatoire rigor and mass entertainment. Her insistence that “all of us as artists should be committed to that” reads less like snobbery than a defense mechanism against a marketplace that rewards immediacy, branding, and novelty. Still, the claim sneaks in a value judgment: other traditions can be brilliant, but they’re being invited to measure themselves against a classical yardstick. It’s an argument for craft as moral obligation - and, implicitly, for institutions (training, repertoire, adjudication) as guardians of artistic seriousness.