Rolando Villazón

His great-grandmother was from Austria, that's why he went to a German-language school in his native Mexico City, and so he learned to speak excellent German already as a child. He discovered his interest in opera at age 18, and studied with various Mexican teachers.

In 1998, he started his career in the opera studios of the San Francisco and then the Pittsburgh Opera. In 1999, he won a second prize at Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition, and the same year, he made his international debut as des Grieux in Manon in Genova.

A meteoric career followed: the Paris Opéra, the State Operas in Vienna, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, Met, Los Angeles Opera, Salzburg Festival... and a considerable hype arose around the "opera dream couple" Villazón/Netrebko.

Villazón was audibly a (too) great admirer of Domingo, but unlike his hero, he had an acceptable top, and above all: charisma; he knew to heat up an audience, he had a good sense of humor, too, and so his performances were fun to attend. Until 2006. Then all of a sudden, he got into serious (emotional and vocal) trouble, had to cancel often, announced one hiatus upon the other, and when and if he appeared, it was a failure.

Villazón's comeback in Vienna

Tonight, January 5th, 2008, the Vienna Staatsoper boasted Villazón's comeback after a six-months world-wide absence from the public, in order to recover his overstrained chords. It was at the same time his first Vienna Werther. It was a complete failure. The voice is in a worse state than ever – it has lost at least half of its size, and while the piano is still working, he is absolutely lacking the necessary volume when singing forte. For me, sheer voice size is not overly important, but this was bordering on the inaudible, and that's putting it mildly. He is almost constantly coarse. And worst of all, he has no top anymore. His B flats were (very short) cries for help rather than acuti, incredible. Even the public seemed to understand, there was no applause after his act 1 and 2 arias. But after "Pourquoi me réveiller", which was rendered clearly worse than the two other arias, there were inevitably idiots enough in the theatre to organize an (if not overwhelming) applause – and after the performance, the applause was even rather frenetic! Maybe they applauded because he was still walking alone, though he had seemed so very feeble before.

Obviously, his rapid rise to the top had been too much for him. In the midst of the collapse of his career, he made his Scala debut in late 2010, just before you couldn't speak of a singing career anymore.

From 2011, he went into stage directing, TV hosting, music business administration (Mozart Week and Mozarteum Foundation, both in Salzburg). At the time of writing (2024), he still sang in concert from time to time, and once in a while even in opera (mostly in Mozart, sometimes as Papageno!)... well, he had better not.

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