Creativity Quote by Victoria de los Angeles

There is a quiet bluntness in de los Angeles's phrasing: not “harder,” not “more prestigious,” but “more difficult,” as if the obstacle is structural rather than merely personal. She’s pointing to a career math that opera glamour tends to hide. Lieder demands a kind of artisanal intimacy - a singer stripped of costumes, plot, and orchestral horsepower, left with text, breath, and microscopic control of color. The margin for theatrical bluffing disappears. That makes the work harder, but it also makes the marketplace smaller.

The line about “less lieder singers” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s a demographic observation; underneath it’s an indictment of how classical music industries manufacture scarcity. Opera produces stars because it has institutions designed to do so: big houses, predictable repertory, clear prestige ladders, marketing built around roles and divas. Lieder lives in recitals, radio archives, and cultivated listeners - ecosystems that can be fragile, especially in the mid-20th century when recording and touring economics increasingly rewarded spectacle.

Coming from de los Angeles, who moved fluidly between opera stages and recital platforms, the remark reads less like complaint than like calibration. She’s naming the trade-off: lieder can offer artistic sovereignty and interpretive depth, but it rarely offers the career infrastructure that turns excellence into inevitability. In a single slightly awkward sentence, she exposes a cultural bias: we don’t just have fewer lieder singers because it’s hard; we have fewer because we’ve decided, collectively, not to build a world that makes them viable.