Creativity Quote by Victoria de los Angeles

A singer famous for warmth and “naturalness” is quietly declaring war on the tasteful museum culture that so often surrounds art song. De los Angeles frames her aesthetic as temperament: “very personal, very independent.” But the target is bigger than personality. In the world of German Lieder, tradition can become a kind of ventriloquism, where performers inherit not just tempi and diction but entire emotional postures. Her blunt phrasing - “a lot of copy, a lot of imitation” - cuts through the polite myth that classical music is mainly about fidelity. She’s accusing the field of rewarding resemblance over revelation.

The awkward little swerve, “I don’t like intimate ladies,” reads like a mistranslation doing accidental truth-telling. “Intimate” here is less about closeness than about a stylized, precious inwardness: the cultivated salon hush, the tasteful miniaturizing of feeling. Lieder performance, at its worst, becomes a coded performance of refinement, where intimacy is an aesthetic filter rather than a human risk. By rejecting that “lady-like” intimacy, she’s rejecting a gendered expectation too: the soprano as delicate interpreter, gently preserving inherited manners.

Context matters: de los Angeles was a Spanish artist moving through German repertory, carrying a different relationship to song, language, and expressivity. “I have put it aside” isn’t anti-Schubert; it’s anti-orthodoxy. The intent is permission - to treat Lieder not as a lineage to obey, but as a text to inhabit, even if that means sounding unlike the approved ancestors.