Creativity Quote by Victoria de los Angeles

There is a quietly radical pecking order hiding in this offhand line: German comes last, and not because it is lesser, but because it demands a particular kind of grown-up readiness. De los Angeles frames repertoire like a body that has to be warmed through before it can carry certain weight. “Ancient and Italian or French or Baroque” reads as both stylistic training and emotional conditioning: early music for line and restraint, Italian for breath and legato, French for color and finesse, Baroque for precision and architecture. Only then, she implies, does the singer earn the right to German.

The subtext is about more than language; it is about density. German art song and opera ask for a thicker relationship to text, a sterner rhythm of thought, and an ability to ride longer musical paragraphs without losing psychological clarity. Her “Not unless” is a boundary, the kind artists draw to protect craft from ambition. It also punctures a common fantasy in classical music culture: that vocal greatness is just about “having the voice.” She’s insisting it’s about having the toolkit.

Context matters, too. De los Angeles built her legend on luminous lyricism, not heavyweight vocal exhibitionism. Read this way, the remark is both pedagogy and self-portrait: she’s describing an aesthetic ethic where repertoire isn’t a trophy case, it’s a sequence of disciplines. German is not a flex; it’s a responsibility.