Art & Creativity Quote by Victoria de los Angeles

A great singer can hide behind technique; Victoria de los Angeles is arguing for the opposite kind of mastery: the disciplined refusal to cosplay as someone else. Her sentence circles around a deceptively simple standard - choose music that "goes very well with my voice" - then quietly upgrades it into an ethic. Voice here isn’t just a set of notes you can hit; it’s temperament, language, emotional weather. When she says she wants something she "understand[s]" as "good communication with the others", she’s framing repertoire as a social contract. The goal isn’t conquest (sing everything) but contact (be heard, be meant).

The subtext is a critique of virtuoso culture, especially in 20th-century classical singing where prestige often meant tackling roles that signal greatness, not necessarily truth. De los Angeles, famed for Mozart, French song, and Spanish repertoire, made a career out of sounding like herself: luminous, intimate, unforced. Her soft "I don't pretend" is a small act of defiance against the industry’s push toward maximalism - the idea that ambition equals range, that the artist proves worth by stretching past comfort into spectacle.

What makes the quote work is its calm clarity. She doesn’t moralize; she demystifies. Personality becomes an artistic boundary, not a limitation but a tuning fork. In an era of branding before branding had a name, she’s insisting that authenticity isn’t raw confession; it’s careful selection. The artistry is in knowing what not to sing.