Rolando Villazón

Three prizes at Operalia in 1999 — second overall, the zarzuela award and the audience vote — launched a Mexican tenor who had come to opera late and by an unlikely route. Born in Mexico City in 1972, Villazón trained at the National Conservatory and then through the young-artist programmes of Pittsburgh Opera and San Francisco Opera. The lyric Italian and French repertoire made his name: Alfredo, Rodolfo, Nemorino, des Grieux, Don José, Roméo, at the Metropolitan, Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, La Scala and Salzburg, with a Deutsche Grammophon discography that has run past twenty releases. He turned to production in January 2011 with a Werther for the Opéra de Lyon, and has since directed L'elisir d'amore, La traviata, Die Fledermaus and Il barbiere di Siviglia. Mozart became the organising commitment of his later career: he took over the artistic direction of Salzburg’s Mozart Week on 1 July 2017, the first edition entirely programmed by him falling in 2019, and became artistic director of the International Mozarteum Foundation in 2021. He also writes fiction — the novel Malabares among it — and presents music programmes for German and French radio. He had become an ambassador of the Mozarteum Foundation early in 2017. His European debuts came in 1999 with Des Grieux in Genoa, Alfredo in Paris and Macduff in Berlin. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2007, he has sold more than two million albums, and his staging work has reached Baden-Baden, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Dusseldorf, the Vienna Volksoper and the Semperoper. Two further novels followed Malabares - Lebenskünstler in 2017 and Amadeus auf dem Fahrrad in 2020 - and he is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an ambassador of RED NOSES Clowndoctors International.