Interview by Eldee Eyimife, AGMA Communications Coordinator
Teresa Castillo’s love for opera was instilled in her before she was born. Her grandfather, who grew up poor in Costa Rica, loved Spanish opera enough to keep it playing on the radio. That love was passed down to her mother, who grew up listening to Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas on the same radio. Teresa never witnessed her grandfather’s devotion firsthand, but she inherited the love of it anyway, the sound absorbed through the radio to her mother’s womb, unconsciously securing a place in her heart.
However, what pushed her to pursue opera wasn’t the art in its traditional form; it came through opera in pop culture.
“There’s a scene in Beetlejuice where Lydia is writing a farewell note while ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ from Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor plays in the background. Watching Charlotte Church, Phantom of the Opera, and the scene in The Fifth Element of Plavalaguna (the blue alien) singing an aria unlocked something in me. All of that led me to opera.”
None of this was the typical, formal exposure to the art form, but it all added up. Teresa began voice lessons in high school, auditioned for a handful of college programs, and built a career from there—first at a state school in Colorado for her undergraduate degree, then at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music for her graduate degree.
In that academic setting, Teresa first felt the gap between the music she’d grown up loving and the music she was being trained to perform.
“Looking back, Spanish music was definitely put on the back burner—there was much more emphasis on Italian, German, English, and French, and Spanish repertoire was more of an afterthought. I was mostly surrounded by non-Latine classmates and teachers, so there wasn’t much emphasis on that music, and I didn’t know much of the repertoire.”
That changed once she moved to New York and began working alongside more Latine singers. She discovered there was more to Spanish repertoire than just the standard Zarzuela songbook for sopranos, or a few well-known song cycles. She started seeking out other Spanish-language works on her own, filling gaps in education that her training hadn’t addressed.
Teresa’s search eventually led her to Ainadamar, the opera centered on the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, which she covered during her first Metropolitan Opera contract. Sung entirely in Spanish and built around themes of revolution, memory, and the passing of tradition between generations, the piece became a turning point for her.
“Latine and Hispanic culture places a strong emphasis on respect for older generations. That passing on of knowledge, respect, and storytelling was one of the most beautiful parts of Ainadamar to me,” she shares. “Anytime I do a piece in Spanish or perform these intricacies of Hispanic culture, I feel more connected to the music and at home in that repertoire than in anything else.”
The same pride shows up in her love for Maria in West Side Story, a role she deems one of her favorites to perform. What draws her to both roles isn’t just the language or the setting, but what they represent to an audience.
“I want an industry where every audience member can see themselves on the stage,” Teresa says. “It can be very isolating growing up around people who don’t look, speak, act, or eat like you. I’d love for underrepresented populations to see themselves represented on stage, in the music, in the rhythms, in the language, in everything.”
Teresa Castillo ended her interview by calling for opera stages to reflect America’s cultural diversity, the very thing she believes gives the country its edge in the first place. That reflection isn’t an abstract ideal so much as something she’s lived out in rehearsal rooms and on stage, in roles that let her hear her own language and history sung back to her. It’s the same instinct that drew her to Ainadamar and to Maria in West Side Story, and the same one she hopes will keep shaping the roles still ahead of her. Diversity, in her view, isn’t a footnote to what makes American opera compelling, but the story itself.