María Fontanez: Bringing the Opera House Home

Fontanez has spent the past year performing in venues that seat fewer than a hundred people. “An aria is a letter,” she says. “You do not shout a letter across a room. You hand it over.”

Her vocal line remains formidable — the house-filling pianissimi still arrive as a shock — but the register has changed. Intimacy, she argues, is not a reduction of opera but its natural state.

“We built the fourth wall to make people feel small,” she says. “I am in the business of taking it down.”