Julie Fuchs: “Opera may be expensive, but there are ways. I spent years queuing for 30 euro tickets”

The story of how Julie Fuchs (Meaux, France, 37 years old) became a soprano could have several beginnings.

In the first, she is six years old and attends a school operetta performance with her class.

The crush is immediate.

"I didn't have anything to compare it to, and maybe at that age I paid more attention to the sequins than to the music, but I had the feeling that there was something more, that everything was possible," she explains.

A year later, she is enrolled at the Avignon Conservatory.

Little Julie wants to dance, but they convince her to choose the violin.

“I was afraid of solfeggio, until I discovered that I loved it”.

Deciphering scores fascinates him so much that he attends twice the number of classes stipulated.

In some of them, the students sing in several voices to interpret polyphonic melodies.

At that time, she remembers, someone praised her voice, but she didn't take it very seriously.

At 14, a friend of hers suggested that she try out for a teen choir that was to accompany Björk on the occasion of the European Capital of Culture in Avignon.

At the audition, the director asked her to do vocalizations, the typical exercise with which singers warm up her voice.

"It was my first time, so I just vaguely repeated the scales that the pianist marked," he recalls.

“He was playing higher and higher scales, and higher, and I repeated them, until the director said it was enough.

'If you keep going up, we're never going to finish,' he said.

They selected her, of course.

"We sang everything from Messiaen to Icelandic folklore."

At the last concert, he started crying.

“No one else was crying, and I didn't understand why.

I didn't want to stop singing!"

The soprano Julie Fuchs.ANGELA SUÁREZ

Two decades have passed and Fuchs has not stopped singing.

At the Teatro Real in Madrid, where we chatted with her, she has just played Susanna in

, which in turn was one of the first roles she took on in her career, just like her admired Natalie Dessay, who made her debut with the Mozart's opera buffa.

Fuchs's repertoire begins in the Baroque —"it was the specialty of my first singing teacher"—, and extends to the contemporary.

He made his recording debut with a recital of melodies by Francis Poulenc and has recorded two albums for Deutsche Grammophon.

This spring he has also been in Barcelona, ​​with

by Debussy, and he yearns for someone to propose to him to make a

where “the place, the moment and the right partners” converge.

During the photos, the conversation oscillates between Rameau –the French baroque genius–, his tango classes, because he is still passionate about dancing, and the inconveniences of traveling so much.

“The worst thing I have is changing apartments so much, opening the kitchen door and not having a clue what is going to be missing,” he points out.

Is she a diva?

"For one thing, I don't know what a diva is," she replies.

"On the other hand, I think all of us singers are, because what we do is very difficult and requires certain things."

She acknowledges that the mythology of the world came to intimidate her.

“If we conceive of a diva as someone capricious, clearly I am not.

In fact, I am afraid of doing things on a whim, or being thought to do them on a whim.

For this reason, for ten years I did not dare to ask for anything or say what I thought.

Until I realized that one thing is a whim and another very different thing is a requirement linked to artistic needs.

This profession requires nerves of steel.”

Determined to undo myths, Fuchs wants to combat one of the most pernicious: that opera is an elitist luxury.

His is the

dedicated to sharing useful information.

“Opera may be expensive, but there are always ways.

I spent years queuing at the Opéra Bastille for €30 tickets.

And besides, sometimes young people don't know what to expect.

They imagine that they always have to be very dressed, or that they won't understand anything, or that it's going to be too long, or that they're going to make a mistake with the applause.

But look, we just did

and nobody knows when it's time to applaud.

Even we don't know why people clap in one aria and not in another.

It has always been like this.

And nothing happens!".

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