Juan Diego Florez

I grew up listening to popular music. My father was a Peruvian folk singer. He played the guitar at home. He sang songs with a waltzing rhythm, yet you can still hear the Spanish influences. I accompanied him to his performances.

I'm lucky because my repertoire is so specific, and theaters are interested in me singing my repertoire because it is not done so much. I'm pretty well settled in my repertoire. I like what I sing. My voice is high, and there is not much in baroque opera for higher tenor.

I have always been pretty flexible. I could always jump and do all kinds of dangerous movements. In opera, I like to do it because it's fun, as long as it fits the role.

Around age 38, there was a slight change to my voice, and very much in the center. That made it possible to start thinking about certain roles: Guillaume Tell, Romeo, Edgardo. These roles require a fuller center.

In Peru, there is no theatre that produces an annual opera season, and though there is one orchestra in Lima, it's always struggling to survive. We shouldn't have just one orchestra, we should have 15, we should have 50! And you should start to build this from the children.

I think spontaneous and free reactions are the most natural.

I don't push my voice; I try to keep a good technique, a natural way of singing, to sing from the breath, which is the main thing.

Even if change in a voice is light, and people maybe don't notice it, that slight change is, for singers, a bit of an earthquake.

I don't like to fill up my schedule. It's easy to do, but then that year arrives, and you find that you have no time, so you are desperately trying to cancel something. I have to think of my family.