On a chilly Thursday evening, Lisette Oropesa made her way down the cramped aisles of an Indian market near St. Mark’s Place, sniffing Ziploc bags of garam masala, turmeric, and curry powders. The 28-year-old soprano—along with her fiancé, Steven—has been on an Indian kick as of late and has been gradually stocking her kitchen with spices to add local flavor to their vegetarian fare.
“I just love cooking. I love experimenting with different flavors. I don’t eat salt, so I love using herbs and different kinds of spices,” Oropesa told me a week earlier over grilled zucchini and beluga lentils at the decidedly non-Indian (but Lincoln Center-adjacent) Café Luxembourg.
From cardamom and daal to vegan bistro fare, Oropesa is a long way from her Louisiana roots and her highest weight of 205 pounds. Born into a musical family of Cuban émigrés, Lisette was surrounded by song and sustenance. Her mother Rebeca (née Ulloa) had sung roles such as Sister Genevieve in Suor Angelica and Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi at local universities and, after becoming a mother, turned her musical ear toward leading the choir at the family’s local church. Oropesa sang in the same choir every Sunday for 20 years, unwittingly learning classical style in that time and also focusing her studies on the flute.
It was on that same instrument that Oropesa originally intended to major at Louisiana State University. When her mother suggested she look at opera, she agreed to audition for the voice faculty, but didn’t think much would come out of it.
“I auditioned for them and they said, ‘You have to do voice,’” she says. “And I auditioned for the flute people and they said, ‘You’re great [but] we think you should do voice, too.’”
Oropesa initially courted a double major but eventually did stick with voice, studying with tenor Robert Grayson (a New York City Opera vet who also worked with her mother) and adding some technical reinforcements to her strong foundation of talent. As recounted in classical music blog Oberon’s Grove in December of 2006, Oropesa credits Grayson with allowing her to “develop good habits while still in the earliest stages of my vocal growth.”
At the same time, however, Oropesa’s childhood of unhealthy eating habits was starting to catch up. She was the drum major in her high school band but was, in her own words, “the last one to finish the mile.” She recalls that her parents always cooked homemade meals for the family during her childhood, but she confesses, “I just didn’t like green things. I’d pick them off my plate. I thought they were gross.” As she got older and in charge of her own meal choices, she opted for fast food, owning up to the fact that at the time she wasn’t aware of nutrition. “You have to kind of know,” she adds. “Somebody has to tell you, or you have to sit down and figure it out.”
Studying in the deep South—where barbecue, football, and fast food reigned supreme—also didn’t help. By the time she graduated, Oropesa was popping out of a size 16. Throughout her time at LSU, she did start to think about her health and her fitness. “At several points in college, I had people who told me I should lose weight,” she notes. She tested out her school gym and its elliptical machine and stopped drinking soda, but getting into a routine of healthy eating and physical activity proved more daunting.
“I’d get tired with it; I wouldn’t stick with it,” she admits. “It was hot outside. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to practice. I wanted to study. I didn’t have time—or I didn’t have the motivation.”
What finally gave Oropesa that motivation was winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2005, entering on a fluke in her senior year of college. The day she returned to Louisiana, she was asked to return to New York to audition for James Levine and the company’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. After 10 minutes of working with coach John Fisher, she was offered a spot in the same program that has fostered the careers of Renée Fleming, Danielle de Niese, Nathan Gunn, Dawn Upshaw, and Andrea Gruber.
From there, Oropesa’s career took off swiftly and steadily. She made her Met debut as the small role of Cretan in Mozart’s Idomeneo under Levine’s baton in 2006. Following that, she was the First Lay-Sister in the company’s new production of Suor Angelica and blossomed the following seasons as Dew Fairy in Hänsel und Gretel, the Woodbird in Siegfried, the Rhinemaiden Woglinde in the final run of Otto Schenk’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the pert maid Lisette in Puccini’s La rondine. Her breakthrough role, however, was as a last-minute turn as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro in October 2007 at age 24 and just 13 months after her first time on the Met’s stage, replacing a pregnant Isabel Bayrakdarian and starring opposite hot-commodity baritone Erwin Schrott.
“Ms. Oropesa’s last-minute elevation turns out to be a more interesting story than a pregnant Susanna,” wrote Allan Kozinn for the New York Times on October 4. “She proved a vocally and physically agile Susanna, with an attractively silky, flexible timbre. Her fine comic instincts and cheerfully bright sound put her in command of the stage during much of the first two acts. But she conveyed emotional depth too, most notably in her moving, dark-hued account of ‘Deh vieni non tardar’ in the final act.”
A reprise of the role in 2009 showed the young soprano embracing many of the same timbers of her childhood instrument, giving a performance as Mozart’s scheming maid that was at turns sweet and strong, light and dark—a rum-spiked tiramisu—and with a silky, agile tone that betrayed no fatigue at the end of the demanding role (Susanna rarely gets a break from singing or being onstage).
Over the same amount of time, Oropesa began another journey—one that was slower but carried just as great an impact. After being told throughout college by well-meaning teachers and college classmates that she should lose weight, Oropesa got a major reality call from the Met. “The first thing they said to me was, ‘The voice is great. You need to lose weight. The voice type is going to put you in a certain category of looks and people,’” she recounts. “‘If you want to succeed, we think it will help you.’”
Oropesa took the advice to heart: as a light soprano, she spent the first summer working in earnest toward getting a body to match her voice and signed up for a gym membership at the YMCA, starting off with 15 minutes on the elliptical and increasing her time bit by bit. Earlier this year, Oropesa documented her weight loss story for fellow singer Rebecca Fromherz’s blog, Opera Organically, writing of her rationalization: “People lose weight every day, so I know I can do this and I’m ready; I’m young enough that it shouldn’t be too hard. Besides, why would I let something like that screw my career over before it even begins?” When she returned to the Lindemann program for a second year, Oropesa was down 25 pounds and received full support from her colleagues at the Met. She was still eating meat, pizza, and pasta, but had begun making subtle changes to her diet.
“And then I went through a really difficult time in my life,” she says. “I went through a divorce and found [Steven]—the love of my life, the person I was supposed to be with all along.” She lost another 20 pounds. “I was stressed out—there was just a lot going on,” she says of that drop in weight. “I was just trying to keep my life in check, and people were worried about me. I would sit, have two bites, and I just couldn’t eat any more. And that’s awful.”
However, when Steven—who lost a significant amount of weight as well—moved to New York to be with Lisette, their journeys to healthier living aligned. As a Web designer, he was at liberty to travel with Lisette to gigs in Germany (including turns as Lucia in Donizetti’s Highland tragedy and Fiorilla in Rossini’s Il turco in Italia at Deutsche Oper am Rhein) where they indulged in sausage and cheese. “You’re like, ‘Oh this is great! I love this diet!’” Oropesa gushed of the European cuisine, pausing for deadpan effect before adding: “‘Why don’t my pants fit?’”
“We both put on 10 or 15 pounds—that was the end of last year—and we both said, ‘OK, let’s start running,’” she says. “Running is the best form of cardio. It’s free, you can do it anywhere, you don’t have to have a gym membership, you don’t have to have a machine.” Like her initial weight-loss journey, Oropesa slowly but surely built up a solid foundation that, almost a year and a half later, sees her running regularly three to four times a week with improved mileage and speed and additional weight loss. It’s a pretty empowering thought given that she was once the last person to finish the mile in high school gym class.
Around the same time, Oropesa also started to practice yoga. She tried a class with her manager at Columbia Artists Management Inc., Bill Guerri, after several invitations. “I said, ‘OK, fine, if I can run, I can do yoga. Let’s see what happens,’” she says. “And we go to class, and it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. I couldn’t do half of the stretches, I sweated like a pig, my arms were shaking, my legs were on fire. [But] at the end, I remember sitting in Savasana [corpse pose], looking up at the ceiling, and I was like, I get it. I totally get it now, man. This feeling rushed over me—I know it sounds cheesy, but this feeling of euphoria rushed over me.”
A natural self-starter, Oropesa started using yoga guru Shiva Rea’s DVDs and practiced at home with Steven before gaining the confidence to practice at a local studio in New York, intertwining the stretching and strength positions with her running and allowing both activities to fuel her singing. “These activities have helped to heal me as a human being,” she wrote for Opera Organically. “They have created a genuine happiness in me because they have put me back in touch with my center. I thought I was lost, my spirit crushed, and that I may never sing again, until I began to grow from the inside out.”
The increase in activity also led Oropesa to overhaul her diet. “When you’re more active, you realize that the things you eat need to be healthier so you can fuel that,” she explains. While she was happy to meet up for lunch—checking out the menu online beforehand to ensure there was something that would fit in with her regime—she prefers to cook with Steven at home, trying out new beans, grains, and vegetables on a weekly basis (and, yes, cooking with Indian spices). Now far from gross, greens dominate her dinner plate. The extension to her spice rack also means she eats less sodium, and she has recently converted to veganism—incrementally, after realizing that she’s happier to not eat meat and feels better using almond milk or coconut milk as dairy replacements.
What doesn’t come up, however, are diet foods. As our coffee service arrives, Oropesa reaches for a Sugar in the Raw packet over the calorie-free Splenda and Equal and even briefly contemplates biscotti. “I have fruit every day for breakfast and I have it for dessert—I never skip dessert,” she says, adding that she also has one cup of coffee in the morning and the occasional afternoon pick-me-up, though she normally sticks to water and, occasionally, Gatorade after a long run. Another recent addition to her pantry are chia seeds, a tidbit she picked up from Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run, which explores the life and running habits of the Tarahumara Indians. “I have them with my breakfast, sprinkle them in a fruit smoothie, and I feel great!” she says.
The stamina is a necessity for a singer working as often as Oropesa does. “When you’re singing, you’re truly engaged. There’s a level of fitness that has to be there,” she explains—but most notably it comes in handy for many of the Met’s new productions under General Manager Peter Gelb, which require a significant amount of movement and the occasional nontraditional costume. Oropesa’s performance as Amor in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, in a production directed by notable dancer Mark Morris and costumed by fashionista Isaac Mizrahi, featured her singing in a harness 70 feet above the stage and wearing a kicky pair of khakis and a sequined pink polo shirt.
Even more involved was her reprisal of Woglinde in Das Rheingold for the company’s shiny new Ring Cycle directed by technological mastermind Robert Lepage (a role she continues next April and May when the company performs the Ring in its entirety). This performance brought into play Oropesa’s distinction between thin and fit. While she was close to her current weight of 125 pounds by the time she went to the depths of Lepage’s Rhine, she was not prepared for the harness work the role demanded. And while she had more advance notice than her first Susanna, she was still pinch-hitting.
“The other girls that were contracted started training at the beginning of the summer for using the machine and the harness. I didn’t have that,” she explains. “I only just started running again and just started yoga, so I wasn’t prepared.” When the movements were demonstrated to the Rhinemaidens, they were done by a professional male acrobat, which placed some added pressure on the female singer—literally.
“The harness was holding us on our pelvis—you had to do a tremendous amount of backbend to stay upright,” she explains of the maneuvers. “It was only a few seconds at a time of being like that, but with enough of that, I’d come home sore. But I kept running, I kept working on yoga, trying to open up the back, and I pulled through it. Now it would have been a piece of cake.”
Conversely, while being thin doesn’t equal being fit, Oropesa is also quick to point out that being fit doesn’t necessarily have to mean being thin. “I always knew that opera singers have large chests, and that makes sense,” she says, noting that when she covered broad-chested soprano Anna Netrebko in Don Pasquale, her energy and muscle tone were envy inducing. What’s more, singers like Netrebko (and Oropesa) have an ability to move gracefully and convincingly onstage, which has become an increasingly attractive asset for opera’s gradual entry into the world of HD. Oropesa can be seen slinking around on the arm of Marius Brenciu’s Prunier on DVD in the Met’s simulcast of La rondine, opposite Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna, and Samuel Ramey. She will also appear in HD transmissions this coming year, starring as Miranda in William Christie’s Baroque pastiche, The Enchanted Island (opening at the Met this month), and revisiting her high-flying role of Woglinde in Das Rheingold.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Did you lose weight for a particular role or did the Met tell you to lose weight? Are they making you do this for HD?’” Oropesa says. “And the answer really is, ‘No.’ Because they told me when I was a young artist, not when I was a singing professional . . . and they told me once.” She also adds that her weight loss and fitness would be vital, HD or not.
“Maybe you won’t have to fly on a harness, but you’re going to have to get down and up off your knees at some point,” she says. “Singers are expected to do a lot more than just stand and sing. And there’s a big difference between looking the part and being fit.”
Of course, looking the part also helps in an industry where the competition is fierce, especially for soubrettes. “Putting Ms. Oropesa in a cast that already included Erwin Schrott, a youthful Uruguayan bass, as Figaro, was a smart move: this nine-year-old Jonathan Miller production, now stage directed by Robin Guarino, has worked best when the casts are not only vocally commanding, but young and trim as well,” wrote Kozinn in his same 2007 review of “Figaro.” However, what’s most important for Oropesa is having a broad mechanism and resonating through her sinus cavities. Yoga has helped her to engage her core and breath support with more strength, a healthier diet keeps her energy up onstage and in rehearsals, and running gives her a therapeutic outlet for her stress.
There’s a lot to credit to Oropesa’s trim and athletic figure and stamina—she’s regularly told at intermission by the makeup crew that she doesn’t sweat and, therefore, doesn’t require a touch-up—however she’s quick to attribute most of it to the support system. Her family, while still in Louisiana, remains closely knit (Oropesa returns to her home state each year for a concert and has appeared with the New Orleans Opera in both Rigoletto and The Pearlfishers). Her colleagues at the Met have given her “nothing but positive feedback” since she lost her first 25 pounds. And she has a partner that keeps her active and healthy for all the right reasons.
“Motivation is one thing—self-motivation on your own part has to be there,” she says. “But there’s a difference between support and someone telling you that you need to lose weight—that’s not positive. With my fiancé now, it’s the support. It’s ‘Hey, let’s try a different bean today or a different vegetable—let’s look up a vegetarian recipe we can do together.’ It’s wholly different. . . . I’m super happy. It’s the greatest thing ever.”
