Victoria Rimoczi - Artist’s Statement
Often times, I’m asked what makes me sing. I sing, very simply because it makes me happy and makes me feel complete.
There is an indescribable joy as your foot goes on the stage, the lights are focused on you and all the months and years of hard work combine in a moment of absolute clarity. Somehow the plywood and paint on the set transforms itself to a beautiful villa in Italy, or a dark den filled with thieves in Spain. For a moment you get to live two lives – one of the singer and one of a character in the story. You stand on the stage and invite the audience to see through your eyes and feel through your voice.
A palpable energy crosses over the threshold of the stage and you are communicating in a language not bound by race, culture or creed, a language which everyone speaks but no one can ever write the words to. There really is no other place in life where this communion occurs. In that moment you are truly alive and free, a creature of music.
There has never been a time when I didn’t want to be a singer. In first grade, I won a trophy for singing “You Light Up My Life”. After that I remember sitting on Santa’s lap every Christmas and when he’d ask me “What would you like to be when you grow up?” The answer was always the same “A singer”. I sang everything. Mom even says I sang in my sleep.
When I was in junior high, I was flipping through the stations on an old radio and a voice lofted out into my bedroom and I just remember listening to that beautiful voice. I didn’t know the language. I didn’t know the aria. But I could feel her pain, her sorrow, her loss. She put a lifetime into five minutes of music. It was in that moment I decided I wanted to sing opera. The singer was the great Maria Callas, the aria was Vissi d’arte.
What she conveyed, the passion, the emotion crosses over the barriers of language, race, or culture and helps us see the challenges in life as universal. We are not so different from our neighbors. We have all, at one time or another, played the role of the seductress Carmen or Delilah, recorded in horror at what we’ve done as Tosca or mourned for loss of our love like Orfeo did for his Euridice.
I want to contribute my voice and style to the wonderful catalogue of singers who have gone before me and have left an indelible mark on the face of the world. I want people to feel through my artistry - be on the grand opera stage or in a church adding to the joy of the joining of two lives or at the final farewell where music enfolds and comforts us.
We as singers have been blessed. We’ve been granted through natural gifts, hard work and a diligence, a voice that can express so much of life. I think Richard Wagner wrote it best.
“...I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through this Art all men are saved...”