Opera star Rolando Villazón cannot imagine life without books. “I read at least one book a week,” said the singer and director on the sidelines of a new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” at the Semperoper in Dresden. The 51-year-old Mexican has already written three novels himself.
He wants to write a fourth book in “neo-baroque language”. “I like to be on the road literary and musical at the same time.” That’s why he’s currently reading a lot from the field of “novela picaresca”, the picaresque novels from the 16th and 17th centuries.
“Especially during the corona pandemic, I read many books again. That’s still the case today,” said Villazón. He cited Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”, Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” as examples.
The Argentinian Ricardo Piglia (1941-2017) was a new literary discovery for him. “He suffered from the incurable muscular and nervous disease ALS and at the end of his life he could no longer write himself, but had to dictate everything.” Villazón reads English, French and Italian literature in the original, the rest in Spanish.