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It ain't over til the fat lady sings? Please. If you think of opera as a staid genre with little to do with young people, Theodora Cottarel is happy to set you right. The Paris based soprano is apart of a generation of musicians who make us drop all our misconceptions about the storied art. After all, Theodora is 26. Her pump up song before she sings to upwards of 1,400 people? Crazy in Love and 7/11 by Beyonce. Here, Theodora talks to us about what being an opera singer today is really like.

I always wanted to be a singer.

It just happened that my path took me to opera. I’m the youngest of four siblings in a family of non-musicians. I wasn't really surrounded by classical music, but I was always in choirs growing up. It’s been 10 years since I first went to the Manhattan School of Music.

Paris is my home right now, but travel is definitely a perk of the job. I’ve been able to go to Italy, New York, Texas and Belgium. There are four main languages in opera: English, French, Italian and German. I grew up speaking French at home and I’ve done a couple operas in Italian, but German is a bit of a struggle.

Opera is more accessible than you think. 

It’s misconception that young singers and musicians, myself included, would like to stop. There's so much gorgeous music that can speak to anybody. For one, I'm doing a concert called Dating in a Modern World in New York this December. I take some dating rules and then play a 20th century American or French song to present the relationship between what's going on today and classical music. 

For example, one of the stories is about a date who brought her scale to dinner and weighed everything that she ate. We follow that with ‘Plum Pudding’ by Bernstein, which includes all the ingredients you need to make plum pudding.

It was inspired by the online dating my friends and I have done. Some of the stories are just ridiculous. I thought, how fun would it be to use this concept that's relevant to so many people and put it with classical music?

I enjoy the humorous side of everything. 

In The Sopranos, we’re poking fun at the competition between women in opera. The majority of the opera singers are sopranos or women. It's much easier for a man to make it quickly, whereas it can be difficult to get a job even if you're a very good soprano.

You can also be 'too young'. You mature vocally at about 27 and you're at your prime when from 30 to 35 or 40. There's a very small window where you can break into the scene.

One of the things I love about Hub Dot is that women are helping women and not pushing them under the bus. It's not only my industry where it's very difficult for women. 

Goethe said, “Music starts where words end.” 

Singing is a way for me to connect to 200 to a 1,400 people I don’t know at the same time.  It's really hard to describe without sounding really corny. Everything comes together, a real sensation of feeling whole.

It's funny because around high school I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue with this path and my parents encouraged me to follow it. I'm super glad I did, because I can say that I'm doing what I wanted to do when I was a little girl.

Meet Theodora on the Piazza or watch her sing live in Paris and New York!

Piqued your interest? Check out Theodora’s top picks for contemporary classical:

• Lee Hoiby
• Isabelle Aboulker
• Tiziana De Carolis
• Amy Beach
• Paul Bowles
• Charles Ives