Stuart Graham

The sound of a Tosti aria booms from an open door at the Universidad Autónomo de Querétaro. Curious students peer in, looking for the source of the dramatic tenor voice.

Image:Julio Cesár González

Stuart Graham.

Inside, Stuart Graham and Antonio Moreno Zúñiga duel with legato phrases. Graham, a tall redhead, pauses to give Zúñiga advice.

"Don't sing to the person you love!" says Graham, 42, a Canadian opera teacher. "Bring her to you!" To demonstrate, he leans back and sings softly.

Last year, Graham expanded his opera studio from Toronto to Querétaro, where he now works full-time. He trains five Mexican singers at a fraction of the cost he charges Canadians, and runs a summer opera program here. In a country with little opera education, Graham refines raw talent.

"People here think opera is this magical sound that comes out of someone." Graham seems to sing even when he's speaking: "They're taught arias, but they aren't taught why they exist. With the summer program, they're taught arias in the context of the story. They learn the process of putting together a sixty-minute show of life and death, blood and guts, and murder and love." He laughs and rocks back in his chair.

Zúñiga, 21, his star pupil, attended last summer's program for free, along with three other Mexican students. After a month of practice, they performed La Bohème and Così Fan Tutte with Canadian students who paid to attend the program. Zúñiga made his operatic debut-in the lead role of Rodolfo in La Bohème.

Graham says he wants to spotlight the large pool of talented Mexican singers, a result of "good genes, I guess," which he says grant many Mexican singers with rich, resonant instruments.

Teaching them, though, has tested his patience. With an opera performance certificate from McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Graham is prepared for advanced students, but he has had to teach remedial lessons in acting because Mexicans haven't been exposed to the theatrical side of opera. His method is to inspire students with his infectious passion.

"If I excite them, [in this] time of the Internet they can look up anything online," Graham says. "My students spend so much time on YouTube looking up artists, arias and excerpts. These students come in completely informed at their next lesson, and their learning curves are enormous. It's part of the culture, a very open-hearted culture. When they're excited, they move."

After a visit to Querétaro in 2004, Graham decided to move to Mexico, "out of purely selfish reasons. I said ‘I have to find a way to live here on a three-month paid vacation.'"

His vacation turned into a permanent relocation lasting eight months and counting. He developed the summer program in 2008 and also developed a one-to-two-week getaway package for Canadian singers who want to take lessons daily and immerse themselves in Mexican culture.

With his busy schedule, Graham doesn't have much time for his own performances, but after his years singing in Canada and Europe, he says he isn't struggling to establish a performance career.

"I'm too absorbed with my own curiosity with my art form," he says.

Visit Stuart Graham's opera studio online at atelier-s.org. Email him at atelier.s@sympatico.ca.