About
Thirty years.
One methodology.
The Story
From civil engineering to the Metropolitan Opera.
Long before the opera houses, there was a guitar and a handful of boleros — popular songs, sung for the love of it. That was the first voice. Luis Chapa was born in Mexico and trained first as a civil engineer before the voice took over completely. What began as a parallel path became the only path — one that led from Mexico to the conservatoires of Europe, and from there to the greatest opera houses in the world.
He has sung at the Metropolitan Opera House, and across the stages of Europe and the Americas, in roles including Otello, Samson, Aïda, and Calaf — thirty years at the level where the margin between training and full expression is measured not in technique, but in freedom.
It was that margin — what separates a singer who knows from a singer who is heard — that became the question Breath & Voice was built to answer.
Breath & Voice is for any singer who's given themselves to it — classical, jazz, musical theatre, or self-taught. You've put in the work, and you know there's more in you, waiting to come out. This is how you reach it: through the body, the breath, and the freedom underneath them both. It comes from tenor Luis Chapa — thirty years at the Metropolitan Opera and the great houses of the world — but it belongs to anyone who sings. It doesn't replace what you've learned. It completes it.
The Methodology
What thirty years on stage taught — beyond technique.
Breath & Voice works with the layer formal training rarely reaches — the body and the nervous system, where real freedom lives.
Grounded in breath physiology, somatic practice, and performance neuroscience — and built from three decades of experience at the highest levels of operatic performance — it works where training ends.
The three pillars are Alignment, Breath, and Resonance. Not as separate technical components, but as a unified system that, when functioning together, allows the Singer State to arrive: free, full, instinctive expression.
Breath & Voice exists for the singer who's done the work and is ready to set it all free on stage.
Founded by Luis Chapa — Metropolitan Opera
The methodology is developed in ongoing dialogue with Marie Vassiliou, singing teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music.
In his own words.
Work with Luis.
For enquiries about private sessions, The Onion workshop, or institutional partnerships.