The Christmas carols are still echoing in the digital ether when Angel Romero’s face appears on my computer screen. He’s just survived his “fifth Christmas” — a whirlwind of family celebrations. “We were bouncing from parents to grandparents to other grandparents to my parents,” he says.
Meet Fidel Angel Romero — rising opera star and first-generation American.
His story begins in Stafford, Texas, where his parents landed after fleeing El Salvador’s civil war. They were teenagers thrust into a world where everything from the language to the street signs might as well have been hieroglyphics. But they had something that no war could take away: a determination to give their children a better life.
“My parents were about affirmations,” Romero reflects. “The gifts you’ve been given come from the Lord.” It’s a mantra that would shape not just his faith, but his entire approach to life.
The path to opera wasn’t exactly straight. There was the saxophone first — band over choir. Then came the moment that would change everything: The Three Tenors on PBS’s Great Performances. The trio performed “O Sole Mio,” and you can almost see the teenage Angel, transfixed by Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras, their voices reaching through the television screen to grab hold of his soul.
But dreams, especially in the arts, don’t come with instruction manuals. Romero found himself at Houston Baptist University (now HCU), not by careful planning but through what he calls “a happy accident.” It was there he met his wife, found his voice, and learned that the best paths are the ones you never plan to take.
“When I decided to go to a school for music, I ended up at Houston Baptist University. Honestly,” he admits with a smile, “that wasn’t my first choice.”
“I wanted to go to University of North Texas,” Romero recalls. “UNT has the best music school. The best, the biggest. I didn’t know anything about Juilliard, I didn’t know anything about Boston Conservatory, I didn’t know anything about all those other big music schools. I had no idea. I grew up in a very small circle. My brothers all went to UH, so I had no idea that there was anything else out there.”
“We couldn’t afford taking voice lessons. That wasn’t an option for us. But my brother gave me 80 bucks to go take this voice lesson with this teacher. It was at Rice University. She took me into a studio and I sang ‘Ave Maria.’ and she’s like, ‘Wow… this is a beautiful gift. I think you could go all the way.’”
“I am trying to pay out and she’s like, ‘No, no, no… you keep the money.’”
“For me, that was my very first experience of someone being generous with their time and telling me that I should be singing,” Romero remembers. “She said, ‘I have this perfect friend, and she’s a professor at Houston Baptist University. She will turn you into a gem.’ So, that’s what I did. I went to Houston Baptist University.”
Romero’s arrival at HBU was a happy accident. The University ticked all the boxes.
“I grew up in a conservative home,” Romero remembers. “Conservative both politically, but also conservative faith-wise. My parents said, ‘Always put the Lord first.’ They were very happy that I went to a faith-based institution.
One, the proximity from the house – I think it was 15 minutes – and two, I was able to express my faith freely without feeling judged.”
He acknowledges that in spite of a few obstacles, he was meant to stay at HBU.
My voice teacher left the university when I was a freshman, and I was devastated. I said, ‘I’m going to leave HBU,’ and I got accepted into Rice University as an undergraduate.”
But, the Lord had other ideas. “Unfortunately, HBU didn’t send my transcripts in time for the transfer deadline, so I ended up having to stay at HBU another year, but it ended up perfectly because I met Dr. David Kirkwood (he’s now my department head) and David became my voice teacher and he showed me the potential I could have.”
“I met my wife at HBU, so if I would have left, I would have never married her. I have some of the best friends in the world that I still stay in touch with, so I was MEANT to stay at HBU. And the Lord just had a funny way of showing me how to do that.”
Talk about the Lord opening all the right doors.
“Everyone who knows me knows that I try to do everything the best that I can,” he says, echoing his parents’ philosophy. “It’s either you suck or you’re good at it. There’s no being mediocre.” Coming from anyone else, that might sound harsh. From Romero, it sounds like love.
Then came the leap – the kind that either makes or breaks an artist. Graduate school at Yale University beckoned, along with other prestigious music schools, but this wasn’t just about choosing a graduate program. It was about leaving home for the first time in 21 years, about being the baby brother who finally flew the nest. “I’d never left home before,” Romero remembers, his voice softening. “I was the baby brother and I was gone.”
New Haven became his proving ground, where talent met reality in a head-on collision. “My teachers never gave me one kind word… not one,” he says.
But they saw something in him — enough to line him up for his apprenticeship at Pittsburgh Opera. He lived in an attic, scraped by on almost nothing, somehow managed to get a dog during the pandemic, and through it all, kept his faith. “It was all the Lord, really,” he reflects. “He made something out of nothing.”
The grind of those years — developing his technique, finding his voice — would have broken many. But Romero had inherited his parents’ immigrant resilience. “My parents were 15 and 16 when they immigrated to this country,” he reminds me. “They had to raise a family in the midst of learning a language that they didn’t know, being in a community that was strange to them. They had to follow that recipe that it’s not good enough to just be good… you have to be better than good to be able to offer that opportunity to your children.”
The journey since then has been a masterclass in faith and persistence. Through it all, there were the constant questions that haunt every artist: How will I put food on the table? How will I pay the mortgage? “It’s a stress that I don’t want to show anybody,” he admits, “because it’s a constant battle.”
But then came Vienna State Opera. Operalia in Mumbai. The surprise recognition from OperaWire as one of the top ten rising stars — news he received while sprawled on his couch preparing to watch a Christmas movie with his wife. “What a surprise for me,” he says, still sounding amazed. “It was years of sacrifice and hard work. It showed me that God has me, he’s got my back, he’s going to provide for me, he’s going to take care of me and my family and that my hard work is being noticed.”
Now, at 16 months old, his son Isaac Walker Romero toddles through their home, his name literally meaning “he who smiles” – a living reminder of joy in the midst of life’s complexities. “He is a light,” Angel beams. “He is exactly what the Bible says. Isaac does nothing but smile and bring joy.” When Angel’s not on stage, he’s teaching the next generation of singers at HCU, bringing both faith and hard reality to his lessons. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” he tells his students, “It’s no longer good enough to be good… you have to be the best.”
As our conversation winds down, Romero reveals his next big step: Beethoven’s Ninth with the Munich Philharmonic in 2025. His eyes light up as he shares this yet-to-be-announced news, and at that moment, I see what his parents saw all those years ago — a gift meant to be shared with the world.
In the end, Angel Romero’s story isn’t just about opera. It’s about faith — in God, in family, in the power of art to transform lives. It’s about a young man from Stafford, Texas, who took his parents’ dreams and turned them into arias. And most of all, it’s about hope — the kind that echoes long after the last note has faded away.