On opening night of Los Angeles Opera’s 2003–04 production of Le Nozze di Figaro, partway through Act I, a dislodged light filter floated down from the flies and landed in the middle of the stage. To the Figaro that night — Erwin Schrott, looking hunky in a tank top and suspenders — the filter was merely so much rubbish on the floor of his new apartment. Staying in the scene, Schrott strolled over to the offending impurity, picked it up, crinkled it, and carried it around awhile before depositing it in a convenient nook.

“Ah, yes,” Schrott says by telephone from his home in Montevideo, “I remember that.” What was he thinking? “Nothing. I was being Figaro at the moment,” he states emphatically. “A piano can fall down to the stage, I would play it at that moment.”

It’s not difficult to believe him. Onstage, in his first Figaro, the singer projected ease and confidence; he was loose and enjoying himself. His demeanor seemed to combine equal parts charisma and a kind of Zen-like calm. Even on a bad phone connection to Uruguay, Schrott’s charm comes through loud and clear.

Born in 1972 in Uruguay, Schrott has made a casual study of acting. He has read Stanislavsky’s manual in Spanish and in English, and when time permits, he likes to sit in on actors’ studios or sit down with acting coaches over coffee. “It’s just a matter of listening and learning and using whatever is good for you,” he says.

He learned how to sing in much the same way. “One thing everybody told me from the beginning was a mistake was that I was studying with a lot of people, not at the same time, but trying to get to know as many professors as I can.” His friends and colleagues worried that this would only result in the young singer’s ultimate confusion. “But my idea, it was exactly the contrary. It was that, absorbing and getting information from all those professionals, I could do my own research of it, and at the end take the right decision.” So he would go to two or three lessons with one voice teacher and then move on to another. “Because there is not only one technique, there is not only one right decision to take, there is not only one person who is having the truth — there are many of them, and you have the right to choose.”

Schrott’s international career was launched when he won Plácido Domingo’s Operalia voice competition in 1998. Offers flooded in, but the fledgling singer was cautious. “Immediately, one thing that I remember talking about with my agents, both of them, is I will do small roles until I will feel that I am prepared to do a little bit more, and after that a little bit more. It’s like step by step, and very slow steps.”

Growing up in Uruguay, Schrott wasn’t always sure he wanted to be an opera singer, or a singer at all. His mother began giving him piano lessons when he was about six years old, but soon he was also interested in violin, flute, guitar, drums and especially ballet dancing. Though he sang one of the children’s parts in La Bohème at age eight, his vocal interests tended more toward folk music, art song and Baroque music.

“But at the age of seventeen, I said to a friend of mine, I will become an international opera singer. Ask me why? I have no idea. And he said to me, ‘What are you talking about? You were born in Uruguay. That is out of range, forget about it, just keep your ideas of becoming a lawyer, it would be better.’” His friend’s doubts only made Schrott more determined.

Schrott’s professional debut came in Montevideo when he was twenty-two, singing Roucher in Andrea Chénier. An invitation to the Teatro Municipal in Santiago soon followed. There, he sang Timur, Colline, Sparafucile and Ramfis. He won a scholarship to study in Italy and lived there for a decade, appearing on Italian stages. He is now looking for a new place to settle down, somewhere in Europe.

Schrott’s voice is rich, deep and fluently produced. Is he a baritone or a bass-baritone? “That is the question of the million,” he says. “As I always say all my life, I sing whatever feels comfortable and is pleasant for me, and also that I believe in. That is why I don’t sing many, many roles.” His main roles right now are Don Giovanni, Figaro and Escamillo, the last of which he is singing at the Met this month. But he’ll drop the role from his repertoire soon after the current run.

“I’ll tell you why. It’s very simple, actually — I don’t sing too much onstage.” More importantly, Schrott adds, it’s that the character of Escamillo bores him — there’s nothing to it, no depth or arc. “From the beginning until the end, it is exactly the same thing. You cannot do a study of Escamillo. I mean, intellectually there is nothing!”

For a year and a half now, Schrott has been working on the villains in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, which he’ll unveil at Bilbao in May, and on Méphistophélès in La Damnation de Faust, which he’ll sing for the first time in October, at Rome’s Santa Cecilia. “They are fantastic! I cannot wait. But, you know, I am getting everybody crazy in my home, I am listening and singing them all the time.”

The singers Schrott most admires and studies are Domingo, Leo Nucci, Ruggero Raimondi and, above all perhaps, Mirella Freni, for whom his enthusiasm knows no bounds. “Oh my god,” he says, “that is the — how do you say? — the fruit on the ice cream. For me she is ouch, hurt. It’s that good that it hurts.”

TIMOTHY MANGAN is a winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and classical-music critic of the Orange County Register.

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