As an opera singer, I’m used to breathing life into characters. During lockdown I took on a challenge to reimagine great artworks in my home – and so brought Black history to life and explored what it means to take up space as a Black man
As a Black British opera singer, I am used to being a rare breed – still. Moreover, I am accustomed to having quizzical glances cast in my direction, as if I am something of a novelty or a curious anomaly. A large part of my musical career to date has been based on balancing and reconciling the tricky dichotomy of otherness in relation to myself and the canon of western classical music that I love and love to perform. And given that they are so few and far between, representations of people who look like me in the classical canon have always been of interest. As a student of opera, I clung to the album covers of the African American soprano Leontyne Price and a black-and-white postcard portrait of the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. These totemic images, my superheroes, became talismanic, protective figures when I found myself on the receiving end of everyday racism from fellow musicians – things like “You’re the whitest Black man I know,”, or “Your performance was so good, I thought you were a white singer blacked up,” or “You would have been a slave when this opera was written.” Or the time a singing coach put her finger in my mouth because she just didn’t understand how I, “a Negro,” could have an alveolar ridge.
In opera, I have been cast as an enslaved African man twice. Both times turned out to be opportunities to humanise Black characters that have all too often existed on the stage as one-dimensional stereotypes. With one of these roles in particular – the enslaved African Kaidamà in Gaetano Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo, a 19th-century opera set in the Caribbean – there was an urgent need to restore agency to an operatic character who has been portrayed in blackface well into the 21st century. This is a “tradition” that has done much to distort the dignity of Black lives.
