From the Seminary to the Stage
Mark S. Doss Takes the Indirect Road to Opera

By Robert Wilder Blue

Mark S. Doss

Bass-baritone Mark S. Doss has given riveting performances as Escamillo in Carmen, Amonasro in Aïda, King Philip in Don Carlo, Mephistopheles in Faust, and the villians in The Tales of Hoffmann. Audiences and critics note his imposing voice, his magnetic presence and his compelling acting. But the road to becoming an opera singer was not a direct one for him. He was an athlete in high school and after graduation planned on becoming a priest. It was only after much encouragement that he finally decided to pursue singing.

"I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I went to East Tech High School and played on the basketball team, ran cross-country, and played tennis. I really only took chorus and drama because I needed the credits to graduate. My first on-stage experience was a production of Godspell. I also took some training in acting, singing and dancing in a youth work experience program in Cleveland where we did a show called The Wiz That Is, which was our original adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. It was billed as a nonracist, nonsexist presentation; I played the lead, Daniel Gale from Kansas. I had a six-foot Toto and the wizard was played by an African-American female. One of the big songs was about looking inside yourself and finding a world of joy and laughter and hope.

"My first career idea was the Catholic priesthood and after high school I entered the seminary, which is perhaps a nontraditional thing for an African-American to do. While I was there I played Sancho in Man of La Mancha and one of the teachers thought the voice had potential and suggested I pursue an operatic career. I hadn't had a lot of musical training. I could play a 'C' scale on the piano and that was about all, although I ended up acquiring piano skills there and I performed more on piano than I did singing during my senior year. My first public solo was at a funeral. I kind of bombed - I guess it was a confidence thing. I sang Schubert's Ave Maria. The teacher who had recommended me told me afterward that the son of the woman who had passed away had suggested that I not pursue singing.

"The chairman of the music department at St. Joseph's was an Indiana University graduate and he talked about it being the biggest opera school in the country with eight productions a year, all of them double-cast. During my junior year I had entered and won a local Metropolitan Opera competition and went to the regionals in Chicago. At that point, I finally decided I was in the wrong place, so I left the seminary and auditioned for Indiana and Illinois where William Warfield was teaching at the time. I had thought I'd be better off at Illinois because it was smaller. But the Indiana faculty's response was so enthusiastic and so I ended up going there. Although even after I got into Indiana I still didn't think singing was the most stable career to go into, so I majored in sociology. I was in the mode of being a help to society and thought I would continue to graduate school to be a social worker and just pursue music on the side.

"Camilla Williams, who came along before Leontyne Price and went through a lot of difficult things as a forerunner in this field, taught at Indiana and she helped me get a small scholarship. She suggested I study with Walter Cassel who had just come from New York City Opera where he had done The Ballad of Baby Doe among other things. He was a very spiritual kind of guy and a strong performer and a very good teacher.

"I didn't really feel that race was an issue while I was at Indiana. My first role was Konchok in Prince Igor and the other guy who was double cast was also African-American. I sang lots of roles there including the title role in Don Pasquale, Mephistopheles in Faust, the Speaker in The Magic Flute, Bartolo in The Barber of Seville.

"After school, I went to Vienna to audition for the Statsoper apprentice program, which was a big deal for me. I had never been to Europe and I had only flown once before. I sold as many possessions as I could to raise the money to go. Nicola Rossi-Lemeni was very impressed by my efforts and he bought my refrigerator. Reri Grist was very supportive also and wrote a recommendation for me. When I arrived in Vienna, James King met me at the airport and helped me get to the hotel and that made a very good impression on me. I sang for them a couple of days later and it went well. They asked me to return another time to sing for Lorin Maazel, but I didn't have the money to remain there waiting so I returned to Indiana. When I got back, I told Reri about my experience in Vienna and asked her if she had any insight. She told me she had had a conversation with the person I had sung for and was quite taken aback when the guy had said something like, 'well, it's too bad he's black.' That was something she had not thought existed still.

"But it was really one of the only times something like that has happened. I'm not sure I really wanted to hear that kind of thing anyway. In high school, we always had these people who came in and gave inspirational talks to us. Something that stuck with me was the sense that I had to be as good as I could possibly be and that I had to be twice as good as my competitors. When I was doing Man of La Mancha, the director, Ralph Cappuccilli, told you that you never know how much potential you have. When you've given all you can possibly give, there is still going to be more you haven't even tapped into. I've always tried to do that in my performing - giving 110 percent and getting in the 'zone,' which comes from my basketball days. Or when you're running cross country, after you have done the first five or six miles you shift into another gear and it's like you're floating and you couldn't have gotten there without that first five miles. I do the research on the roles and I study the languages and I always try to be the best I can.

"I do feel I have to be more convincing when I go to auditions, though, and I usually present photos of myself in costume. There was only one time when my agent told me that a company didn't want to hire me because they didn't want an African-American in a role, although now I can't even remember what it was. I was a little ticked off at the time but that was really the only time that was brought up to me. Sometimes, I think there is a bit of an exotic look being African-American. There was a lot of cross-breeding with African-Americans - Italian and Cherokee Indian are part of my makeup. I think my cheekbones come from the Cherokee side and of course my complexion is from the African side. In many cases, the director wants to work with my features, even accentuate them, rather than saying, 'oh jeez, that's too different, we have to hide that.' As Rossi-Lemeni said to me, you can be a green Mephistopheles because, after all, he's the devil. But other roles are not quite as diverse as that.

"When you think about roles like Aïda or Otello, singers have put on darker makeup to do them in order to create the realism. Certainly in the larger houses it was okay to lay on the dark makeup in order to create another race. We have to ask ourselves what we must do on stage to allow us to be comfortable.

"There certainly have been changes in the art form recently because of television. We used to accept all the absurdities in opera and now we do not. I think it's very important to keep asking the questions about the visual aspects. There has been a tendency to move toward a visual conformity and I've heard people say that we're moving backwards as far as integrating casting. Are you casting for the voice or the looks? That subjective element is part of theater, you know, whether it's pairing a really tall person with a really short person, or whether it's the color. Hopefully, the voice is still what people want. I mean, Carlo Bergonzi was short and wore elevator shoes. When you find a voice that is such an amazing instrument it has to be brought forward. I think these other things don't matter."

"Casting operas with all black singers has been done in the past. Of course Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts were written with all African-American casts in mind. But I don't know if I'm open to that if the effort is made outside of vocal requirements. I would never want to think that I was there because of what I looked like first and foremost. I want to be there because I can sing the role better than anybody else can.

"Certainly racism exists and it needs to be talked about, but I also think we tend to be over-obsessed with race in America. I think there is a balance that has to be achieved. We talk about the racism and prejudice that exists on the outside but certainly there's the internal racism too. That's something I also have to deal with in myself. Being part of an art form that is predominantly European, sometimes I will sit in the audience and think about my perceptions of the performers from different ethnic groups. I ask myself how I feel about that and I have to deal with my own sets of racism and that makes me more tolerant of what others have to deal with.

"There are so many important opera companies in the U.S. now and I think there are a lot of singers who want to make their careers in the United States for a variety of reasons. First of all, there are the travel factors and the fatigue. Then there's the issue of going to do a production in Germany and being asked to do things that are amazingly outrageous; here the productions are a little more traditional. There are more places to sing now in the U.S. and there are appreciative audiences in the regional opera houses. You can make a living singing here without going to Europe. But, I think that as far as racism goes, they are a little more progressive in Europe, perhaps because of the productions.

"I can't say I've ever been treated disrespectfully; in fact, I've almost always gotten a very good response from people I've worked with. Early in my apprenticeships, I sometimes felt I got more flack from my African-American colleagues - that there was jealousy or something there. People have said, though, that my voice category makes a difference in the overall perception. I think there is some authority present in a lower voice that makes people listen. At least it gets their attention!"