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Through the Years with George Shirley

By Hampton Smith

George Shirley

George Shirley is a pioneer in the world of opera and art song. The first black tenor at the Metropolitan Opera, Shirley, over the course of a long career has sung an extraordinarily wide repertory in the world's major opera houses, concert venues and festivals. He began performing at a time when black Americans were making their way onto many of these stages for the first time and was the first black man many audiences saw in romantic tenor roles. He is now Director of the Vocal Arts Division, Joseph Edgar Maddy Distinguished University Professor of Music at the University of Michigan and he continues to perform newly composed music. The breadth of his perspective on opera and music theater is especially pertinent to the question of race in opera. Have things improved for black men in opera over the half century of his career? As a teacher and advocate for new music his interests are much broader than the question of race and racism in opera, but he does not shrink from confronting the underbelly of this particular beast.

"My interest in classical music was long-standing. Both of my parents were musical but untrained. My father - a Kentucky farmer - played three instruments by ear - fiddle, guitar, and piano. My mother was from Arkansas. She had a beautiful soprano voice and sang in the church choir. When I was very small I formed the third part of our family trio and we performed in churches in and around Indianapolis, Indiana where I was born. My family moved to Detroit when I was about six, and there I continued to sing, study piano and work on vocal repertoire with my piano teacher. Music was one of the major building blocks in my education. I had all my schooling in the Detroit public schools and at Wayne University.

"Even when I was in junior high and high school my interest was in singing art songs. I started voice studies when I was fifteen and my teacher gave me Händel, Schubert and American art songs. I went to Northern High School, one of two basically all-black high schools in Detroit. We had one of the best systems of public school music education in the country. There was a fabulous teacher who introduced us to the complete range of choral literature. We did [Händel's] Messiah every Christmas, and I had my first experience with the Verdi Requiem singing the first chorus in one of our concerts. The recitals I did at my church included classical literature. My musical training was solid, although opera was not an interest at that point. I sang my first music drama when I was a senior at Wayne University. The director of the glee club asked me to do the leading role in Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn't think about pursuing an operatic career until I was in the army chorus surrounded by other men who had aspirations for operatic careers. I met a private teacher in Washington with whom I studied for a year and he convinced me that I had a chance for a career in opera.

Those kinds of public junior high and high schools don't exist today. Did integration have a down side to it? "There was indeed a kind of downside in terms of the commitment of the faculty to the students they taught and the sense of really working to bring students up to a standard. There was less of a sense of teaching being just a job that it may be in some instances now. I taught high school music after graduating from Wayne and before being drafted into the military and I did some substitute teaching in the New York public schools when I started my career. I'm not saying that teaching is easy; it requires unending patience and a talent that a lot of people don't have. I do think that there was a downside to integration. A lot of the really wonderful black teachers were eventually wooed away or sought better compensation for their talents at other schools or joined other professions. But the elimination of segregation had very powerful pluses.

"I remember in the '60s when the revolution was going full-speed I had a recital at a black college in the south as part of the Lyceum Series in which performers gave concerts and lectures. The recitals were based in classical literature. One of the positive things that came out of the revolution was more respect for what African Americans had created and an insistence that it be treated with respect rather than just offering the European model as the only one of value. However, one of the things that happened as a result of the revolution was that the Lyceum Series underwent a transformation or was eliminated from some campuses. More popular performers were invited and there was a rejection on the part of many young people of European classical music that was essentially throwing the baby out with the bath water. We are still dealing with that. We are still trying to come to a sense of what is valuable, regardless of its origins.

Did you encounter problems having to do with race as you were pursuing your career? "I can't tell you why this is, but I ran into very little opposition that I know of in the U.S. I made my debut in Woodstock with a small company of seven or eight singers. I was one of two tenors. I sang five roles that summer including Rodolfo [in La Bohème] and Belmonte [in The Abduction from the Seraglio] and to my knowledge no one objected. I know of one instance in 1959 when my manager put my name forward for Tamino [in The Magic Flute] in Houston (before the present Houston Grand Opera had been formed). He was told by the manager of the Company he would have to speak to the board of directors. The next day he called back and said they couldn't offer me the contract. It was my experience that the board members - the people who raise and give the money - had the problems with hiring minorities more than the people involved in the artistic decisions.

"When I went to the Met I heard only one comment passed on to me by a colleague who overhead a female singer from the South express some discomfort with my being there. Interestingly enough I sang with that individual about two years later and there was no problem. In Italy there was no problem, although after the opening performance of my debut, one of the headlines read "Black Rodolfo has passed his exam." But the Italians were not negative. At that time they were still sort of amazed by black people. As I would walk down the street, little children would pull on their mother's skirts and stare in amazement. My wife and I were at a train station once and there was a whole line of people gawking, but it wasn't negative or nasty or hostile. They looked on us as something beautiful and exotic.

"In Germany it was somewhat different. In 1965 [conductor] Lorin Maazel was interested in casting me in a production of La Traviata at Deutsche Oper in Berlin, but he wasn't able to bring it off. In 1970 I was asked by Gunter Rennert, the stage director, to come to the Munich Festival to do Abduction from the Seraglio and as far as I was concerned it was a done deal. But then my manager contacted me to tell me that Munich had withdrawn the offer because the conductor wanted a different tenor -- supposedly due to the [German] spoken dialogue. Rennert had heard me speak dialogue and knew I could handle it. I had sung with the same conductor in San Francisco and it could very well have been that he didn't like my singing. My name was on the posters up until the performance.

"I had a bad taste in my mouth for Germany until I was invited to Deutche Oper in 1983 by the late Gotz Friedrich with whom I had worked in Amsterdam and London. He invited me to do Orpheus in the Underworld and Das Rheingold, and I performed there as a guest through 1989. I know that the consciousness of my race was present. A friend of mine told me that one of his students hadn't liked the production and noted that there were three blacks in the cast. I'm not so naïve that I don't know people are aware of my race.

"I was never asked to do anything in terms of stage craft or specific roles because I was black. I have always gotten the feeling I was being treated with respect. Gian Carlo Menotti and Luchino Visconti approached me to do Verdi's Otello. I said no thanks. I knew it was wrong regardless of how it would have looked. To be fair, though, about a week later they asked me to do Tristan.

"There have been a heck of a lot of black tenors who have not been hired. One of the reasons my path has been fairly smooth is the fact that I'm light-skinned and I've always used makeup - like my colleagues have used it - to make myself look more like the characters have been traditionally portrayed. Some people have not known I was black, but that has never been the reason for me using makeup. It's a part of theatrical convention. I think that if I had been really dark there would have been a much harder road to travel.

"There is a reluctance on the part of non-blacks to accept or be comfortable with interracial romantic relationships whether they are on stage or otherwise. I understand that there is evidently more of an acceptance today of interracial marriage and it's great if that is true. But it still rankles a whole lot of folks to see dark-skinned men linked romantically with white women.

"A black woman is less a threat, more of a prize. A male is more likely to be seen as a threat. It's been socialized into us. It's the same thing that one confronts in every facet of American life. There was the plight of the first black quarterback. In business black executives still run into problems. It's very difficult for blacks to find themselves reaping the benefits of their talent and this will always be the case as long as we are a minority. There is a loss to society when this kind of foolishness happens."

Some have said that singers emerging from conservatories and music schools today are technically proficient but otherwise uninteresting and vocally nondescript. Do you agree with this? "I don't know if that is anymore true today than it was sixty years ago. You've got a pool of talented young people attempting to master an art form that is increasingly foreign to them in terms of the language and musical style. At the same time you have more students today in comparison with the number of students that studied towards a career fifty or sixty years ago. I think we do pretty well. Acquiring expertise in German lieder, opera and the musical literatures that spring from foreign societies is no easy matter. I don't think that anyone but the cream of the crop has ever risen to the top. I don't think the talent has been greater in the past than it is now in terms of its potential. One of the things that is lacking now that existed after the Second World War is the number of musicians who fled Hitler and came to these shores bringing with them first-hand experience of these literatures and of working in opera theaters next to people like Strauss and others. I was fortunate, as were others of my generation and the generation preceding mine, to be able to work with these people, to study with them and get the influence of that experience first-hand. I think that the further we move from the origins of the tradition the more watered down things become.

"But I think we produce excellent talent. One of the things that enables that talent to mature and blossom is the ability to go abroad and spend time in the cultures that created the music we perform. I teach a month-long course in Florence, Italy from mid-May to mid-June. We live and work in a villa that was built by the family of Jacopo Corsi, one of the founders of the Florentine Camerata. I teach in a high-ceilinged, frescoed room. We live in the villa, have our meals there and walk in the gardens. To have that experience just for a month alters the approach of these young people and raises their consciousness about Italian music and Italian culture in away that four years of university study in the U.S. can't begin to approach. I am sanguine about our talent. I think that once students leave the university environment, the experiences they have as they attempt to enter the profession have got to be laced with a strong dose of time spent abroad. Once that happens I don't think one has much of an argument about the quality of the talent."

Who are the younger black tenors singing today? "Scott Piper just made his debut at New York City Opera. He has a wonderful voice. Scott will work because he's handsome and not dark-skinned (he is actually black Hispanic). Vinson Cole has sung at the Met. He is light-skinned too. The darker tenors have done well but not as well if they looked less Negroid. Curtis Rayam is a wonderful singer who sang a good deal in Europe and is now singing less and teaching at Bethune-Cookman College.

"Black men have had a somewhat easier time recently in Europe. There have been some blacks who have gotten jobs in Germany, which surprised me because I thought it would be the last place they would get work. Jim Wagner, who is a handsome dark-skinned guy, had a hell of a time getting a job at the start but he eventually did. Jim still lives in Europe. Steven Salters is a baritone who does more concerts than opera. Ray Wade, a wonderful tenor, is singing in Europe. He won the Queen Elizabeth and the Met competitions, but he hasn't performed here. But the problem doesn't have to be racial. It's very difficult for singers, once they enter the system in Europe, to find a way to get back to the States."

"Where are we now? I think it's a mistake for people to think that once they have opened the door it will remain open. It will always shut. The next person has to find his own way to open the door. I tell my students to have concern, but not to let their concerns rob them of pursuing their dream. If you are meant to have a career you're going to have one; I believe that. I wasn't even planning on it. I was sort of guided into it. If you're not meant to have a career you won't have one. But in the process, if you keep your mind open you will grow and find strengths you didn't even know you had. Just know what the terrain is, what the facts are, and gird your loins to go out and do battle."

"What's the alternative? You can't know what you will obtain unless you push the envelope. You can sit and speculate ad infinitum and that speculation will have nothing to do with reality. If you get out and push the envelope, you'll find out whether there is going to be a barrier you can't surmount, whether there will be an impediment put in your way that you can't get around. I don't care who you are, life is going to put something in your way. You can be white as milk but you'll run into problems because you're too tall or short or thin, or blond and they're looking for a brunette, or you're partly bald. There is always that stuff that everyone has to deal with. Even if you're pretty, white, 21, blond and blue-eyed, you're likely to run into somebody who's going to want something that you don't want to give, so there is always the possibility of a downside, a problem. If you sit at home and do nothing but worry, there is no life."

How can an audience be built among young people and especially young black people? "I'm working with a woman named Yvette Smith, a wonderful soprano who has developed booklets that demonstrate how opera can be used to teach other subjects. Children love music drama when it's presented in the right way. When they realize that this form of artistic expression - dance, drama, and music - is native to their ancestral experience, that it is indeed the core activity of African tribal life, they can begin to take ownership of it, even when it's in a foreign language. They say 'yeah this is something I can do, something that makes use of the gifts I possess.' Yvette helps children to construct an instant opera in which the music and text are made up on the spot, and the children love it.

"As far as building an audience for opera in the African American community, whenever I speak to composers who are thinking of writing something, I note the rich history of African Americans that would make wonderful libretti for opera. Stephen Newby is a graduate of Michigan's composition program and a phenomenally talented guy. He wrote a piece called Montage for Martin that we're going to do in February, 2002 at a big Baptist church in Washington state -- Antioch Bible Church -- that has a heck of a music program. It's a sort of an oratorio in which each piece is written after a particular style of black music and it's fabulous.

"What I try to do is convince composers to write a piece that is not in a huge, four-act grand opera style, but in a chamber style, in a form that is mobile and can be performed in churches, gymnasia and so forth. I suggest they write pieces that deal with African American history, using small ensembles imaginatively like Benjamin Britten did. I'm convinced that if the pieces are good and the stories are powerful, you will build an audience for music drama. Music and drama appeal to black folks. If you get someone writing in a style that uses what we can bring - singers who sing in an operatic fashion, singers who can belt it out, gospel style singers - using the whole mix, there will not be a problem. People will want to see them."