Why So Few People Of Color In The Opera?

The letter went out to music critics and writers all over the country.

It began: "I would like to ask you and your readers a few important and thought-provoking questions, which are absent of any and all malice, strife and self-righteous indignation."

The letter was from Antonio Jenkins, a tenor whose frustration was evident in every line he wrote. The winner of several scholarships and a teacher in New York, he has auditioned at the Metropolitan Opera, hoping for major roles. Instead, he was relegated to the chorus - certainly a mark of some excellence, but not the career Jenkins had in mind.

This is a common enough story; opera is one of the most difficult fields of all to conquer. Thousands of young hopefuls advance through many years of training, only to be told their voices aren't right for a specific company's version of grand opera.

What makes this different is that Jenkins is an African-American tenor - and he's saying his failure at the Met is due to racial prejudice.

"Am I merely a frustrated opera singer," Jenkins writes, "or did the judges, none of whom were black, really become hostile at my audition, set up double standards, and later instruct me to `re-explore singing in the chorus,' something they would never have done to a white tenor of my talent and training because the voice is rare?"

It's impossible to say, unless you were in that audition room, and unless you could compare Jenkins to the hundreds of others auditioning. But it's equally true that there are precious few African-American male singers on today's operatic stages, despite an era of impressive accomplishments among their female counterparts - with such major talents as Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Barbara Hendricks and Harolyn Blackwell.

The late Marian Anderson, one of the great voices of the century, is widely considered to be the ground-breaker for today's African-American singers, when her Easter performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 was a triumph over bigots who wouldn't let her sing at the Daughters of the American Revolution's Constitution Hall.

Anderson's career ended nearly 30 years later in Carnegie Hall, by which time the meteoric rise of Leontyne Price was making opera directors all over the world rethink their standards of racial tolerance.

For black men, it hasn't been as easy. Although there are notable exceptions, from the Met's George Shirley and Simon Estes to today's Vinson Cole, you have to look far and wide to find African-American tenors on the stage. Although it is distasteful to think so, one major reason probably is that tenors are the guys who get the girl, and it is harder for some audiences to accept the black man in the role of victorious lover - especially if he is singing to a white heroine.

Seattle Opera's Speight Jenkins says he's "very doubtful" that racism played any role in blighting Jenkins' hopes at the Met.

"It might be difficult for a black tenor in some companies," he says, "but not at the Met, and not here. Jimmy Levine (the Met's artistic director) has done more for black singers than anyone else, and they have a good reputation for color-blind hiring. So do we: Race or color has absolutely no effect whatsoever on Seattle Opera's casting."

At the same time, it is hard to imagine a successful opera company bending over backward in the other direction, hiring a less qualified singer of color simply because of the color. Talent is supposed to be color-blind; audiences want to hear the best Otello or Radames an opera director can find, not somebody hired to balance a racial quota.

But is this system working? In fact, the same question can be asked of all classical music organizations, where the number of African-American performers is always disproportionately small. Nor can racism alone be blamed: Symphony auditions take place from behind a screen, through which neither the sex nor the race of the aspirant can be determined.

"There just aren't a lot of them out there," says Speight Jenkins of the minority tenor talent pool. "I'm not sure anyone knows the reason. We are actively looking. I just hired an Asian tenor in `The Pearl Fishers' who is going to astonish everybody."

The reason there aren't "more of them out there," in classical performing arts, probably is circular. There aren't many male opera singers (or violinists, or conductors) of color who are successful role models in their profession, so in turn, young men of talent may

decide that's not a field in which they can succeed.

In the meantime, companies that receive public tax dollars - and that's virtually all of them - should look closely at how this situation can be bettered. One obvious area is the early development and recruitment of non-white talent. Everyone committed to an educational program should be making this a priority, if they want to keep those tax dollars.