We were having voice lessons once a week, but he told me that I would need at least three a week. They thought about taking the part away from me, but Robert Brown told them he would be my voice teacher and he would make sure that by the end of my sophomore year I had all the tools to be a part of the program. I practiced them for weeks, but at the final dress, the conductor had to stare at me and speak the words, because I could not get them out of my mouth. My first opera role was the Ghost in Ballad of Baby Doe and I had two lines. Also, I had a really horrible stage-fright problem. When I first got into the program, I was not the best of musicians: I could barely read music. He was a chorus master and voice teacher, and sort of a father to so many of the young singers. You’ve got a great quote in there from your high school teacher Robert Brown: “Education without application is use-less information.” In Sing for Your Life, you talk about the people who have mattered to you. And operas have bad guys - Scarpia did some awful things! One three-minute aria is not an entire opera. We should have had more discussions with the community, and the protesters should have done more research on the piece itself. Actually, I think the problems were partly our fault and partly the fault of the protesters. Have you ever heard of The Death of Klinghoffer? I was in the Met production that was so welcomed by the New York community. And it helps that there are so many composers now who are writing modern operas with modern stories. But modern productions, placed in different periods with different plotlines, are giving it a more diverse appeal. I think if someone my age or younger walks in and sees a production that could come from the 1920s, they could be put off. She had heard about my story and how much she meant to me, so she came to see me and tell me how much that meant to her.ĭo you think you, in particular, were naturally drawn to opera? Or do you think that it has the potential to draw in anybody who walks into the opera house? This fall, when I had my first major role at the Metropolitan Opera, Colline in La Bohème, I went into the green room to greet my family and friends, and who was there but Denyce Graves. I had seen this diva on stage performing one of the great roles, but backstage she greeted all of us, 40 high school kids, like we were her best friends. Afterward, we got to go backstage and meet her. But seeing this person who looked like me on stage opened a huge door in my mind to what I could do as a musician, as an artist and as an African-American.
#La boheme opera norfolk va windows
I thought opera was something that was sung by a ginormous white Viking lady, breaking windows with her voice. But what made it even more special was the fact that the title role was played by an African-American woman by the name of Denyce Graves. Just walking into the Met was a huge experience for a kid like me, coming from a trailer park in Virginia. We took a field trip to New York City and saw Carmen at the Met. SCORCA: Let’s start at the beginning: Who brought you to your first opera? GREEN: I was 15 and I was at a magnet school in Norfolk, Virginia, called Governor’s School for the Arts.
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