The Black Pioneers of Opera

On January 24, renowned mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves stepped onto the Metropolitan Opera Company stage to perform the role of Maria in Porgy and Bess, a farewell appearance that capped a celebrated 40+ year career. 

Ms. Graves leaves behind an incredible legacy, an Emmy and Grammy winning vocalist, she performed in almost every opera house around the globe. 

She was raised in Washington, DC and as a child her only singing lessons came from her church's gospel choir. Thanks to the encouragement of her junior high teachers she reluctantly enrolled at the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. There Ms Graves blossomed, she learned works in French and German, studied jazz and then opera. She began her training on a scholarship at Ohio’s Oberlin College which led her to the New England Conservatory, the Wolf Trap Opera Company and then the Houston Opera Studio.

Ms Graves made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the 1995-1996 season, singing Carmen. She has performed with Opera’s leading directors and performers at opera houses including the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, La Scala Milan, Vienna Staatsoper and Opera Nationale de Paris.

Through her appearances on Sesame Street and annual airings of her ‘Denyce Graves: A Cathedral Christmas’ at Washington's National Cathedral, Ms Graves is well known to non-opera fans. Off stage she sang at presidential inaugurations, the 2001 Washington DC memorial service for the victims of 9/11 and at the funeral of friend and opera buff Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  In 2014 her recording of We Shall Overcome, along with a poem from Maya Angelou, was sent to space on the first test flight of the spacecraft Orion.

In announcing her plans for retirement Ms Graves wrote “As a Black woman, I felt the emotional and practical weight of pursuing life in a culture that often seemed foreign to me, or that saw me as foreign to it. Many in the industry, especially in the beginning, asked me point-blank why I was in ‘this’ profession and if I wouldn’t have been ‘better suited’ for another genre of music.”  

Called the ‘first great American opera,’ George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, debuted in 1935 and has been.” But Porgy and Bess has long been criticized for cultural appropriation and stereotyping. Set in a fictional African-American tenement in Charleston, South Carolina, it presents poverty, violence, and addiction. Over the decades attempts have been made to modernize the piece, Gershwin himself removed racial slurs in the book, but controversary over ‘white-washing’ its themes or presenting the racist content of the original has limited productions of the work.

But Ms. Graves wanted to perform it. “Generations of African American artists, including Leontyne Price, Simon Estes, Grace Bumbry, Todd Duncan and so many others, have sung it. We all stand on their shoulders as they fought for dignity and respect in the industry.”

Coincidently, her first professional role was in a Tulsa Opera staging of Porgy and Bess, her career coming to a full circle.

Denyse Graves often remarks that it was soprano Leontyne Price who inspired her opera dreams.

Ms Price turns 99 on February 10, 2026, today she is still remembered as one of the greatest sopranos of the 20^th century in a storied career that included many ‘firsts.’ She was the first Black woman to star in a televised opera performing the title role of Tosca in a 1955 NBC Opera Theater broadcast.

The Metropolitan Opera’s first African American opera star, in 1961 she made history by receiving a forty-one-minute ovation at curtain call at her debut performance, one of the longest in Met history.

She was also among the first African American classical singers to be able to earn a living from performing.

Born in Laurel, Mississippi, Ms Price studied music at what is now Central State University in Ohio and then at  the Juilliard School.  Her first big success came in 1952, when she performed the title role in a touring production of Porgy and Bess. Despite her rising fame through performances in opera houses in London, Vienna, and Milan, she did not make her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera until 1961.

She became an audience favorite and would go on to star in company operas for the next twenty years. Ms Price sang the title role in Cleopatra at the grand opening of the Met’s new Lincoln Center home in 1966 and it was there she made her farewell appearance as Aida in 1985.

An in-demand recital performer, she won fifteen Grammy Awards for her recordings and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1980.

Long before Denyse Graves and Leontyne Price, the renowned contralto Marian Anderson (1897-1993) became the first Black performer to sing at the Met. In 1955 director Rudolf Bing, invited her to sing the role of Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. The audience was enthusiastic and although it was her only appearance on its stage, she was named permanent member of the company.

Ms. Anderson grew up in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood, her church raising the money for her music lessons. Nicknamed “The Baby Contralto” she began singing at other churches; she became so popular she could perform at three different places in a single night. The Philadelphia Choral Society raised $500 for her to study for two years with leading contralto Agnes Reifsnyder which led to lessons with Guiseppe Boghetti.

Single bookings led to actual tours at black colleges and churches in the South making $100 per concert. After a disastrous appearance at New York’s Town Hall she considered abandoning music, but she then won the important Philadelphia Philharmonic Society singing contest and the Lewisohn Stadium competition. She beat 300 rivals to sing in New York with the Philharmonic Orchestra accompanying her. It was a triumph and Arthur Judson, an important impresario, put her under contract. In 1928, she performed a solo recital at Carnegie Hall. It was a critical success, but white audiences ignored her.

Scholarships through the National Association of Negro Musicians and the Julius Rosenwald Fund took her to Europe. She attracted the attention of agents who booked her throughout Germany and Scandinavia, she performed at 142 concerts in Scandinavia alone, even singing before King Gustav in Stockholm and King Christian in Copenhagen.

Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, dedicated his song “Solitude” to her, and conductor Arturo Toscanini told her, “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years.”

She returned to the US in triumph.

As storied as her career was, it was overshadowed by the events of 1939 when the Daughters of the Revolution refused to allow her to perform in the DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC.

The only hall large enough to hold her audience, Constitution Hall banned black performers from appearing.  With help from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, she was permitted to sing instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The 25-minute April 9 Easter Sunday concert drew an integrated crowd of 75,000 people and it began with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” and ended with “The Star Spangled Banner.” 

In 1952 the DAR apologized and invited Ms Anderson to perform at the hall, an invitation she accepted on the condition that the audience be integrated. Nearly half of the crowd that night was Black and attendees included former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – who had canceled her DAR membership - and two Supreme Court Justices.

The Lincoln Memorial concert was broadcast nationally, pointing out to its audience the country’s racial divide.  Although the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s were years away, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King would speak of it often, before and after his famous speech on those steps. She would later attend marches and performed at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

She would go on to be honored by the first Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1977, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.

While she has retired from the stage, Ms Graves has dedicated herself to The Denyce Graves Foundation, which advocates social justice and mentors and trains young singers in the American classical arts, including students at the historically Black colleges and universities.  Part of its mission is the ‘Hidden Voices’ program, introducing the public to historical Black vocalists such as Ms Price, Ms Anderson and others such as Mary Cardwell Dawson, who founded the National Negro Opera Company in 1941.