Willard White at 75
Willard White, by reputation at least, does not suffer fools gladly, so it is with some trepidation that I call him one Sunday morning at his home in Paris. This will be an attempt, I tell him, to offer a rounded portrait on his 75th birthday, which falls in October, so it will take a reasonable amount of time. “As long as it’s not an unreasonable amount,” he says with that gloriously deep, slightly intimidating voice.
This is not a good beginning, and I fear the worst – not least when I ask him how many children he has and he replies “enough”. It is, though, said jokingly, we settle on seven (he has been married three times), and thereafter the conversation thaws. The tenor Robert Tear once said of him: “Willard can be impenetrably serious. He gives you a look that manages to be quizzical but killing at the same time, and people tend to be terrified, which is a shame, because deep down inside he’s rather cuddly. But deep is the word. You have to dig.” Which I suspect is right: the occasionally forbidding exterior masks an intriguing, questioning, warm-hearted man.
He takes life very seriously. He sees his bass-baritone voice as an expression of what is within him. This explains the depth of his dramatic interpretations on stage: he does not perform roles; he inhabits them. It is not every singer who, as White did in 1989, can perform Othello with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is a true actor, the antithesis of the “stand-and-deliver” singer. As he approaches 75, he has no intention of retiring. He says he sings virtually every day – “it’s part of my peace of mind” – and feels his voice is in very good condition, though thanks to the pandemic he hasn’t been able to test it on an audience for a year.
White’s career is one of the most remarkable in opera. Born in Jamaica, the son of a dockworker who did a little farming on the side, he has been performing for more than 50 years, has sung a huge range of repertoire and been recognised with a knighthood. Did he always intend to be a performer? “One powerful experience I had when I was 13,” he recalls, “was very telling for me. I never wanted to be a singer. It was just for fun. I had this [very deep, powerful] voice that surprised people; it caused a reaction and in certain circumstances I would hide it. But when I was 13 I remember feeling quite depressed one day. This was not a new feeling; it was a feeling of disempowerment. I said ‘There must be a way to be different. What can I do?’ And I had this impulse to sing.”
My sense from reading about his upbringing was that music and then stage performance gave an outlet to someone who was quite introverted – a classic trope for performers, who find the wearing of masks liberating. He accepts my cod psychology. “Introvert is a term that could be applied to me. I had a desire to be noticed, to be liked, to be a contributor.” He says singing and performing gave him confidence: “The confidence to be oneself, whatever that is. I was able to give vent to my feelings. Singing is almost like crying in some ways.”
Growing up in Jamaica, there was no classical music in White’s home. “Classical music as far as we youngsters were concerned was boring,” he says. “There was no beat. You couldn’t dance to it.” His first musical role model was Nat King Cole. But his music teacher at school spotted his talent and gave him Valentin’s aria from Gounod’s Faust to learn. He sang it in the school Eisteddfod – Jamaica was pursuing its inner Welshness in the colonial 1950s – and won, beating far more experienced singers.
His father wanted him to be a dentist, and his own plan was to go to university in Jamaica and study economics. But he sang in the school choir, started to perform in am-dram, and found it gave him a “psychological lift”. He tried office work but disliked the routine and felt uncomfortable with his colleagues. Realising that he preferred performing, he decided to give it a go professionally for two years.
John Barbirolli was visiting Jamaica with the Hallé orchestra, and his wife Evelyn Rothwell heard White sing and encouraged him to study in London, where she offered to provide references. But since New York was closer, he opted to apply for the Juilliard School of Music, which his father had heard about from one of his colleagues at work. “I penned a letter to the Juilliard,” White recalls, “without the full, proper address, but being such a place of note it actually got there.” He went to New York, auditioned, was accepted and was given a scholarship to help pay for his studies (he later supplemented his income by working nights as a hospital orderly – “the graveyard shift”, he says). White, like Porgy in the role that later came to be identified with him, was on his way.
He experienced racism in New York – this, remember, was the end of the 1960s, that most volatile of decades in the US. “One of the things that surprised me in the first few days going to classes at the Juilliard,” he recalls, “was that afterwards, walking down the street, I would see someone from one of the classes that I’d been in and they would cross the road. I thought to myself ‘This is the world I’m in.’ “ Did it make him a political radical? “In my mind, I was a radical because I wouldn’t stand for any racial abuse. I would not live like that. I didn’t see the necessity of waving banners. My banner waving is in the essence of my being. I knew I couldn’t fight it by telling people what they should do. I only had my personal dignity – not to expect to be treated a certain way. I knew I could always walk out. I don’t have to fight with them. I can walk away.”
White showed great strength of character at the Juilliard. He insisted on a change of voice coach because he felt the training regime was leaving him hoarse, and resisted pressure from another teacher to have a tongue operation that would change the nature of his singing – with the aim of adding the Italianate trill seen as necessary in some repertoire. This young Jamaican clearly had remarkable inner resources.
Being black in the predominantly white world of opera proved problematic as his career developed. He tells me one extraordinary story of a soprano who, singing Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, was uncomfortable with a black Prince Gremin as the husband. “The director introduced us and she immediately said to him: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think Tatyana would marry a black man.’ I said: ‘Hey you guys, you’ve got something to discuss. I’m going to go to the canteen and have a drink, and when you’ve finished your discussion let me know what’s happening.” The production went ahead, but White says their arm-in-arm stage entrance each night was desperately awkward. “She couldn’t get rid of my arm quickly enough,” he says. How did that make him feel? “It made me feel there is one person with a big problem. But I’m not going to make it my problem.”
His occasional appearances as Wotan also provoked hostile reactions from obsessive Wagnerites, who were unwilling to imagine the head of the gods as a black man. “In Glasgow, people were demonstrating in front of the theatre against me. They did the same thing in Oxford and Nottingham. It was a touring company and every city we went to these people were there. I had letters explaining that it wasn’t a matter of colour; it was a matter of spiritual connection. Because the god Odin, who was a forerunner of Wotan, was of Scandinavian extraction, it was impossible for someone of another race to emit these spiritual qualities. I though ‘My gosh, what a load of codswallop.” The way he pronounces “codswallop”, with the emphasis on the wallop rather than the cods, is itself a thing of beauty.
White relates these experiences of racism matter-of-factly. He never allowed them to divert or unduly disturb him. Did he feel he had to become a standard bearer – to demonstrate that black people were rightfully part of opera too? “No”, he says, “there’s too much weight.” He tells me people in the music business used to say to him: “There’s no racism in opera.” To which he would reply: “You should wear my shoes sometimes.”
Early in his career, White drew inspiration from the life of Paul Robeson, and in 2002 he recorded a disc called The Paul Robeson Legacy, but he resists too close an identification with him and says he has never wanted to be “Paul Robeson II”. “I just wanted to be a man who sings. I knew that when you were black you could sing spirituals or Porgy and Bess, but I wanted to sing everything. It was great that Paul Robeson did this in the 1930s and had a [political] message. I was inspired by that. But I had to walk my own path.”
White has a wide repertoire of roles. They include Porgy, in which he enjoyed a huge success at Glyndebourne in 1986, Mephistopheles in The Damnation of Faust, Bluebeard in Bluebeard’s Castle, Klingsor in Parsifal, King Marke in Tristan and Isolde, Claggart in Billy Budd, both Golaud and Arkel in Pelléas and Mélisande, Nekrotzar in Le Grand Macabre, Seneca in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress, Gorjančikov in From the House of the Dead, and Trinity Moses in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
He has done his fair share of Verdi and Mozart roles, but is less associated with them than with, say, Mephistopheles, Bluebeard or Nekrotzar, which he has made his own (he has cornered the market in devilish characters). In Verdi, in an echo of his experience at the Juilliard, he thinks casting directors may feel there is some particular Verdian “colour” missing in his voice, though he says no one has ever articulated this. “Very few people [in the music business] are constructive in their criticism or explain why you are not getting parts. They will talk behind your back, and you don’t know exactly why.” Does he lose sleep over it? “No I don’t. What’s the point? Then I’m the one who’s not sleeping.”
As for Mozart, the Commendatore in Don Giovanni is in his repertoire, but he has never taken to Leporello. “When I sang it, I felt Leporello lacked precision and incisive character. He was a pushover. He was dominated by the need for money. His livelihood came from the Don, and though he despised some of the things the Don would do, he still felt he had to stick with him.” White clearly needs to believe entirely in the characters he plays. “It’s not enough for me to learn the words to sing,” he says. “I have to understand the text. I have to commit to the story being told, and that creates a sense of belief.”
He has dabbled in crossover, with the Paul Robeson disc and a collaboration with Carl Davis, but without turning it into a major part of his output. Was that by choice – a sort of opera purism – or design? “I never liked the term crossover,” he says. “It’s just another version of me. I would have sung more, but I didn’t get the opportunity.” A shame, because he does a moving rendition of My Way, which he describes as an “everyman’s song” and treats seriously.
His greatest departure – an extremely unusual form of crossover – was performing Othello on the (non-musical) stage in 1989. This was director Trevor Nunn’s inspired idea. Nunn had directed White in Porgy and Bess in a critically acclaimed production at Glyndebourne in 1986, and quickly recognised White’s talents as an actor. Was White surprised when Nunn asked him to perform Othello? “Yes and no,” he says with that improbably deep chuckle. “Trevor had already prepared me. He came up to me one day during the rehearsals for Porgy and Bess, and said ‘You know, you are different. You relate to what’s going on before, and then what’s going on before leads to what you say. You’re an actor, and I have something in mind for you.’ “ That something, which he did three years later, was Othello with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Did he enjoy straight acting? “Oh boy,” he exclaims. “In many ways it was harrowing. When we got together for the read-through, it was a big shock to me.” He recalls the first line Othello has – “Tis better as it is” – and says that when the time came for him to say it, having heard the way everyone else was reading, he realised there were at least 32 ways in which he could say just that one line. “That never happens in opera,” he explains. “You can sing it loudly or more slowly, but there is a predetermined tune. With a straight play, you have to create the tune. And when you have a speech of 35 lines, you have to be a good composer.”
Nunn tells me White is a wonderful natural actor. “Modestly, Willard will say ‘I had a lot of problems’, but there was no sense of that in the rehearsal room. Nobody was thinking ‘Oh crikey, this guy is really an opera singer.’ It didn’t feel that way at all. I was hugely proud of him, especially by the time we’d done the television version of Othello. I though that was game, set and match. He’d accomplished doing a fantastically complex role on television – close up, close up, repeatedly. It was remarkable. It had become absolutely clear to me when we doing Porgy and Bess that Willard could have had a major career as an actor if he hadn’t been able to sing a note. He had all the instincts you crave in an actor. He could immerse himself in a part in rehearsal, become the part, and was terrifically inventive.”
I ask White why he didn’t do more straight acting. He says he could have done more, but the scheduling was impossible. Plays are often staged at short notice, whereas operas are booked years ahead. But his work in the opera house has always made full use of his acting ability. “Every song is part of the human story,” he explains. Opera is lyric drama, not a concert in elaborate costumes – a truth that White’s entire career exemplifies.
“The moment he gets on stage, you can’t look at something else,” says Romanian mezzo Ruxandra Donose, who has appeared with White in The Damnation of Faust and The Tales of Hoffmann. “He embodies the idea of what a singer should be: he combines a magnetic personality with this very well-controlled voice, but at the same time he’s totally humble in front of the role. He’s not there to present himself; he’s there to present the role and the piece.”
Tenor Graham Clark has known and worked with him for more than 40 years. “The thing that has always thrilled me about Willard – apart from his voice, which is staggeringly beautiful – is his physicality on the set,” says Clark. “He plays the character absolutely to 100%, and he comes across as immensely strong and direct.” Clark doesn’t accept Robert Tear’s view of White as “impenetrably serious”. “His look can be ferocious,” he says, “but offstage he loves to have fun and jokes, and he picks them up immediately. He can be hard to please, but is not overbearing. He’s a dynamic, strong character, and you just deal with that. He will argue his point, but never in a destructive way. My discussions with Willard have always been to try to find the answer to a thorny problem. It will be quite a long conversation, but it doesn’t become negative for the sake of negativity. All that matters is being truthful to the music and the drama.”
Looking back, is White surprised by all that the boy from Jamaica has achieved? “In a way, yes,” he says, “I have to admit that I think ‘My gosh, that’s really weird.’ I have had many difficulties and many joys, and every life has that. I’m on a journey of discovery. Every role I’ve done, every rehearsal – that’s what I use them for.” He has no time for the moans he says you sometimes hear among groups of performers. “I can’t afford to complain; it doesn’t fix anything. It generates anxiety; it generates frustration.” At 75, time is short, and what matters is the drama on the stage, not the petty dramas off it. Retirement is not a word that enters his vocabulary. “I prefer refocusing.” And he laughs again, a long, resonant rumble emerging from somewhere deep within him.
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