Willard White interview: ‘I thought no real man would go on stage and sing’

Nature certainly had fun creating Willard White’s voice box. A combination of treacle and granite, its sweet and hard sonorities cannot be muffled even by Zoom. It’s such a famous instrument that, earlier on today, before our conversation, the person doing his PCR test knew instantly who he was. “I knocked on the door,” says White, “said, ‘Good morning’ and they said, ‘You’re Willard White, aren’t you?’”

The test preceded rehearsals in Leeds for Opera North’s new production of Rigoletto. White is to sing the role of Monterone, the wronged father who utters a vengeful malediction on the Duke of Mantua and his court jester. Now 75, and knighted for services to music in 2004, it can’t be often that he comes upon a new role in the core repertoire.

In fact, White’s first Monterone was meant to be 40 years ago, when he was due to join the second cast of the late Jonathan Miller’s 1982 ENO production, set among Mafiosi in New York. But Miller argued against the idea of a black man in the Italian-American underworld in the 1950s.

“It became difficult for the director to accept my presence to be fake white,” says White. “So he said no. Then my agent got on to it, it got into the newspapers, and I just kept cool. And it never happened. If someone opposes my colour, then they do.”

He chuckles, which feels typical of White’s soft-touch approach to life. Later, for example, he kept his counsel when Wagnerians objected to his casting as Wotan in Scottish Opera’s Das Rheingold in 1989. “How I’m accepted and all that – it’s a waste of time trying to bother with it,” he says. “Without arrogance, I remember when I started on my career and there was a question of colour there, I thought, ‘What I’m going to do is sing as well as I can. If they don’t accept me for anything else then they’re either stupid or I need to work a bit harder.’”

Opera North’s Rigoletto must represent some sort of progress, because taking charge of an opera for the first time is British-Nigerian director Femi Elufowoju Jr. “That’s a notable change,” says White when I ask how opera has modernised over the decades. “I’ve never come across a black person who is putting on a production by himself. I’ve worked with assistant directors who are black, but not one who, in his own right, is heading up the whole thing.”

White comes across as so laid-back that it can be rather a surprise when he takes a stand as he did in 2020. Invited to take part in the 75th-anniversary commemoration of VJ Day, he objected to singing a line from Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay”. In the poem a British soldier recalls serving in Burma: “An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot.”

“I didn’t feel I could face myself declaring a text saying that the Buddha is inferior and the Christian is superior. That’s a dangerous premise to present. I had two or three very abusive messages – that I should be ashamed of myself. But, of course, these were from people who didn’t bother to know my side of the story, and I didn’t choose to explain it to them because it would just prolong things.” In the end, White sang You’ll Never Walk Alone instead.

He grew up in another part of what used to be the British Empire. As a teenager in Kingston, Jamaica, White’s resonant voice spawned an avalanche of nicknames: Bigger, Old Man, Frog, Thunder. It caused him acute discomfort. “My voice could not be hidden at any time. I never wanted to be an opera singer, because I thought it was sissy stuff. No real man would go onstage and sing,” he admits.

But, while White was studying at the Jamaica School of Music, the oboist Evelyn Rothwell heard him sing – he’d learned an aria from Don Carlos by listening to a library recording – and she recommended he train in London or New York. His father, a dockyard foreman, deemed it cheaper to fly one way to the latter. So White went to the Juilliard School on a scholarship. He made his professional debut in 1974 and first performed in the UK in 1976 as Seneca in ENO’s The Coronation of Poppea. Amazingly, he was still singing the role 43 years later, just before the pandemic struck. “Actually I was singing well,” he says. “I’m completely amazed at my voice. Of course, it could be an illusion.”

I ask him why bass baritones are the Duracell bunnies of opera. They may not get the rock star arias like the Duke’s “La donna è mobile”, but they seem to be able to perform for ever.

“Maybe the bass baritone voice tends to be able to live a bit longer,” he accepts. “I’ve seen tenors fall by the wayside, I’ve seen sopranos succumb to nervous breakdown. It would be great if I could find a song that is so catchy and gets the heart racing. But I accept where I am.”

It was this equanimity that enabled White, who has been married three times and has seven children, to embrace the enforced silence of the past two years. When the Covid hammer blow fell he was rehearsing Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in Amsterdam. “I got on the train to Paris [where he lives] and I remember my wife [the French-Armenian soprano Sylvia Kevorkian] saying, ‘We’re going to be together for a whole month. How are we going to do it?’ I said, ‘Day by day.’”

In the end, they were thrown together for many more months. She continued to teach singing; he mainly cooked while reflecting peacefully upon “the potency of uncertainty”. The pandemic, in his view, is “something that we created to stop us in our tracks from taking for granted so many things in life”.

I wonder how someone so zen summons up the required rage to issue Monterone’s terrible curse (“Spettro terribile mi rivedrete/Portante in mano il teschio mio/Vendetta chiedere al mondo e a Dio!” – I shall haunt you as a terrifying spectre/Carrying my skull in my hands/Crying to God and man for vengeance!). “That’s not so hard for me to do,” he says. “I know that place. I was accosted very violently by a famous singer. I was still at the Juilliard. He actually hit me after I had sung an aria and said, ‘What you’re doing is not coming out!’

“I wanted to kill him, but I also felt powerless. I said calmly, ‘Sir, I don’t think you’d speak to me like that if you couldn’t help.’ It was the most devastating thing that I could have said. He started shaking and ordered me to go to his office. I went, but it was one of the great learning experiences of my life.” From the way White paints the scene, it’s evident the singer had never been challenged by a student in such a way before.

“In that moment when you feel like you could rip somebody’s head off, what is happening inside you? Why do you feel so affronted? [Sometimes] being quiet or speaking one simple sentence can disturb the whole scene,” he adds.

“I’ve wanted to point the finger and say, ‘You! You turn to ashes!’ But I don’t do anything. The universe takes care of a lot of things for me.”

Rigoletto is at Leeds Grand Theatre from Jan 22 to Feb 19, then touring. Details: operanorth.co.uk