Limmie Pulliam, renowned US Tenor, dies at 51: Here's what we know
Limmie Pulliam, renowned US Tenor, dies at 51: Here's what we know
Limmie Pulliam gave a magnificent performance days before his sudden death at age 51
Limmie Pulliam, renowned US Tenor, dies at 51: Here's what we know
Famed US tenor, Limmie Pulliam, has passed away at the age of 51.
The heartbreaking news was confirmed by his friends on Wednesday, May 20.
Pulliam had recently performed in Mahler's eighth symphony alongside the Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi before his sudden death.
He trained with the late renowned pedagogue Richard Miller and became a participant in the young artist programme of the Cleveland Opera, Opera Delaware and Opera Memphis.
The Missouri native previously took a break from his singing career two decades ago due to weight struggles and shaming; however, he returned to the stage in January 2023 at Carnegie Hall.
After his comeback, Pulliam performed across Europe and the US, including playing the role of Radamès in Verdi's Aida at the Metropolitan Opera. He was scheduled to perform in Cleveland for his next engagement.
Friends and fellow artists expressed grief over the sudden loss, as Jacksonville conductor Courtney Lewis penned on his social media, "Rest in peace Limmie."
"I only knew you for a week, but our concerts together are etched into my memory forever. You captivated our orchestra and audiences in Jacksonville and West Palm with your astonishing voice, artistry and humanity. We love you," said Courtney.
Limmie Pulliam's cause of death
As of writing, Limmie Pulliam's family has not revealed the cause of his death, nor the details about his funeral.
Notably, the late musician spent his childhood as the son of a preacher in Kennett, Missouri, a town with a population of 11,000 residents, before embarking on his international operatic career.
'Limmie Pulliam' (Image source: YouTube/Courtney's Stars of Tomorrow)
A tenor who defied convention and captivated stages from New York to Sicily has gone silent too soon
The World Has Lost a Rare Operatic Force
Limmie Pulliam, the Missouri-born dramatic tenor whose thunderous voice and commanding stage presence earned him a place among opera’s most compelling performers of his generation, died at 51. His passing leaves a void in a world that had only begun to fully appreciate the scope of his gifts.
Pulliam’s path to the upper echelons of opera was one built on discipline, competition, and the kind of stubborn artistic conviction that turns promising singers into enduring artists. He trained under the late Richard Miller, one of the most respected vocal pedagogues of the 20th century, whose method-driven approach shaped countless professional voices. That foundation proved indispensable as Pulliam navigated the competitive terrain of professional opera.
Pulliam Conquered Young Artist Programs Before Major Stages
He sharpened his craft through young artist programs at Cleveland Opera, Opera Delaware, and Opera Memphis — proving grounds that test a singer’s ability to perform under pressure while developing interpretive depth. By 2012, the industry had taken formal notice: Pulliam claimed top honors in the Artist Division of the National Opera Association’s Vocal Competition, a prestigious platform that has launched numerous significant careers.
The following year, he crossed the Atlantic to win at the 3rd Annual Concorso Internazionale di Canto della Fondazione Marcello Giordano in Catania, Sicily — a signal that his artistry resonated not just domestically but on an international stage.
A Career Built Across the Country’s Finest Halls
What followed was a career of remarkable breadth. Pulliam performed with some of the most celebrated orchestras and opera companies in North America and beyond, including the Minnesota Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Orchestre Métropolitain, Florida Grand Opera, Madison Opera, Utah Opera, and the Gewandhaus Orchester in Germany, among others. His repertoire ranged widely — encompassing the sweeping Italianate drama of Verdi and Leoncavallo alongside the Germanic weight of Beethoven and Mahler.
His 2021–22 season marked a turning point. That year, Pulliam made his debut at LA Opera, expanding his footprint on the West Coast. But the headline moment came in 2022, when he stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera — the most storied house in American opera — as Radamès in Aida. It was both his Met debut and his role debut, a bold artistic choice that reflected the confidence he brought to everything he undertook. He reprised the role the same season for Tulsa Opera’s 75th anniversary gala concert, cementing his ownership of that demanding part.
A Voice That Welcomed New Audiences
Beyond his performances, Pulliam believed deeply in opera’s capacity to evolve and reach wider audiences. He was an advocate for concert versions of operatic works, viewing them not as a lesser format but as an effective bridge between the art form and communities that might otherwise never encounter it. He saw accessible, stripped-down productions as a genuine means of expanding opera’s cultural footprint — a perspective grounded in experience rather than theory.
That humanizing quality extended to his artistry. He did not perform for critics or connoisseurs alone. He performed for anyone willing to listen.
Pulliam Leaves a Legacy on Record and in Memory
Pulliam is survived by the music he made and the audiences he moved. He left behind one studio recording, Witness — a recital album that now stands as a testament to a voice the opera world will not hear again. The title, in retrospect, feels apt: those who saw Limmie Pulliam perform were witnesses to something extraordinary.
Oberlin Conservatory: Tenor Limmie Pulliam ’98, Who Sang on Stages Worldwide, Dies at 50
Tenor Limmie Pulliam ’98, Who Sang on Stages Worldwide, Dies at 50
Gifted singer became a regular presence on the Oberlin campus where he honed his craft.
May 20, 2026
Communications Staff
Limmie Pulliam, in an October 2022 preview performance of "The Ordering of Moses" with the Oberlin Orchestra and Oberlin choirs in Finney Chapel. The following month, the musicians presented the work at Carnegie Hall.
Photo credit: Yevhen Gulenko
Dramatic tenor Limmie Pulliam, a 1998 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory who gave life to a host of leading opera roles and as a classical soloist on prominent stages across America and around the globe—and whose unlikely rise to fame after years away from music buoyed the dreams of performers everywhere—has died. He was 50.
Last week, Pulliam had been the tenor soloist in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8.
Raised in Kennett, Missouri, Pulliam, the son of a preacher, grew up singing in his church choir before his passion for classical music took shape. At Oberlin, he was a student of the legendary voice professor Richard Miller, who played a vital role in developing Pulliam’s remarkably powerful sound.
Soon after graduating, however, Pulliam found himself disillusioned over concerns related to his weight and the audition rejections and body shaming he was subjected to as a result of it. For 12 years, he pursued work as a debt collector and security guard—even operating his own security business. For most of that time, he seldom even thought of music, let alone sang.
Pulliam’s rediscovery of his own voice came in the unlikeliest of ways: While working as an organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in Missouri, he was invited to sing the National Anthem when the scheduled singer backed out.
The performance, and several others that followed, signaled to Pulliam that his voice had matured and grown in size in the years since his Oberlin training. It reignited his interest in exploring where he might go with it. His formal return to the stage happened at age 36, with a performance in the National Opera Association’s vocal competition.
In November 2024, Pulliam discussed his career trajectory with Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar on the Running to the Noise podcast. In it, he revealed how he revisited old videotapes of his sessions with Professor Miller.
"It was almost like riding a bicycle," he recalled. "As I began to work with the tapes, the coordination began to come back."
Limmie Pulliam performing the title role in The Ordering of Moses with the Oberlin Orchestra and Oberlin choirs at Carnegie Hall in January 2023.
Photo credit: Fadi Kheir
As Pulliam’s career resurgence took shape, so did his involvement with Oberlin, where he delighted in working with students on projects and in rehearsals.
His on-campus collaborations included singing the title role in The Ordering of Moses, an opera penned by 1908 Oberlin alum R. Nathaniel Dett. The work, performed by the Oberlin Orchestra and Oberlin choirs in January 2023, marked Pulliam’s Carnegie Hall debut.
The previous month, he had made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Radamès in Verdi’s Aida. He was the first Black singer in the history of the Met to perform the role.
Also in 2023, Pulliam debuted with the Cleveland Orchestra in the title role of a semi-staged production of Verdi’s Otello.
“He has an amazing voice,” Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst said in an interview with cleveland.com. “I’ve not heard a better Otello in a very long time. He really is quite something."
Within days of Pulliam’s Carnegie Hall premiere, he was featured in a New York Times story with the headline “He Quit Singing Because of Body Shaming. Now He’s Making a Comeback.”
Former First Lady Michelle Obama called out Pulliam on Facebook in February 2023, recalling his initial performance on her husband’s campaign and his spate of debut performances. “Limmie, I’m so proud of you,” she wrote. “Your story is incredible and I hope you know how much you are inspiring people to never give up on their dreams.”
In 2024, Pulliam was one of several Oberlin contemporaries who reunited for a collaborative concert production of Omar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera by Rhiannon Giddens ’01 and Michael Abels. He sang the title role alongside his longtime friends and collaborators Giddens, bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch ’98, and baritone Michael Preacely ’01. Another prominent Oberlin alum, John Kennedy ’82, conducted the performance. Pulliam and Giddens spoke about the experience of returning to campus to perform the opera to NPR.
Pulliam performing the title role in Rhiannon Giddens' Omar in Finney Chapel in December 2024.
Photo credit: Mike Crupi
Pulliam derived great joy from his work with Oberlin students, and he offered them a word of support in his podcast conversation with Ambar.
“Don’t be afraid to face your fears, to step out of your comfort zone, to be persistent in your work, to be consistent in your work, and don’t let a no deter you from continuing to push forward,” he said.
“It’s up to us to take control of our own destinies and to define ourselves, as opposed to allowing other people to define us.”
In October 2025, Oberlin students attended Pulliam’s performance as soloist in Mahler's Song of the Earth with the Cleveland Orchestra, after which the orchestra hosted a reception for Pulliam and his Oberlin guests. In February of this year, a busload of Oberlin students experienced Pulliam’s performance in Turandot at Detroit Music Hall.
Most recently, Pulliam returned to campus to honor the late Daune Mahy, a longtime voice professor whom the conservatory celebrated with a memorial concert in early March. Pulliam sang Richard Strauss’ Zueignung (von Gilm).
“Limmie was an extraordinary, powerful artist,” says Dean of the Conservatory William Quillen. “Even more, he was a deeply good, kind-hearted, funny, brilliant, and generous colleague and friend who transformed the lives of everyone he met. His performances with our students were life-changing for all involved. On behalf of everyone at Oberlin, we send deepest condolences to Limmie's family, friends, classmates, and loved ones. He was a remarkable artist, and we will miss him greatly.”
In his podcast conversation, Pulliam’s reaction to achieving notoriety later in life was a fitting example of that big-hearted generosity. “I hope [my story] inspired others to just really know not to ever give up on their dreams,” he said.
New York Times: He Quit Singing Because of Body Shaming - Limmie Pulliam 1976-2026
He Quit Singing Because of Body Shaming. Now He’s Making a Comeback.
The tenor Limmie Pulliam, who made his debut at Carnegie Hall on Friday, hopes to break barriers for larger artists.
Limmie Pulliam at Carnegie Hall, where he made his debut on Friday singing the title role in R. Nathaniel Dett’s “The Ordering of Moses.”Credit...Fadi Kheir
As a rising young tenor in the 1990s, Limmie Pulliam dreamed of a career that would take him to the world’s top stages. But Pulliam, who has struggled with excessive weight for much of his life, quit singing in his early 20s because of concerns about body shaming in the music industry, finding work instead as a debt collector and a security guard.
Now, after spending much of the past decade rebuilding his voice and career, Pulliam, 47, is finally realizing his dream. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall on Friday with the Oberlin Orchestra, singing the title role in R. Nathaniel Dett’s “The Ordering of Moses.” And last month, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida,” filling in for a tenor who had canceled his appearance — making Pulliam the first Black singer to perform that role in the Met’s history.
His solemn performance received a warm ovation at Carnegie.
“To hear Limmie succeed in this moment so beautifully, and at this point in his life, was personally satisfying for me,” said Timothy LeFebvre, the chair of the voice department at Oberlin. “We always cheer on our colleagues when they reach these notable achievements, but even more so when it is so hard fought.”
In an interview, Pulliam reflected on his 12-year break from singing and the challenges facing larger artists, who once were common in the industry but have faced pressure in recent years to slim down. He also talked about how a chance to perform the national anthem while working as a field organizer in Missouri for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign allowed him to rediscover his voice. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
After you attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, you seemed destined for a career in opera. Then you quit. What happened?
There was a lot of pressure on artists in terms of appearance. The industry cared about things that really had nothing to do with the voice, but with physicality, and that made it difficult for singers of size. It made it easy for me to walk away. I made myself a promise that if it ever stopped being fun, I would do something else. And so I did.
What was it like at the time for singers struggling with concerns about their weight?
People within the industry were able to make comments regarding someone’s physical look with impunity. In other industries, that would not be accepted, but it was almost widely accepted within the classical music world. It felt like it was OK to make fun of people of size and that we weren’t worthy of careers. It was a very difficult time, and it’s still a very difficult time.
What would people say to you?
I’ve had general directors send me email messages complimenting me on my voice and then saying, “Well, when you lose 50 pounds, get in touch with me again, and I’ll give you a live audition.”
How did it feel to hear those comments?
I began to look at rejection in a different way. I used to get a bit down when I received a note like that or just a flat-out refusal about an audition. But I began to use that as fuel to make me want to work even harder — to be an even better vocalist. I thought, “They may not want me right now, but they will need me at some point.”
During your break from classical music, you worked a variety of jobs, eventually starting your own security firm. Did you sing at all, even for your own pleasure — at home, in the shower, at church?
Not really. I was deliberately making the decision not to sing. I just didn’t have the desire. I wasn’t singing that much in church, and I rarely listened to the radio in the car. There wasn’t much going on musically for me during that time. I was just concentrating on this new life that I was trying to build and trying to move forward.
And then, in 2007, when you were 31 and working as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Missouri, your home state, you got an unexpected chance to perform the national anthem.
We had invited someone to sing the national anthem. And they got cold feet at the last minute and decided they didn’t want to do it. And it happened to be an event that I had invited my boss to attend. And he immediately said, “I remember seeing on your résumé that you used to be an opera singer. Why don’t you sing it?” And I said, “Well, you know, I haven’t sung for a number of years. And the national anthem is not an easy song to sing. I’m not sure I can pull it off.” It was terrifying; it was not something I had practiced or prepared. I did not know what was going to come out.
But he convinced me to do it. And I sang at the event and ended up singing at several other events. And in doing so, I noticed some very interesting changes in my voice. It had taken on a more mature, burnished quality. And it had grown substantially in size. And it really piqued my interest as to the type of repertoire I could possibly sing with this new instrument.
Your returned to the stage five years later, when you were 36, at the National Opera Association’s vocal competition. How did you prepare?
I pulled out my old lesson tapes from the conservatory and began working with those lesson tapes and polishing things, just out of interest to see what the voice could do. And I eventually reached out to a voice teacher in Memphis, Tenn., and began working with her. We realized that we had something that was special — that there wasn’t anyone like me as an artist out there. We were working to rekindle the voice. That’s when I found the joy again in singing.
Was it easy to get back into the business?
It took a good three years or so before that first staged operatic engagement came, and it came because I was posting clips of my singing on YouTube and other platforms and just sharing wherever I could, and reaching out to friends who were still in the industry and letting them know I was back and basically trying to sing for anyone who would hear me.
A friend saw a clip of me singing “Ch’ella mi creda libero e lontano” from Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” with my former high school choir director playing the piano. She shared it with her husband, who happened to be the music director of a small opera company in the Seattle area. They invited me to to sing the role of Canio in “Pagliacci.”
You were the first Black singer to perform the role of Radamès at the Met. Do you feel that classical music is doing enough to address racial and ethnic disparities?
As a Black man, I’m usually the only one who looks like me in a rehearsal setting. So there always is a sense of isolation, of not fitting in. You have to learn to work through that and do your job to the best of your ability.
We always seem to have had celebrated Black female voices in the industry, like Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Grace Bumbry and Shirley Verrett. But the list of Black men has always been quite short. There are some in the industry who have difficulty in seeing Black males in romantic leads. We’ve made progress, and we just have to keep pushing forward and breaking down some of these walls.
How did it feel to make your debut at Carnegie Hall?
It was very difficult for me to enjoy it fully. It has been a challenging year for me personally. On May 8, my father passed away. And the following week, after the funeral, I left to get on a plane to prepare for my debut with the Cleveland Orchestra singing the role of Otello. I arrived in New York on Nov. 10 to begin my cover contract with the Met for “Aida.” On Nov. 14, my eldest sister passed away.
It has been an emotional roller coaster for me. One never knows how grief will manifest itself. And grief is a very sneaky thing. And it pops up on you at very odd times, and you never know what’s going to trigger it. I was able to make it through because of the strength of my faith and knowing that my loved ones were in complete support of me and my career and would have wanted me to be where I was.
What did your family say to you after the performance?
My mother walked up to me and gave me a hug and a kiss and said: “God bless you. I’m extremely proud of you.” My oldest brother, whenever I go to perform, he always reminds me to make the family proud. And his response on Friday night was, “That’s how you make us proud.”
Javier C. Hernández is a culture reporter, covering the world of classical music and dance in New York City and beyond. He joined The Times in 2008 and previously worked as a correspondent in Beijing and New York.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shaming Derailed His Career. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Denyce Graves's Second Act by Soraya Nadia McDonald
When the curtain of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House rose for the closing matinee of Porgy and Bess in January, the boos that typically accompany the entrance of the show’s villains were a mere murmur. The nearly 4,000 people who packed the space to capacity—175 of them standing-room ticket holders who remained on their feet for the opera’s three-and-a-half-hour run time—had come to cheer.
Thirty-one years before, Denyce Graves had made her Met debut in the title role of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. The mezzo-soprano had been a revelation, her full, rich voice and lusty physicality defining the role for a generation. Graves was a diva in the original, operatic sense: a world-renowned performer who made journalists wilt, and whose name alone was enough to draw crowds. But here she was, playing a supporting character in Porgy and Bess. Graves was singing the part of Maria, the matriarch of the 1920s working-class Black community of Catfish Row, the Lowcountry settlement where the show takes place. It was set to be her final performance ever, a return to the opera that had launched her professional career in 1985.
Discover Your New Apartment - Updated Price & Listings
Filter by Amenities, Price, & More to Find an Apartment in Dyer. Search Now! Beautiful & Modern Apartments in Dyer. Find Your Next Place ...
>
After intermission, but before the opera resumed, the entire company crowded onto the stage, and the house rose to its feet. Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, presented Graves with a plaque recognizing her career. It would be installed in the Met’s List Hall, where aspiring artists audition. “My heart is unrehearsed at having to hold so much love,” Graves said, tearing up and taking a few beats to collect herself. “It has never been asked to hold this capacity of love before.”
It was a rare moment of harmony in a year—for opera as for much else—that had been defined by conflict. Just weeks after his second inauguration, President Trump had fired members of the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center—the longtime home of the Washington National Opera, the other major opera company that Graves had performed with for decades. He handpicked the artists recognized for the Kennedy Center Honors, banned drag queens from performing there, and affixed his name to the building’s facade. He successfully pushed to dismantle the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which for decades had helped opera find audiences on television and radio. After the WNO voted to leave the Kennedy Center early this January, and after several acts refused to play the venue in protest of Trump’s changes, he announced that the building would be closed for “renovations” for two years.
The administration had also engaged in a sweeping campaign against Black history—against what it calls “wokeness”—perhaps most notably demanding a review of every exhibit in the Smithsonian’s halls, singling out the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with its unflinching portrayal of slavery, as a purveyor of “corrosive ideology.” Two days before Porgy and Bess’s closing matinee, National Park Service workers removed an exhibit at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park memorializing nine people enslaved by George Washington (the administration is now appealing a federal judge’s order that the exhibit be restored).
Courtesy of Richard Termine / Met OperaGraves’s final performance brought her back to Catfish Row in Porgy and Bess, the opera that launched her career.
Graves is a perfect avatar of everything the Trump administration seeks to eradicate, a fact that gave her swan song an even more sentimental air. She has consistently used the artistic capital she amassed through her mastery of the European canon to unearth and preserve Black history, and to promote productions that challenge Eurocentrism. She’s sought to diversify the world of opera. And Graves does not consider her work finished, even if she has now walked offstage for the last time as a performer. With both the arts and Black history under attack, she is entering a new phase of her career, one that may well be more consequential than the first.
After the show, I found Graves backstage, already changed out of Maria’s plain apron, shift dress, and sensible black Mary Janes. She wore a strapless burgundy A-line number paired with stiletto pumps, an ensemble more befitting a diva. A crowd had gathered outside the stage door of the opera house, and another in the front plaza of Lincoln Center, even as frigid winds cut through layers of clothing like X‑Acto blades. A staffer coordinated a receiving line so that Graves could greet her frozen public before she was taken to her retirement party.
“I was genuinely surprised,” she told me, speaking about the intermission ceremony, her voice deep-toned, like polished mahogany. “You know what I thought about? I thought about what we see happening right now, with our history being erased.” The placement of the plaque in the Met’s audition hall, where a new generation of Black artists would see it and perhaps be inspired, was what had touched her most.
Graves’s path to the stage was challenging, in no small part because of racism. She was born in Washington, D.C., in 1964 and raised in a poor neighborhood in the city’s Southeast quadrant. When she was 4 years old, riots erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and nearly 12,000 federal troops were deployed to the city.
Graves grew up singing in church, initially at the behest of her mother, Dorothy Graves-Kenner, who had to coax her daughter past her shyness and toward some sense of authority behind the microphone. Judith Allen, her first music teacher, recognized that she had something worth nurturing, both in voice and in presence. Allen took a young Graves to rehearsals of D.C.’s All City Chorus at Constitution Hall. At age 13, when Graves heard a record of Leontyne Price singing Puccini arias, she was struck with a revelation: She needed to be an opera singer.
Discover Your New Apartment - Updated Price & Listings
Filter by Amenities, Price, & More to Find an Apartment in Dyer. Search Now! Beautiful & Modern Apartments in Dyer. Find Your Next Place ...
>
With Allen’s encouragement, Graves auditioned for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a D.C. public magnet high school seemingly worlds away from the racialized poverty that characterized her neighborhood. Still, when Graves informed her mother that she wanted to study singing in college, Graves-Kenner was surprised. People attended college to become doctors or lawyers. What on earth was her daughter going to do with a degree in something she’d already learned in church?
Graves ultimately studied at Oberlin College, where she encountered the first in a procession of gatekeepers who saw her as a misfit or a novelty because they believed that opera was a white art form. A professor told her, “This is not a place for you” when she showed up to his class, she recalls. Still, in 1985, she signed a contract with the Tulsa Opera, taking roles in Porgy and Bess and The Magic Flute. The former carries a fraught reputation because it is a work about poor Black people, written and composed in 1934–35 by a white creative team (George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward), and almost always conducted and directed by white leaders. Even now, aspiring Black opera singers are warned against Porgy and Bess, lest they find themselves confined to Catfish Row for the rest of their career.
But Graves, like her Black-diva predecessors—Price, Marian Anderson, Jessye Norman—has always had a gift for transforming domains in which she was considered foreign, and making them bend to her. She went on to perform with the Vienna State Opera, London’s Royal Opera, and the Paris Opera. Graves met her friend and close collaborator Francesca Zambello, now the WNO artistic director, when Graves was singing with the Bavarian State Opera and Zambello was directing the company’s production of Otello. In 1995, Graves made her Met debut in Carmen. A busload of 75 family members and friends traveled from Washington to see her.
Kathryn Osler / The Denver Post / GettyFor most of Denyce Graves’s career, the titular character of Carmen was the role most people associated with her.
She was incredibly magnetic. Before that Met debut, a smitten Morley Safer interviewed her in her dressing room for 60 Minutes, seeming more nervous to speak with her than she was about performing. Graves soon became an opera evangelist to young children, appearing multiple times on Sesame Street, including in a memorable segment where she uses Bizet’s “Habanera” melody to fashion a lullaby for Elmo. She sang with BeBe Winans and Patti LaBelle, and released several albums. But if you really wanted to witness her talent in its fullest, you had to go see her in her element.
Unlike musical theater, there are no microphones in opera. When singing fills an opera house, it floats on the power of the lungs, assisted by only the acoustics and architecture of the room. Both the form and its fans can be unforgiving. But Graves was an experience, the sort of performer who reaches through the proscenium, grabs you, and doesn’t let go until curtain. She more than held her own when sharing the stage with the Three Tenors—Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti—the supergroup that made opera sexy and popular in the ’90s.
In Carmen, and in her other signature role of Dalila in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, she played seductresses with such believability and authority that many profiles raved over the carnality she projected. Her crossover appeal extended to the halls of power. Graves sang at the inauguration of President George W. Bush and became close friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, singing at the justice’s funeral in 2020.
Graves used the fame and influence that Carmen brought to nurture her passion for Black artistic history. In 2005, she starred in the opera Margaret Garner, composed by Richard Danielpour, with a libretto by Toni Morrison. Garner was a woman in antebellum Kentucky whose escape from slavery—and decision to kill her daughter rather than allow her to return to bondage—had inspired Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved.
Margaret Garner brought Black artists together to an extent that few operas could, and since its debut, Graves has consistently supported Black vocalists, conductors, composers, directors, and librettists. In 2013, she sang in the composer (and frequent Spike Lee collaborator) Terence Blanchard’s first opera, Champion. In 2021, she went back to the site of her first paying gig, the Tulsa Opera, to sing in Greenwood Overcomes, a production memorializing the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Graves has always chased a sense of workplace and artistic camaraderie, of homecoming. I recognized it in the Met dressing rooms when I visited her: Black singers casually trading stories about jobs, directors, and cities, able to let down their guard and enjoy one another’s company. For much of Graves’s career, such a scene was a rarity. Instead, there was a tremendous, lonely pressure to be perfect. She wants things to be different for her heirs, for the future Black standard-bearers of opera. Implicit in this desire is also the desire for opera to persist, not as a remnant of its old grandeur, but as an art form that has been elevated by accessibility.
Greg Nash / GettyGraves sang at the funeral of her friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020.
As I spoke with Graves in the weeks before her final performance, she seemed ready, happy even, to say goodbye to performing. She could finally set aside the monastic life required to keep her voice in top shape. “I know I’m not going to have dairy,” she said, explaining a typical day to me. “I know I’m not going to have vinegar. I know I’m not going to have all of those things which cause acid reflux and which will play out in the quality of the sound. I’m even thinking about talking to you, and the cost of that. If you’re a violinist, you’re not playing the violin from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. But you’re using your voice. It’s very, very different.”
Although Graves might be newly able to partake in cheeses and vinaigrettes, she is far from retired, and intends to dedicate more time to directing while continuing to teach and build her foundation, which aims to promote more diverse representation in the vocal arts. She made her directorial debut in May 2022 with a Minnesota Opera production of Carmen. Last year, she directed the world premiere of Loving v. Virginia, by the composer Damien Geter and the librettist Jessica Murphy Moo, which tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple at the center of the 1967 Supreme Court case that ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
This March, six weeks after her retirement from performing, Graves was slated to direct the opening production of Washington National Opera’s 70th spring season, an expanded and reimagined version of Scott Joplin’s 1911 opera, Treemonisha, with which the famed Black ragtime composer had intended to create a Black style of opera, before his death in 1917. Though Joplin paid to have the piano-vocal score published, his original full orchestrations were lost. Graves’s restoration would feature new orchestrations and arias by Damien Sneed and a new libretto adapted by the playwright Kyle Bass.
Treemonisha, which is set in the Texas wilderness in 1884 and tells the story of a Black woman trying to rid her community of the influence of conjurers and superstition, was originally scheduled to open at the Kennedy Center Opera House. But that was before all the unpleasantness began with Trump. The show would instead debut at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. And if the production did not previously register as political, a revival of Black opera’s would-be foundational work by D.C.’s opera-in-exile just a few blocks away from the Kennedy Center certainly reads as a provocative statement now.
On opening night, when Francesca Zambello and WNO’s general director, Timothy O’Leary, took the stage to introduce the production, they were greeted with a standing ovation filled with whoops and throaty roars, as though they were a couple of outlaws in formal wear.
“We deeply appreciate your understanding, your solidarity, and your belief in creative freedom,” O’Leary said. The opera opened with a banjo solo, and Sneed played Joplin’s score on an upright piano onstage.
The performance could never be exactly what it would have been in its planned venue. Opera is a big, melodramatic medium, designed for capturing big, melodramatic emotions. Although Lisner is a perfectly serviceable auditorium, it lacks the high ceilings, deep stage, and general grandeur of the opera house. The Treemonisha set didn’t have the three-dimensional, full-scale production value and enormous cast size typical of opera productions. The usual ornate set pieces were more modest and two-dimensional, relying on a floral-filigree wrap that evoked the background of a Kehinde Wiley painting. Sitting in the auditorium, I felt those constraints.
Even so, Treemonisha’s themes played to the times, and after the final number, in which the title character and the chorus repeat the refrain of “Marching onward, marching onward,” the auditorium erupted. Graves and Sneed joined the performers for the curtain call. And then the cast and the crowd joined together to sing to a surprised Graves. The debut was on March 7, her 62nd birthday.
This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Diva.”
_updates.jpg)
