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Musical America: Why Opera Singers Quit the Trade October 13, 2026 | By Taylor Grant

 

INDUSTRY NEWS

Why Opera Singers Quit the Trade

October 13, 2026 | By Taylor Grant, Musical America

For all but the top echelon of professional opera singers, creating a sustainable career poses a challenge so daunting that many quit just as their vocal prowess peaks. They simply cannot afford to continue.

“We just have to start telling the truth, and that is that unless you're in the top one or two percent of singers in the world, this is not something that you'll be able to sustain a family with,” Andrew Potter [left] tells Laura Atkinson, a reporter for Louisville Public Media.

The 43-year-old lyric bass, who has appeared with, among others, the Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, Dallas Opera, and Portland Opera, has been making more money than ever and getting regular bookings. But in September he published an open letter to the profession in The Times (London) announcing his retirement and explaining why.

Potter’s reckoning with his profession’s future took on great clarity when he sang at The Metropolitan Opera in December of 2025, a pinnacle achievement for which he brought his family to New York. But the need to fund food, housing, and transportation for the six-week rehearsal period before curtain made Porter’s Met experience  a financial wash. And this is the rule, not the exception, for most in his trade.

As Atkinson explains, “While opera often seems glamorous, the reality is quite different. For one, there's a lot of travel. There are over 100 opera houses in this country.” Potter tells her, “There were nights sleeping at rest stops on drives across the country because you can't afford a hotel…. I'm making a thousand-mile drive for a $300 travel stipend.”

Road dad

The time away from home is another cost, one that may be harder to calculate in dollars and cents but cuts deeper in impact. Clark Evans [right], a baritone from Kentucky, tells Atkinson, “It's like living two lives simultaneously because it changes so much with the kids… growing up.” At 42, Evans, like Porter, decided to retire this year. “I'm ready to be a better home-husband and home-father instead of being a great road father,” he tells Atkinson.

Porter and Evans are not outliers, says Katherine Phares, a voice professor at Bowling Green State University who has studied hundreds of professional opera singers’ lives. The financial and personal pressures begin to catch up with singers around midlife. “Making real money that you can invest,” she explains, “[is] when many people feel that the rug is pulled out from underneath them.”

For most opera singers, like most Americans, working hard to hone their abilities no longer guarantees (if it ever did) the comforts of life commensurate with their achievements. “Singers rarely stop singing because they are tired of making art,” Atkinson concludes.

They stop because the institutions for which they perform are in crisis, she continues, “struggling financially with an aging donor base, declining federal support and high ticket prices…. That squeeze extends to the people making the music…. Opera singers just live that tension loudly on the road, on the stage, in front of an audience until, sometimes, it's time to walk away

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NYT - Martina Arroyo, Luminous Soprano Who Broke Barriers, Dies at 90

 

Martina Arroyo, Luminous Soprano Who Broke Barriers, Dies at 90

A leading star at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s and ’70s, she was one of the first Black singers to have a major stage career.  Martina Arroyo poses for a black-and-white portrait in costume as Aida, with a dress and fabric pulled over as a head scarf.

By Vivien Schweitzer

Oct. 14, 2026

Updated 10:06 a.m. ET

Martina Arroyo, a soprano whose rich voice carried with ease through the scores of Giuseppe Verdi and who was one of the first Black singers to have a major operatic career, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.

The death was confirmed by her representative, Miracle Management.

Ms. Arroyo and other artists of her generation, like Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and George Shirley, broke color barriers in the opera world in the 1950s and ’60s, becoming stars at important houses.

At the Metropolitan Opera, Ms. Arroyo made her debut in a small role in 1959, but her big break arrived six years later, when Rudolf Bing, the company’s general manager, called and asked her to replace an ailing colleague as Verdi’s Aida.

Ms. Arroyo, whose career had been building slowly in Europe, initially assumed it was a prank. The evening, though, was a triumph. She was offered a contract; sang later that year as Elisabetta in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Leonora in his “Il Trovatore” and Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”; and starred in three season-opening nights in the early 1970s.

Reviewing her in “Il Trovatore” at the Met in 1969, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she “always had a big, soaring voice. Now she sings with color, knows how to pace herself and produces tone after tone of focused beauty.” In a section on Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” in “The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera” (1993), Lord Harewood said that Ms. Arroyo’s Amelia, from 1975, was the best in the 14 classic recordings under review.

A frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” Ms. Arroyo took an unusual path to stardom, briefly serving as a social worker and schoolteacher in New York City early in her career. She was down to earth and known for her sense of humor. Joking about the role she sang for her Met debut after winning the company’s Auditions of the Air in 1958, she recalled, laughing, that the offstage part of the Celestial Voice in “Don Carlo” was so tiny that her mother missed hearing her because of an ill-timed bathroom break.

In addition to the Met, Ms. Arroyo appeared at leading houses such as the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Royal Opera in London. While best known for Verdi, she was a versatile artist whose repertory ranged from Mozart to 20th-century composers like Stockhausen, Schoenberg and William Bolcom, and she gave the world premieres of works including Samuel Barber’s “Andromache’s Farewell.”

She sang with a powerful, luminous and expressive voice, and wanted listeners to know that she labored to achieve such lustrous results.

“If people think a kind of magic happens onstage, they ought to know that what they’re seeing is a lot of work,” she told The Times in 1972. “To me, ‘charisma’ is just a fancy word for rehearsals. And if I catch you using the word ‘effortless’ about me, I’ll laugh in your face.”

Ms. Arroyo, wearing a silk dress with a shimmering top, smiles as she sits next to Johnny Carson’s desk on “The Tonight Show.”

Ms. Arroyo with Johnny Carson. She appeared on Mr. Carson’s “Tonight Show” regularly in her heyday.Credit...Paul Drinkwater/NBC via Getty Images

Ms. Arroyo was born on Feb. 2, 1936, in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the daughter of Demetrio Arroyo, a mechanical engineer from Puerto Rico, and Lucille Washington, an amateur pianist from South Carolina.

The family, which also included an older son, placed a premium on culture. Ms. Arroyo sang in church choirs and took ballet classes, and with her parents frequently attended museums, concerts, plays, films and musicals.

Opera was not part of her upbringing, but while she was a student at Hunter College High School, she attended an opera workshop and was sent to audition for the vocal coach Marinka Gurewich, who later told the Times that she was as impressed by Ms. Arroyo’s character as she was by the teenager’s voice.

“To be a great singer means more than just a voice,” Ms. Gurewich said. “What struck me was this personality of straightforward determination without any of the unkindness that is so often included.”

Ms. Gurewich would be Ms. Arroyo’s teacher for the next four decades.

Ms. Arroyo’s parents initially worried about her passion for opera. “My father was so afraid I would have to wear a short dress and kick up my legs,” she recalled. “He finally found out more and saw an opera himself, and certainly my mother came to love opera and respect it almost more than I do. She became addicted to it.”

But the possibility of a career in the field still seemed far-fetched when Ms. Arroyo was getting started, in part because of a lack of models. It was only in 1955 that the contralto Marian Anderson became the first Black artist to sing a significant role at the Met.

Even after Ms. Arroyo’s parents began supporting her interest in music, they insisted that she also pursue a more reliable line of work as a backup. She received a bachelor’s degree in romance languages from Hunter College, followed by a teacher’s license and graduate studies in literature at New York University. She was a New York City welfare caseworker and a high-school teacher in the mid- to late 1950s.

Later, asked about the advice she liked to give young singers, she replied, “The only real answer that has remained with me has been the security of having had another profession.”

Ms. Arroyo won the Auditions of the Air by singing “O patria mia” from “Aida.” She then returned to her day job while also making her Met debut and singing around the country in opera and concerts. She then moved to Europe, giving well-reviewed lieder recitals and becoming part of the resident ensemble at the Zurich Opera.

In 1961, she married the Italian violist Emilio Poggioni, a relationship which ended in divorce, and later married Michel Maurel, a banker, who died in 2011. She has no immediate survivors.

She sang “Aida” for her final Met performances in 1986 and, after retiring from the stage in the early 1990s, devoted herself to teaching. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honor in 2010 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2013.

As a professor at Indiana University, she taught a course in role preparation that laid the groundwork for the Martina Arroyo Foundation, which she established in 2003. Ten years later, she told The Washington Post that, while her singing career had been wonderful, “Life as I wanted it truly began for me with the foundation.”

The foundation long organized a six-week summer program, Prelude to Performance, that culminated in a fully staged opera at Hunter. Instead of focusing on technique, the program sought to help aspiring singers more convincingly inhabit roles. It was the kind of dramatic training that Ms. Arroyo felt had been missing from her own early studies, which had left her to her own instincts.

“I love Amelia in ‘Ballo in Maschera,’” she said. “I love Butterfly. She’s dramatic, she’s wonderful, she’s warm, she gives. The characters I don’t like, I don’t go near. Because if I don’t like her, if I don’t really love her, I can’t sing her.”

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Corrected on Oct. 14, 2026: An earlier version of this obituary misstated Ms. Arroyo’s year of birth and her age when she died. She was born on Feb. 2 in 1936, not 1937, and was 90 when she died, not 89.

We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.

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