Denyce Graves’s Second Act
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.
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.
[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.”