(Credit: Dario Acosta)

American soprano Angel Blue is widely considered to be one of the most influential sopranos before the public today. The two-time Grammy Award winner, 2020 Beverly Sills Award recipient, and the 2022 Richard Tucker Award winner is celebrated worldwide for her honeyed soprano and affecting deliveries of many of the most beloved roles in the operatic repertory, such as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” Bess in Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” Mimí in Puccini’s “La Bohéme,” and Destiny/Loneliness/Greta in Terrence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”

Opera Wire caught up with Angel at her home in New Jersey

OperaWire: You have just finished “Aida” in the Montreal Metropolitan, how did that go?

Angel Blue: I think it went very well, it was just a wonderful experience with my colleagues, and, of course with Maestro Yannick (Nézet-Séguin). I enjoyed it. Every time I visit Canada I have a good time. I love the people, the culture, and speaking my broken but entertaining French. I’ve sung “Aida” twice now. The very first time was in Detroit and then at the Royal Opera House in concert. It’s still an interesting thing for me, I would still consider it a new part of my repertoire but it’s something I really enjoy.

OW: I saw and reviewed your “Tosca” performance at the Royal Opera House recently. I managed to see your first day of rehearsals there, where you were being instructed to do a complicated-looking backwards leap from the walls of Castel Sant’Angelo. You didn’t try it in rehearsals, but on opening night you performed the most spectacular, acrobatic backward leap that I suggest has ever been witnessed. How on earth did you accomplish that?

AB: Well, the rehearsal that you saw, although I had done the jump before; we were pressed for time and I didn’t want to be rushed to do it. I didn’t think that was safe. It was actually MY idea to jump backward. For me, it didn’t make sense to go forward. It’s interesting because most of the women, I’ve heard that most of the sopranos singing “Tosca” at the Royal Opera have said that they’re nervous to go backward because, well, it IS; it’s a trust fall. But I felt less safe going forward so I thought jumping backward would be the right thing to do for me. It is one of the most beautiful productions I’ve ever done of “Tosca.” I’m not sure how many times I’ve sung the role now, I want to say I think this is my fifth time. But this was one of my favorite productions.

OW: Tell me about growing up in California. I understand both your parents were quite musical.

AB: Yes. I grew up in a very musical home. My dad was a Pastor, but he studied classical music. He studied voice at the Cleveland Conservatory. My Mother played the violin and piano and is still playing piano today. Even though she’s very arthritic she says when she plays she doesn’t feel the arthritis, which is awesome. I often think that music has the ability to heal…..so I grew up in a musical family. I would probably say my brother is the best musician out of all of us. He’s currently serving in the military but he’s a great musician. I have three sisters, all of whom are musically inclined, but I’m the only one who decided to make it a career.

We used to travel around the United States and Canada singing. We traveled because of my Dad’s ministry. We were a family band. I played the bass guitar. I’ll bring it out quickly…..I’m in my music room. So, my dad bought me this when I was ten years old, it’s my favorite instrument, a Jazz bass guitar. My sisters sang with my dad….my mom played piano and my brother played the drums. Then, when I was having issues with my breath control my dad said you should learn how to play the saxophone. So, I started learning the saxophone when I was around 14. So, music was just always everywhere, all the time in the home. My dad was playing Gospel, he was singing Gospel he was singing, he’d go from listening to Richard Tucker, Jussi Björling to Stevie Wonder, Deep Purple to Led Zeppelin. Everything was in the house; bluegrass, country, classical, and all kinds of music. I grew up listening to everything, but definitely, classical music was very important in our home.

OW: So, you grew up listening to all these different types of music, classical, jazz, etc. What made you choose opera, and who did you hear or listen to that inspired you?

AB: My parents took me to a concert when I was four. I was really young. It was “Turandot” in concert and we were visiting my grandmother in Cleveland. To this day, my favorite section of the orchestra is the brass section. I love the brass; I also like the woodwind instruments. I like the wind instruments, probably because I’m a wind instrument too, but when I was a kid, I remember hearing the brass section. I didn’t know it was brass. I said to my dad: “What is that honking sound?” And he explained it’s the trombones and the trumpets and all of that. And I saw the ladies singing in “Turandot” and that just grabbed me. From the moment I saw it, that was what I wanted to do. My father bought me a recording of Leontyne Price, her recitals called “A Program of Song.” I was probably about six or seven years old, and I had a little Walkman, you remember those little tape cassette players? So, I had this little Walkman and we stopped at a Walmart store in Louisiana, my dad was ministering and he bought this tape. Can you imagine, they were selling classical music at Walmart? So that was my upbringing. It was never abnormal for me to listen to opera. It was almost like, why DON’T other people listen to opera, it was so normal in my home.

OW: So Leontyne Price clearly influenced you?

AB: Oh yes. Major, major influence. My dad also loved Lily Pons so he had this….I have it now. He left it to me. He passed away eighteen years ago. He left me all of his records, but he used to play Lily Pons on his stereo player. I don’t know, it was just a really big part of my childhood. It’s funny… of course, I hear people say different things about growing up, and of course, it shapes who we become, and then we get to decide how we want to let those experiences we had when we were younger influence us as adults.

I’m really very thankful to my parents because I had a great childhood. I really did. You know, my brother and my sisters will often have a chat on text messages, and every now and then someone will just say: “I’m so grateful for Mom and Dad.” Thank God my Mom is still here…but the way we were raised with so much culture in the house. Maybe my grandfather is the one to thank for that because he liked Enrico Caruso! He was a coal miner in West Virginia and he was part of a barber shop quartet and their favorite singer was Enrico Caruso!

OW: Can we speak about your much-publicized withdrawal from Verona? Do you still feel as strongly about the whole thing as you did at the time, or do you have any regrets about it?

AB: Ok. I’m answering the question, I promise, but I want to answer with my name. My name is Angel Joy. Angel means messenger and obviously Joy is a state of being. It’s not like happiness, it’s not conditional, you know? Joy is something that is continuous, I feel. For
example, I miss my father….I think about him often. I miss him so much and as I’ve gotten older, I miss him even more. But I’m still joyful. I say that first because I’m prefacing my answer with that because what I felt at the time is still how I feel. If there was a regret to it, I wish I had said it in a more joyful way. It was a statement that had come from my publicist because I didn’t know how to be succinct about what I was thinking. She helped to get my ideas together. So I won’t say that I regret what I did; I still feel strongly that, that sort of makeup is unnecessary because I sing all kinds of roles, you know? I’ve never been asked to change the color of my skin, I haven’t been asked to lose weight, I haven’t been asked to fit some kind of a mold so that the opera makes sense. I’ve only been asked to come and sing the opera so, in that respect, no I don’t feel: “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that” or “Oh I wish I hadn’t done that.” What I DO feel, and it was a very big eye-opener to me, If there is a regret, I regret, I didn’t fully understand or think that people would think that something that I said would be so important.
That’s why I say Angel means messenger.

OW: Having read quite a bit with regards to the incident of your withdrawing, I feel you were also misconstrued somewhat and got a lot of undue criticism.

AB: Undue criticism is just a part of what we do. I’m a Christian. I’m a very strong believer, and I don’t resile from that. I don’t resile from my decision of what I did, not to go and sing. But I have a very strong faith, and part of that is having conviction of what I believe and if my convictions are swayed or changed, based on what everybody else does or thinks, then I’m not really following my belief or following my faith. I’m not being honest with who I am, and what I believe in and the God that I serve. To be perfectly honest with you….before I posted that, I
prayed. I really did; I prayed with my sister, I prayed with my husband, and I said I didn’t want to say anything that was going to be hurtful to people. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, that was never my intention, that’s not the kind of person that I am. I was a bit naïve because I didn’t think that anyone would care about what I had to say. It’s Angel; Angel from Los Angeles talking! Who cares? Who cares what I think? You know?

That’s honestly how I felt. And I thought that part of me was a bit naïve, so if there’s something that I regret, it’s that: Angel, no-one’s going to care about what you say. So, I do believe I did the right thing for myself; I understand other people don’t feel that way, and that’s OK.

Also and no-one knows this but I’ve been invited back to Verona every year. They actually invited me this year to sing “Aida,” and unfortunately, I wasn’t able to because of a scheduling conflict.

So, the most important thing for me, I think….I don’t use the ‘R’ word anymore; R-A-C-I-S-T…I try not to use that word, and I try not to use the ‘B’ word either! The ‘B’ word that ends with the word ‘Face’! Because now I recognize that those are strong words and everyone feels the way they feel about those words, but for me, I do believe I did the right thing for me. As long as I can look at myself, in the face every day and know that I held on to my beliefs.

I do want to make sure and clear that I definitely wasn’t saying that people have to have a certain skin color in order to sing a role. I think that’s wildly inaccurate for opera. One of the things I stopped doing was, I stopped reading things on the internet.

There’s a great verse in the Bible, Philippians 4:8: “Think on these things, whatever things are true, whatever things are pure.” We can’t always
be, “Hey, every day is a great day…..let’s just be happy every day”… No. It’s not saying that. It’s saying we’re in charge of what we think. And when I saw people arguing with each other. Being very mean online to one another. Very mean to each other, .being very mean to Miss (Grace) Bumbry, god bless her memory and her legacy…very rude. And I didn’t like that. That didn’t make ME feel good. And instead of engaging, I thought, well let’s do what you do best, Angel. Go home, be Adam’s wife, be a stepmom, clean up your house, take care of your dogs, and sing opera. It was hard to see that something I said encouraged such unkindness in people and that was really rough, for me. It was hard because I love people. Because I can’t love God if I don’t love people, even people who disagreed and said hurtful things to/about me.

OW: You’re coming back to London soon, to sing in the ‘Last Night of the Proms’. Are you looking forward to that, and what will you be singing?

AB: Oh, I’m thrilled! I’m so thrilled, I was thinking about it this morning. I’m going to sing “O mio babbino caro.” I haven’t decided on my second aria. I was hoping to sing something from “Il Trovatore” but the arias are a bit long so I’m thinking it will probably be “Vissi d’ arte” and “Las Carceleras” which is a Zarzuela piece. And then, Sir Stephen Hough arranged two spirituals for us to perform together. “He’s got the whole
world in his hands” and then it goes into “Swing low, sweet chariot.” So, it’s just a beautiful arrangement and I can’t believe I get to work with him. It’s very special.

OW: And then, you’re going to be singing in a modern opera, “Ainadamar” by Golijov, at the Met? Hugely different from anything you’ve sung before, I would suggest. What attracted you to this role, and how are you preparing for it?

AB: Well, I was asked by the MET if I was interested in learning it. I ordered the score as soon as they asked, and I started listening to it. MY connection to it was, that I was a young artist in Spain when I was 26 years old. So for me, I felt very connected to the music. I usually, feel connected to anything that has a Spanish influence. I’ve always had this music in my heart. When I saw the opera online, I found a recording with Dawn Upshaw and Kelley O’Connor….I believe that’s the only recording of “Ainadamar”……and I fell in love with the music. I just did. The story….is very difficult to understand….about the Spanish revolution in 1936….and so I’ve been researching it, and reading about the story of Federico Lorca, and it’s an amazing story. It’s of course, very sad but the opera is very beautiful, it’s wonderfully written.

OW: What would you like to sing in the future? What do you aspire to sing or perform?

AB: It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking about that, probably for about a year. What DO I want to do next?

OW: Wagner perhaps? Definitely an acquired taste!

AB: I’m happy with where I am right now. I like where I am. I like where I am right now, in singing. And I don’t know exactly what I should do next or what IS next. I DO know that I’m scheduling myself a lot less to sing.

I’m not sure that most people really know my background and how long I’ve been singing professionally. In October, I’ll celebrate my 17th year singing professionally in opera. I have only been in the limelight for about five or six years, since “Porgy and Bess” at the MET. However, I’ve been going for a very long time. I started voice lessons when I was six years old and did my first singing competition when I was 10 years old. And I went to an arts high school. My high school was two hours away from home. So, I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go to school, to study opera, you know, and the commute was long. My parents were dedicated to it. I was dedicated to it. I was very disciplined, very consistent. I have constantly been going and going and going and going. I do think there is something very special about stopping and just taking a moment to gather oneself and realize just how much I’ve accomplished and what I’ve done. So, when you ask the question what’s next? the answer is I just want to make sure that I take the time to appreciate and be grateful for everything that has happened.