White Heat

Willard White is one of the world's great opera singers, and famed for his intimidating presence. But what lies behind the voice like thunder? Interview by Michael White

He laughs like Father Christmas, slow and loud and deep. And as we talk I can't help thinking that if Willard White's career as one of the world's leading opera singers took a nosedive he could always find seasonal work in a department store - except that the laugh would probably traumatise more children than it charmed. The villain in a Christmas panto would be more the thing - which isn't far removed from what he's just about to do at Covent Garden, opening next week in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann.

Hoffmann is a pantomime in most respects beyond the core requirement for the audience to hiss, boo, cheer and sing along. And Willard White is certainly the villain of the piece. In fact, he plays all four villains in this most fantastic of fantasy operas, following a modern practice that tidies its rambling narrative of four successive lost loves into some kind of order by casting all the heroines (the lost loves themselves) as different aspects of a single personality and all the baddies (the men who steal them away) likewise.

When that happens, it makes hard work for whoever bears the burden of so many roles in one evening; and this time round the Garden actually has separate sopranos for the heroines, in acknowledgement of their differing vocal demands. But someone clearly decided that Willard White's capacity for villainry was up to four at a time. And checking out his career, you can see why.

Although he's never appeared in this particular piece before, he has become to opera almost as Christopher Lee is to the cinema: a much-loved Mr Scary. It's the consequence of being big, with a don't-mess-with-me sort of demeanour and disarmingly dark tone of voice.

By comparison, his singing voice is slightly lighter than the speech suggests - a bass-baritone rather than a true bass - but these are fine distinctions. To the average ear it's massive, deep and most appropriately villainous: which is why he travels the world singing roles like Mephistopheles in Damnation of Faust, Nick Shadow in Rake's Progress, Claggart in Billy Budd, Bluebeard in Bluebeard's Castle ... a catalogue of demons, bullies, murderers and tyrants.

When he isn't being downright evil, he turns darkly tragic as the Flying Dutchman, Wotan in The Ring, or Golaud in Pelleas and Melisande: characters that even in their more attractive aspects remain lofty, unapproachable, alone. It's reached the point of typecasting. And you'd have to be dull-witted or innocent not to wonder whether the factor (alongside voice and physique) that propels him into these roles isn't the colour of his skin: a sensitive subject, and one you broach with caution in the face of White's unnerving way of making interviewers feel they've asked him the wrong question.

"What's that got to do with the price of carrots?" he intones in the voice of an old testament prophet when he feels you're trespassing on private ground. Worse still, he answers with an awesomely deliberate "Hmm-hmm" that ricochets around the room and makes you want to hide under the table. It's a cultivated potency, and he's aware of the effect.

"I know my voice, my presence can be scary, and I've made use of that in the past. But I don't set out to intimidate. I simply want to say what I feel and have the satisfaction of saying it with clarity and strength. That's all."

The strength is undeniable, the clarity I'm not so sure about. He tends to talk in sermonising riddles, like a country parson torn between philosophy and self-help. People, I assume, must tell him that?

"What people tell me is I'm full of crap, and that I talk too much. I tell them: then don't ask me questions. The answers may be longer than you want."

It isn't just his answers that get longer. Scrutinise the printed programmes for his more recent appearances and you'll find he's enlarged the name by which he chooses to be known professionally to Willard W White, the middle letter standing for Wentworth. I wondered why, at the age of 57, one of the best-known opera singers in the world was tampering with his own identity?

"I used to hate my name. Willard was bad enough and Wentworth, my middle name, was too much: these were things that isolated me when I was young in Jamaica, and I had more than enough of that just trying to be an opera singer in such circumstances. A black opera singer. Deep inside I wanted to be like everyone else and be called John or David, but now I've come to realise, this is my name. It empowers me, I embrace it, it helps me in the search to speak my truth."

What does he mean by that?

"I mean that there were lies in my life. And the biggest lie was denying what I felt, because I thought what other people felt was more important. Society encourages us in this deception. Hmm-hmm?"

Willard's in his pulpit, and he fixes me with sermonising eyes. I hmm-hmm back, but less impressively. I haven't got the resonance.

It's hard to know if Willard White is being serious or not with all this hmm-ing; but the tenor Robert Tear says it's better to assume he is: "Willard can be impenetrably serious, and he doesn't respond well to jokes. He gives you a look that manages to be quizzical but killing at the same time, and people tend to be terrified - which is a shame, because deep down inside he's rather cuddly. But deep is the word. You have to dig."

Willard himself admits to being shy. It isn't obvious. But as you get to know him it becomes apparent that this massive, powerful, potent (he has seven children scattered round the world, aged 6 to 34) and vocally intimidating man is someone who has spent his life confronting insecurities. About himself, his background, and (surprisingly) his voice.

Born in 1946 into a moderately but not, by Jamaican standards, excessively poor family (his father was a dockworker) he clearly had a tough time and felt a misfit: a common enough experience for gifted working-class children anywhere, although Jamaica added to the problems of what he calls "a most challenging childhood, beset by doubts".

Doubts about what? His singing?

"Doubts about being. About my validity. I did not enjoy an atmosphere of encouragement to do anything - except be a dentist, which is what my father wanted."

Why a dentist?

"I don't know. Everyone has bad teeth, it's an income. But I had this voice. I often wished I hadn't because it earned me nicknames: Grumbler, Thunderer and so on. I was a self-conscious child. It stung. And I remember overhearing people say I was ugly. That stung too: one of the many little things in childhood that stay with you."

He might well have gone for dentistry but for the efforts of a local singing teacher and a passing visit to Jamaica by Lady Barbirolli, wife of the conductor, who heard him and said he should study in London. As things turned out he went instead to New York ("the flight was cheaper") where he won a scholarship to the Juilliard School and took part in Maria Callas's legendary masterclasses but was nonetheless left crushed by feelings of inferiority.

"My fellow students all seemed to be skilled singers polishing their art but I wasn't there for polishing: I didn't even know the basics. f And New York seemed so foreign, so cold, that I remember counting my money to see if I had enough for a flight back to Jamaica. I wanted to leave. It was despair."

In fact he quit the opera course at Juilliard but stayed in the United States where he eventually began to pick up work, from Washington and New York City Operas. But the Metropolitan, the goal of singers in America, seemed closed to him ("they said my voice wasn't big enough") so he was pleased to be talent-spotted by English National Opera in the mid-1970s and brought to London - where he has made his home ever since in the genteel hinterlands of Lewisham. More comfortable, he found, than NYC.

But even here his problems followed him. His London début role was meant to be Sarastro in a 1976 production of The Magic Flute but, in the final week of rehearsals, he withdrew from the production - telling himself, and ENO, that he couldn't do it.

Significantly, the reason he gives for this second, career-threatening failure of nerve is that he felt he hadn't the "nobility" the role required. "Nobility", and "dignity", have always featured high on Willard White's list of objectives, on and off the stage; and he needs no reminding that these are the classic calling-cards of high-achieving black men in a white man's world. If he were slightly younger he could add "respect".

Opera is certainly a white man's world despite the growing number of black singers (mostly women) who succeed in it; and though the casting process focuses on how a singer sounds, not how he looks, there is invariably discrimination. Audiences immune to overweight romantic leads or five-feet-nothing warriors still baulk at brown-skinned Russian princes in Eugene Onegin and at brown-skinned Nordic gods in Rhinegold.

Meanwhile, there are only two specifically black male leads in the standard repertory; and of those, the crippled Porgy in Porgy and Bess is something most black singers find embarrassing (when White agreed to do it for Glyndebourne in 1986 it was "dignity" on sticks, pointedly non-pathetic) while Othello is usually sung by white singers blacked-up and, in any case, a tenor role beyond the vocal reach of a bass-baritone. The nearest Willard White will ever get to the Moor of Venice was in Shakespeare's original, which he acted (as opposed to sang) for a 1989 Trevor Nunn production at the RSC and found alarming "because there was no conductor out there to set the tempo. With music there are fixed parameters. Without music, the sheer freedom is a problem for singers."

That being black can be an even greater problem is a subject on which Willard White has views, although you have to drag them out of him. He starts by saying that it's not an issue: "at least, not for me. My only concern is to do the part as well as I can." But he accepts that it can be an issue for others, and eventually admits that he's spent his whole life dealing with the issue it is for others. Starting with Juilliard.

"It wasn't so much a case of 'What's this black guy doing trying to be an opera singer?' - although there was some of that. It was more 'Here's a black guy trying to be an opera singer', which is subtler.

"I once sang Prince Gremin in a production of Onegin where the Tatyana went to the director during rehearsals and said she couldn't do this because a girl like Tatyana wouldn't marry a black man. The director said: 'Oh, come on.' And she did it. But how that woman suffered trying to play her part with a black husband. It was quite an experience that she allowed herself to suffer so."

More seriously, there were letters of complaint when he sang Wotan in the Scottish Opera Ring Cycle.

"People wrote to explain that because of my non-Nordic background I couldn't possibly deliver the spiritual qualities of this great god so would I please not try."

What did he do?

"I ignored them. What else can you do?"

Ignoring racial slights - with dignity - requires a certain attitude, and a certain way of dealing with the world. Hence the philosophising, the sermons and the various principles by which he rules his life. He says he never consciously "plays white" in any of his white roles. And he never wears white make-up.

"It doesn't work. You should see me trying to look white. Huh! You should see me trying to look black. You should see me trying to look human ..."

And what about looking villainous? The evil black man, the black devil: the kind of stereotype that political correctness was invented to eradicate.

"That's your problem not mine. I'm amused by people like the lady who came up to me recently after I'd sung Mephistopheles in Berlin, most concerned that someone of my colour should be playing the devil. But OK, I see where she's coming from.

"There was a Pelleas in Los Angeles that happened to be taking place at the same time as the O J Simpson trial and where Peter Sellars, the director, had the Melisande look pregnant. He wanted me to kick her in the stomach. I said I couldn't. Then I thought, wait a minute: why not? Could it be that I'm trying to protect my race? This is absurd.

"So I did it. And after the first night there was a reception at which a man came right up to my face and said: 'I don't like you.' I said: 'Well, OK.' And he said: 'I don't like you because tonight you've made me think seriously about things in my life.' Then he walked out and I thought: that's a very good comment. I haven't wasted my time here. I was pleased."

Anything else he shies away from?

"There were times when I avoided Tarquinius in Rape of Lucretia because I didn't like the idea of being a rapist. But Peter Sellars got me through that one with a comment I've never forgotten. He said: 'Go out there, think of your shoe-size, and just do it.'

"This was good advice. I've done it many times since, and it works. I recommend it."

'Les Contes d'Hoffmann' opens at the Royal Opera House, London WC2, on 22 January, and runs to 17 February. For ticket information call 020-7304 4000/www.royaloperahouse.org