At 33, Ms. Yende has become one of the most accomplished and charismatic coloratura sopranos of her generation. Last season at the Met she appeared in three productions; her recent Met appearance as Adina in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” will be broadcast nationally on PBS on April 29.
She will be the soloist in the Met Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on June 5, singing Mozart’s “Exsultate, jubilate” and the solo in the finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Next season she stars in “La Fille du Régiment” and “Les Pêcheurs de Perles.”
But when Ms. Yende was growing up in a Zulu-speaking home in South Africa, the daughter of a businessman and a primary schoolteacher, she was aware of few role models for a black girl who wanted to be an opera singer. As human beings, she explained, we are inspired by the “pictures” of life we see.
“I guess at the time I hadn’t seen so many on the world stage like me,” she said. Singers like Leontyne Price and Kathleen Battle had by then paved the way for black artists, but while growing up, Ms. Yende was essentially unaware of their existence in what seemed to her an almost all-white field.
As a teenager, Ms. Yende dreaded her name. “I didn’t feel I was pretty at all,” she said. But she came around. Her name is “delicate,” she said, with “so many subtleties” — suggestive of “wish and will,” sentiments that still guide her.
She showed up for “Lucia” at the Met this month with clear ideas about the opera and the inner strength of the character, a role closely associated with great divas like Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland.
Ms. Yende’s success hasn’t pushed aside her questions concerning race and opera. For sure, she said, classical music institutions, music schools and universities have much work to do to recruit young artists who have been historically excluded from the art form. On the positive side, though, Ms. Yende said that both opera companies and audiences have mostly embraced colorblind casting.
“I think we are experiencing a big change,” she said. “The world might
not see it. But the operatic world is really breaking this wall, and we
have to thank the opera houses and casting directors.”
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