Ronald Samm
Photo: Jack Liebeck

Any singer who takes the title role in Verdi’s Otello is facing one of the most challenging endurance tests in opera. Verdi never wrote a more punishing part for a tenor than in his masterful Shakespeare adaptation of 1887. But there is even more resting on the shoulders of the tenor singing the part in Birmingham Opera Company’s new production than the immense musical challenge. Ronald Samm, a Trinidadian educated at St Mary’s College, Port-of-Spain, who now lives in England, is the first black singer to perform the part in a UK production. It’s an extraordinarily belated first, yet it’s also one that Samm is trying not to focus on. “There are all sorts of expectations,” he admits, “but in some way I have to get that out of my head. Because the role is hard enough, you know?”

Yet Samm isn’t shirking the responsibilities that BOC’s production has brought to his door. “In this cosmopolitan society that we live in—particularly in Birmingham—you walk down the street and you see so many races. It’s important that the opera company reflects the racial diaspora here. As a black man, it’s important for me to see on stage all types of people reflected back.” In this Otello, that quest for diversity has assumed an even more significant edge. BOC has also cast a black Iago in the British singer Keel Watson. Three other principal roles are being fielded by black singers. Is this open-minded casting, or is it sending out a more provocative message?

Can white men play the Moor?
The answer, according to BOC’s artistic director Graham Vick, is a bit of both. Vick has never hidden his passionate desire to make his opera company more representative of the communities it serves. His radical yet populist productions for BOC are site-specific: he set Beethoven’s Fidelio in a tent next to Aston Villa stadium, put Don Giovanni in a disused municipal bank, and did Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses in a derelict ice rink. And Vick has always cast a far higher proportion of black singers than you will ever see on the stages of the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera or Opera North, as well as fielding an amateur chorus from local communities to support each production.

Stephanie Corley as Desdemona and Ronald Samm as the Moor of Venice in Giuseppe Verdi’s classic opera, Otello.
Birmingham opera company

In Otello, however, race was at the forefront of his mind for the first time. “Yes, it’s a piece about race, and about many many other things,” he says. “But the reason I’m very rarely moved by Otello in the opera house and only excited and stirred by it is because I never feel that racial tension. And that’s not a criticism of anybody—God knows there’ve been few more wonderful performances than Plácido Domingo doing Otello, but that’s not the story of a black man and a white woman. It’s the story of a white man playing his idea of a noble black man, and it simply doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t speak.” Vick last worked with Samm when he sang Siegmund in his production of Die Walküre in Lisbon. At his audition he sang the death scene from Otello “amazing beautifully”; the idea for BOC’s Otello began there.

But with this multicultural casting Vick has also opened up a dialogue about a subject too rarely aired—opera’s own attitude to race. As the Times theatre critic Benedict Nightingale notes, the role of Shakespeare’s Othello has for years been the preserve of black actors. As Samm’s belated debut demonstrates, opera houses have hardly rushed to to follow suit. Yet attitudes to an Otello production have changed decisively in the UK, even in the past five years. In 2005 there were two separate storms about the dubious practice of “blacking up” on the opera stage.

At Glyndebourne David Rendall reprised his Otello (he had first blacked up for the part in 2001, with no complaints) to widely publicised disapproval from the chairman of the Brighton Black History Project. The company responded: “There are only five or six people worldwide who can perform that role—and none of them is black.” But that is no longer the case. Samm has stared down his demons to get as far as singing his first Otello. He admits that he has frequently considered quitting the industry because of its obstacles. “But you realise—hold on, if I think like this then what happens to little Peter or little Johnny who wants to do this 20 years from now? They’d be able to say there was a black tenor who did sing this in 2009. You just have to keep on going, not let it affect you, and try to be as true to your art as you can.” He grins. “And enjoy it.”

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Ronald Samm was born in Port-of-Spain, the younger son of two teachers. Early musical training began at St Mary’s College where he was a regular prizewinner in the islandwide biennial Music Festival. He studied voice and piano with Noelle Barker and Ian Kennedy at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and won a scholarship from the Peter Moores/Lord Pitt Foundation to pursue post-graduate study with Nicholas Powell at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.