A recent guest on Amplify , the celebrated countertenor John Holiday , told us that his dream of a singing career was sparked when, as a young choirboy, he met star mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves . “She was so beautiful and elegant," Holiday writes for Opera America . “And then she opened her mouth and this amazing sound came out.
I thought, ‘Whatever it is she’s doing, I want to do that.’” Holiday isn’t the only one who’s fallen under the spell of Denyce Graves. She’s thrilled audiences everywhere, from the world’s great opera houses to the White House.
She’s won a Grammy, an Emmy, and a shelf-full of other prestigious musical honors. Hers is the kind of A-list career that might shuttle you from airport to stage door to gala reception, cocooning you from the realities and priorities of the everyday world. But Denyce has kept it real.
From the beginning of her own career, she’s worked tirelessly as a teacher, mentor and cultural ambassador, active within a long list of institutions, from the Ellington School of the Arts in her native Washington, D.C., to the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists program.
She loves her students with a fierce “mama bear” energy. She listens to them, cooks for them, worries about them, believes in them and learns from them. It was from one of her students that she first heard about Mary Cardwell Dawson, the trailblazing Black opera singer who founded the National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh in 1941, fostering the career.
