@Duchess64
A Chinese bass (who has sung at the Met) said that he was explicitly told by a
a major opera company in Europe that he had the right voice for a part, but
he would not be hired because a non-white could not play a white character.
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That is correct, Libtard Duchess64.
**your** liberal people keep telling us that such a disrespectful action is "culture appropriation" - and you certainly would not allow this, would you?
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The post that was quoted here has been removedOpera may claim to be 'colour-blind' in its casting, but that's traditionally been used only to justify casting white stars as non-white characters.
That may "traditionally" have been the case, but genuine colour-blind casting seems more and more a reality in the UK. In 2014, it was still a bit of a surprise when the Birmingham Opera production of Khovanshchina (an opera about ethnically Russian characters) cast black singers in all the three bass roles. But in the last few years, the casting of non-white singers in major roles has become more and more common. While sometimes they are cast as characters of corresponding ethnicity (e.g., the black American soprano Latonia Moore as Ethiopian princess Aida at ENO), the majority of recent examples that I have experienced do not fall into this category.
At Britain's most prestigious stage, the Royal Opera House in London, I have seen a Korean singer, Yonghoon Lee, perform the starring role of Turiddu, a Sicilian, in Cavalleria Rusticana. Lee is scheduled to sing Caravadossi in Tosca when the ROH re-opens in January. On the same stage, I have heard Jamaican bass Willard White sing Klingsor in Parsifal and Gorjancikov in From the House of the Dead (White, in fact, has been singing ethnically diverse roles since the 1970s, including Boris Godunov, Messaien's St Francois, and Claggart in Britten's Billy Budd).
At London's other major opera house, the Coliseum (ENO), in Lucia Miller, the title role was sung by black British soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn, while Korean tenor, David Junghoon Kim, sang the male lead. I had also heard Kim sing the Duke in Rigoletto in the touring Welsh National Opera production a few months earlier, opposite another Korean, Haegee Lee, as Gilda. The most recent English Touring Opera Marriage of Figaro had a black Countess (Nadine Benjamin) and Susanna (Rachel Redmond) singing opposite a Figaro of South Asian heritage (Ross Ramgobin).
In the recent Scottish Opera production of Nixon in China, Nixon was sung by a black baritone, Eric Greene - quite a radical example of colour-blind casting, since the physical appearance of the real Nixon is so familar. The Chinese characters were played by a mixture of white and East Asian singers; another Korean, Hye-Youn Lee, was Madame Mao.