Opera singer Denyce Graves is ready to ‘turn the page’ with new foundation that champions overlooked musical voices

One night early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Baltimore County-based opera singer Denyce Graves had a conversation with a student that left her badly shaken.

“She was really very angry with me,” Graves recalled recently from her office at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, where she is a distinguished faculty artist.

“She told me, ‘You encouraged me to enter this profession, and it’s so hard and so narrow and it cost me so much money to get a degree. And now what is it all worth?’

“I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I thought, ‘What have I done? I’ve got to find a way to help my students.’ ”

Her initial response was “Cooking with Denyce,” a YouTube show that ran for two years and that combined culinary skills (Graves is an accomplished chef) with guest appearances by her students and other performers, and straight talk about the opera industry. At its peak, Graves said, the show had an audience of 250,000.

An April 2021 episode highlighted another student singing in front of the crumbling edifice of what once was the National Opera House in Pittsburgh and the home of Mary Cardwell Dawson, founder of the groundbreaking National Negro Opera Company.

“As I was stirring the soup, we started talking about all these great musical figures of color who contributed to our cultural fabric and who we don’t know anything about,” the opera singer said.

And just like that, the Denyce Graves Foundation was created. Its mission? To champion overlooked musical voices of the past while uplifting the vocal stars of tomorrow, with a focus on talented opera singers from nontraditional backgrounds.

Earlier this month, the foundation announced the appointment of arts educator Terry Eberhardt as the philanthropy’s first executive director. He will be in charge of running the day-to-day operations of the organization with a $1 million annual budget.

“This is an easy mission to want to be a part of,” Eberhardt, 47, of Ellicott City said. “As a person of faith, I have to believe in what I do. The foundation does important, powerful work and there is a lot more that needs to be done.”

For those who don’t know Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” from Vybz Kartel’s “Car Man,” Graves rose to international fame in the mid-1990s. She was acclaimed for her gleaming mezzo-soprano voice, and in particular for her performances as the titular Spanish siren in Bizet’s opera, and as the seductress Dalila in Camille Saint Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila,” based on the Biblical story of the legendary Israelite warrior.

Graves is still glamorous, and though she still occasionally performs, she is 60 now and her days on the stage are numbered. It is time, she said, “to begin transitioning into a different part of my life.”

She and her husband, the transplant surgeon Robert Montgomery, live on a farm near Monkton with llamas and horses and a vegetable garden that Graves mined for produce for her cooking show. Between them, the couple have four children.

“I did something that moved me, and I did it at the highest level,” Graves said. “I have no regrets. That makes it easier to turn the page to begin my next chapter.”

Among the perks of a long international performing career is a contact list that includes such influential folk as former first lady Laura Bush, who in 2022 donated $800,000 at Graves’ request to renovate Dawson’s former home in Pittsburgh.

When the Graves Foundation’s ambitious “Shared Voices” kicked off at Howard University in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris, a university alum, sent greetings.

If Graves is magnetic on the stage, in person she is friendly and nurturing and unpretentious.

During the 2019 production of “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera, Graves and the performer Reginald Smith, Jr., spent part of each performance talking about cooking as they waited for the second act curtain to rise. One day, Smith brought in a dish he had prepared for Graves. The following day, she returned the favor.

One thing lead to another, and soon, Graves was preparing dinner every day for the entire cast and crew. Then, “Porgy and Bess” was a hit and the run was extended. But Graves couldn’t stop.

“It got to be a thing,” she said. “As soon as I came through the door, the security guard would say, ‘Miss Graves, what have you made for us today?'”

Her studio at the Peabody is decorated with portraits of her students (“my sweet little kids” she calls them). Elaborate decorative crystals hang from the ceiling, symbolizing tomorrow’s stars. Soon, Graves will run out of ceiling space.

No matter; she is always on the hunt for more luminaries.

The Graves Foundation has three initiatives aimed at elevating past and future operatic superheroes:

“Shared Voices” is an exchange program that pairs talented students, teachers and administrators from musical conservatories with their counterparts at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Students and faculty from Howard University, Fisk University, Morgan State University, and Morehouse College study together and work on projects with faculty and students from Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Peabody.

“Hidden Voices” aims to bring to light what Graves describes as “stories about great trailblazers and pioneers we don’t know anything about,” figures such as Chevalier de Saint-George a biracial violinist, composer and conductor who was a contemporary of Mozart’s, the 19th century soprano Sissieretta Jones and Dawson.

“She was the first lady of opera,” Graves said. “Her company had chapters all over the East Coast that gave opportunities to over 1,600 singers. But we don’t learn about her in the conservatories. The Black dailies covered these hidden figures, but mainstream media mostly did not. We want to bring them and their work into rightful prominence.”

Graves said the Foundation has uncovered 136 seminal artists so far, and is beginning to publicize their stories on calendars, notecards and new works of art — including a musical play by Sandra Seaton and Carlos Simon called “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson.”

Graves played the title role when the musical premiered in 2021 at New York’s Glimmerglass Festival.

The foundation’s third program, “Generational Voices” matches an up-and-coming opera singer with a mentor, an industry legend who provides advise on everything from role selection to the financial aspects of singing for the stage.

“In classical music, no one looks out for the career of the singer,” Graves said.

“Students get out of the conservatory and they are excited and they want to perform and they have student loans to pay back. Someone offers them a role and they say yes whether it’s right for them or not. That’s how careers die before they can begin.”

During the pandemic, Graves and her staff ran the foundation themselves. But as the pandemic abated and schedules gradually returned to normal, the board realized they needed a senior manager to oversee the staff and programs. They hired Eberhardt, a Peabody graduate and the longtime music coordinator for the Howard County Public Schools.

“We have been supported by very generous foundations,” Eberhardt said, “but we haven’t really gone after public dollars and grants. We need to develop a strategic plan to identify how we can sustain the foundation’s mission forever.”

They’re already seeing some early success — including that of Graves’ furious and heartbroken former student.

Perhaps the young woman was inspired by Dawson’s story of triumph over formidable odds, or was warmed by Graves’ soup recipe. Or maybe the pandemic ended just in the nick of time.

But something clicked.

Though she couldn’t have known it in 2020, the young woman would get her chance to perform on one of the world’s great stages.

“She’s singing right now in the chorus of the Met,” Graves said.