09/21/2026
Earlier this week, Andrew Potter, one of American opera’s well known basses, a voice type that is among the most difficult to develop in our field, wrote a heartbreaking piece about why he is leaving opera at the peak of his vocal develpment, age 43.
He bravely put into words what we in the field have been living and breathing and witnessing and talking about for decades. We know, Andrew, we know. But it didn’t make any difference to those doing the gatekeeping. They felt they knew better what the industry needed and they weren’t listening. Well, here we are.
Thank you for saying it out loud and thank you for saying it so beautifully for the love for opera. Maybe, just maybe, we can finally have a productive conversation about this.
“American opera has been shedding itself for 20 years. Companies in New York, Boston, Baltimore, San Antonio, Cleveland, and beyond have folded***. Mainstage performances across the country have fallen by a fifth in two decades, with the steepest losses at the largest houses – the very houses that employ the most singers. The industry’s response, again and again, has been to balance its books on the people with the least power in the room: the artists.
We are told this is the price of a calling. I no longer believe that. A calling is not a discount. Devotion is not collateral. The chorister, the comprimario, the young artist making apprentice wages below the legal minimum, the principal funding her own housing – we did not fail opera. Opera has been failing us, politely, for 40 years, and calling it tradition.
Here is what makes this letter hard to write: I loved it. All of it.
I found deep purpose in this work – real purpose, the kind you can feel in your chest. Standing in the dark before an entrance, hearing an orchestra breathe, and knowing that for the next three hours my whole job was to bring love and light to a few thousand strangers in the dark. To make a room full of people feel something together. There is no cynicism that survives contact with that. Opera gave me that gift for sixteen years, and I will die grateful for it.”
Andrew W. Potter
I am 43-years-old.
