A Baritone Digs Deep

Will Liverman steps into the opera world’s most visible spot— the Met’s opening-night lead—in Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

- By Justin Davidson

A YEAR AGO, with concert halls and opera houses shut and most professional singers reduced to performing for their pets, baritone Will Liverman received a life-changing phone call. The Metropolitan Opera planned to reopen with Terence Blanchard’s 2019 adaptation of Charles Blow’s memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Live auditions were out of the question. Could Liverman record the opening aria?

“The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears,” Blow writes, and the opera, like his book, is a tough tale of sexual abuse, poverty, racism, and violent threats during his upbringing in Louisiana. Liverman turned to the aria and read the line “Prepare to die, motherfucker.” “I thought, What am I getting myself into?” he recalls. “A few days later, we signed the contract.”

Behind the scenes, he had been all but cast already: He was the only baritone asked to audition for the role. “We’d felt he was the right singer and had discussed it with Terence,” says the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb. “The audition tape he sent us was a confirmation of what we already knew.” Until that moment, Liverman was a promising young baritone with a knack for classic comedic roles like Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He’d performed with regional companies, had a couple of secondary roles at the Met (plus a stint as Papageno), and drawn the attention of some talent-sniffers. This casting propels him into a rarefied club, singing the lead in a new work on opening night at the Met. And not just any opening night: This would be a new production, a Met premiere, and the company’s first work by a Black composer.