Few people would have expected Russell Thomas to become a leading man in opera. Nobody in his family listens to opera, and even now that he has become a singer, they don’t often go see his performances.
“It’s not for everybody,” he says. “But the times when my family has come to the opera, they were extremely moved by it. … They gave it a chance.”
It was this chance that transformed Thomas’s own life when, as a young child, he turned on the radio one day and heard opera for the first time.
The boy found it strange—he had never heard the human voice used in this way before, and in an unfamiliar language, but he was intrigued. From then on young Thomas listened to opera every day, trying to decipher its structure.
At 12 years old, his grandmother took him to see his first staged opera. It was love at first sight—the lights, the drama, the music captured his heart, and the boy told his grandmother that day he was going to be an opera singer.
“It changed my life. It made a little poor black kid from Florida realize that there was something more than football, basketball, R&B, hip hop—there was something more,” said Thomas who has performed at some of the world’s leading opera houses in the past two decades, including New York’s MET and the Royal Opera in London.
