How did mezzo soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen become the new artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera? Strangely enough, the typecasting of Asian American singers and the pandemic shutdown both helped open that door for her.
Nelsen (CFA’01,’03) has sung the role of Suzuki in Madama Butterfly roughly 200 times, far more than any other role she’s sung. Too often, she says, it’s the only opera where Asian-American singers get cast in prominent roles. In 2020, she was set to play Suzuki once again, with the Boston Lyric Opera (BLO), but the pandemic postponed the production. At the time, Asian communities in the United States faced prejudice over the origins of COVID; six women of Asian descent were murdered in Atlanta in 2021.
During that long timeout of Zoom meetings and cultural reckonings, with most other live performances canceled, Nelsen founded the Asian Opera Alliance to push for changes, including a wider variety of roles for singers of Asian heritage.
Nelsen says Bradley Vernatter, the BLO’s Stanford Calderwood General Director and CEO, lent a willing ear on that and other topics, and that year she accepted a new role offstage, as an artistic advisor to the company.
“We talked a lot about what true diversity actually is on a stage and what that looks like—what shows we’re bringing into our stages, how we’re casting them,” she says. “Then…bringing in those same Asian artists that we brought in for Madama Butterfly to do non-Asian repertoire as well.”
Nelsen sang the role of Mamma Lucia in the BLO’s first post-pandemic production, 2021’s Cavalleria Rusticana. But perhaps more important, she participated in the “Butterfly Process,” the company’s in-depth yearlong examination of Madama Butterfly’s problems and potential, prior to fall 2023’s rescheduled production. Productions of Puccini’s opera have been problematic in their depiction of Japanese people and culture and the…
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