ArtsWatch

Mentioned only vestigially in the many fine obituaries of Beverly Sills last week was the soprano’s Jewishness. But listening to Sills (nee Belle Silverman) on the walk to work today I recalled that the two Jewish classical-music figures who had enough of a mass-media presence to be discussed in my non-classical household when I was a child were Sills and Itzhak Perlman.
You just can’t overestimate the message it sent to a consciousness in the formative stage to hear authority figures speaking with awe about one of their own breaking through the goyishe ceiling.
It meant nothing less than the world opening up, quite specifically, to you.
To translate that concept into 2007 terms, I’m eager for the arrival of an analogous African-American figure in the instrumental realm. Yes, pianist André Watts is big to anyone who has been to an orchestra concert in the past three decades. But he’s never headed an arts institution, appeared as guest host on The Tonight Show or had his own talk show on network TV. Sills was opera for millions of people - many of whom had never actually been.
Today’s media world is more finely segmented than ever, so it’s hard to imagine any classical figure breaking through to household-name status (unless Paris Hilton has been secretly taking bassoon lessons). But think of the power the first Tiger Woods of classical music will have in becoming a beacon to millions of African American children.