Issue #1,092 Today In Black History, Wednesday, October 28, 2026
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On Sunday, November 1, 2026, at 2:30 p.m., the curtain rises at the Detroit Opera House on Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, the production that opens Detroit Opera’s 55th season. A South African soprano will sing the title role for the first time in her career. A New Orleans bass-baritone will play the villain. And the story they tell, about a police state that tortures, lies, and kills to hold power, has rarely felt so current.
A Role With a History
Black singers have been bringing Floria Tosca to life for a long time. On January 23, 1955, Leontyne Price sang the role on NBC Opera Theatre, becoming the first Black American to sing opera on television. Several Southern NBC affiliates refused to air the broadcast. She recorded Tosca with conductor Herbert von Karajan in 1962 and made the role one of her signatures.
Seventy years later, the soprano stepping into Tosca’s shoes in Detroit also has a link to Karajan. In 2024, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha received the Herbert von Karajan Prize.
The Voice From Limpopo
Rangwanasha was born in 1993 in Limpopo province, South Africa. She began singing at school and in church. She studied vocal performance at Tshwane University of Technology and the University of Cape Town, then sang with Cape Town Opera’s young artist program. Her roles there included the Mother of Mandela in the Mandela Trilogy and Serena in Porgy and Bess.
She then trained in the Jette Parker Young Artist Program at London’s Royal Opera House and won the Song Prize at the 2021 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition. In 2022, she sang the soprano solo in Verdi’s Requiem on the First Night of the BBC Proms. Since then, she has appeared at Washington National Opera, Hamburg State Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera. Sunday’s performance is both her Detroit debut and her first time singing Tosca, three days before her 33rd birthday.
Familiar Faces, New Stakes
Detroit audiences already know her co-stars. Tenor Nathan Granner, who plays the painter Mario Cavaradossi, was Korey Wise in Detroit Opera’s 2025 production of Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five. That role made him the voice of a young Black man wrongly imprisoned by a system that had decided his guilt in advance. Now he plays another man the state imprisons and tortures for the people he chose to protect.
Bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who sang Amonasro in Detroit Opera’s 2022 Aida, returns as Baron Scarpia, the chief of police. A New Orleans native and Dillard University graduate, Walker trained in the Metropolitan Opera’s young artist program and has sung at the Met, La Scala, and Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Why This Tosca, Why Now
Director Louisa Proske first staged this production in 2025 for the Glimmerglass Festival’s 50th anniversary. She moved the opera out of 1800 Rome and into a world of encroaching authoritarianism. Scarpia rules from a cinder-block military bunker, Blackshirts fill the stage, and political opponents simply disappear. At Glimmerglass, this staging displayed quotes from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny on the curtain during intermission. Proske says the production asks one question above all: What should artists do in the face of evil so they don’t collude with it?
Roberto Kalb conducts the Detroit Opera Orchestra, Chorus, and Youth Chorus.
A Double Anniversary
Sunday’s matinee is followed by a gala, emceed by Paula Tutman, which marks two milestones. The company founded by Dr. David DiChiera begins its 55th season. The Detroit Opera House also celebrates 30 years since reopening on April 21, 1996.
Some 70 years after Leontyne Price, Black artists are still singing Puccini’s story of a woman who refuses to bend to a tyrant. In 2026, the story is just as urgent as it was then.
Tickets for all Tosca performances are available here at Detroit Opera.
In 1862, the First Kansas Colored Volunteers put down a force of Rebels at the Battle of Toothman’s Mound in Missouri. This was the first engagement for Black troops in the Civil War.
In 1914, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, originally founded at Howard University in 1911, was incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia.
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