Raising Her Voice: LGBTQ advocate heads to Boston

Boston Spirit
January 2025

Renowned mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton finished 2024 in full-circle fashion when she sang Baba the Turk in Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” for Opéra National de Paris at Palais Garnier — the world’s best-known opera house immortalized by its famously crashing chandelier in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Barton grew up in rural Georgia where her ever-present musical influences ranged from the Grateful Dead to bluegrass to the classical program she heard late at night over the NPR radio station from Chattanooga. In high school “a good friend, who’s still a good friend, set me down the path of falling in love with the performing arts. It was the mid-to-late ’90s, so ‘Phantom of the Opera’ was very popular, and while it’s not an opera, it’s about an operatic place and has operatic characters,” says Barton over Zoom from Paris. Say what you will about Lloyd Webber’s ubiquitous show, Barton points out, but “he got the word ‘opera’ into people’s minds, and thank you to him for getting that music into my ears because it was one of those things that got me here.”

Right now, “here” is a pretty good place for the openly queer Barton, whose lauded pipes and infectious personality have vaulted her to international stages. Barton says it’s a joke in the opera world that mezzo-sopranos get to play the “witches, bitches, whores and britches” — or, it could be said, the queer characters.

“It’s a fascinating history with this genre,” she says, noting that for many years women were not allowed on opera stages which gave rise to the castrati — male singers who were castrated before puberty to keep their high voices. “It’s better to castrate than to allow women on stage? Honestly, I am so happy I get to embody women who are not the patriarchal femme ideal. Poor sopranos have to die most of the time. … I love how absolutely queer this art form is and has been from the beginning. The queer community has shepherded this forward, from artists to administrators to audiences, we come honestly by those roots and I’m proud of that,” she says.

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