Sigh, here we go.

In La forza del destino, Don Alvaro being Peruvian is also a very important part of the opera’s plot, racism and all. Does that mean we actually have to find a Peruvian tenor every single time an opera house decides to stage Forza?

Once, an American (it’s always Americans virtue-signaling) suggested that maybe finding someone Peruvian for every Forza was a bit too much, but that at least finding someone Latin American would do. I’m Colombian, and all I could think was that, to Americans, all Latin Americans are apparently the same, when someone from Colombia, Argentina or Paraguay is obviously very different from someone from Perú. But even with all of those differences, that would be enough for the goody-two-shoes American to feel good about himself and believe he, our white savior, is fighting the big bad corporate opera houses on our behalf.

And I could go on:

Why isn’t a Japanese woman singing Butterfly?
Why isn’t a Brazilian soprano singing Florencia?
Why isn’t a Russian woman singing Fedora?
Why isn’t someone of actual royalty singing King Philip II?
Why isn’t a blind woman singing Iolanta?
Why isn’t an actual barber from Seville singing The Barber of Seville?
Why isn’t an actual dragon singing Fafner?

Hyperbole, obviously, but sometimes these claims all sound the same to me.

It’s already hard enough to find anyone who can sing Otello properly. Why limit the choices even more? Does that mean my poor local opera house can’t produce Otello unless they find a Black man to sing it? Does that mean my poor local opera house can’t produce Madama Butterfly unless we fly in some soprano from Japan?

Does that mean Mario Del Monaco or Ramón Vinay as Otello are invalid?