"Ah, la maledizione!" sings Quinn Kelsey. The curse!
Rigoletto, the hunchback, kneels over his teenage daughter, Gilda, dead in his arms, a victim of adolescent love, a nobleman's whim and a father's resentment. The Hawaiian baritone is the picture of mourning, suffering a parent's worst imaginable fate: outliving a child. There are loud sobs among the audience. These last notes from Giuseppe Verdi have not been sung with more purity or pain at the Metropolitan Opera of New York this century. The crowd is trying very hard not to shed tears, and mostly failing. "You know she's not really dead, right?" chuckles a man in the row ahead of me, waving a Kleenex over his shoulder in my direction.
But in that moment, Oahu native Quinn Kelsey, 47, is keening for his little girl, and nothing can bring her back as long as the curtain is up—and the thunderous applause and rounds of standing bravissimos threaten to keep the curtains aloft all night. This Rigoletto has taken the opera world by typhoon, and however long Kelsey can sustain those final, agonized cries could never be long enough for this score, this house or this writer. He's that good.
"Opera lovers should relish Kelsey's capacious, shadowed, echoey tone because—unlike so many artists, even talented ones—you always can hear instantly that it's him," swooned The New York Times over his "unmissable" Rigoletto.
More remarkable yet, Kelsey is not the only Native Hawaiian receiving ovations at the final bow: Jordan Shanahan from Kailua had his own Met Opera debut as Count Monterone, who bestowed the fateful curse leading to Rigoletto's tragedy. Only days before, the first Native Hawaiian woman to tread the boards at the Met, Tasha Hokuao Koontz, debuted in Ainadamar. Days later, Kelsey's presence, pipes and interpretive chops are out in force again as Baron Scarpia in Tosca, the manipulator who threatens evils only the darkest soul could summon. On New Year's Eve 2024, he opened the Met's first new staging of Aida in almost forty years as King Amonasro.
For a tiny collection of islands thousands of miles from any other landmass, Hawaii is making itself heard. The state is pumping out voices with such power and nuance, it's enough to make music nerds wonder, What's in those North Pacific waters anyway?
Baritone Quinn Kelsey (in red gloves) performs the title role beside fellow Hawaii-born opera singer Jordan Shanahan as Count Monterone in the Metropolitan Opera of New York's 2024 production of Verdi's Rigoletto. PHOTO COURTESY NINA WURTZEL / MET OPERA
Backstage in the lounge suite at the Met, Kelsey, in a black felt fedora, black coat and turtleneck, does not look like a grand opera divo but rather a long-lost Blues Brother. He's holding a case of Pampers to bring home to his daughter, and when he speaks he is all humility and aloha.
"When you sit down and kind of begin to walk yourself back through the last twenty, twenty-one years, it's crazy," he says, reflecting on the skyward trajectory of his career: Three overlapping principal contracts in one season at the Met place Kelsey firmly in the pantheon of Italian opera's brightest lights. Music is a family business for him; the Kelseys are a kind of Hawaiian version of the Trapp Family Singers. His sister, Blythe, is artistic manager at Hawaii Opera Theatre; their parents met singing a duet with the Hawaiian chorus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His mother was a classically trained soprano and the piano accompanist and choir director at the UH Laboratory School, which both Quinn and Blythe attended.
But the world of vocal performance on Oahu is so tiny that the idea of making a living at it felt foreign to a younger Quinn. "I had no clue about what to do after high school, no clue about how to go about even discussing music school, as weird as that sounds," he says. With UH right across the street from the Laboratory School, he enrolled in the fall of 1996, "thinking, if nothing else, that I would just get a bunch of credits, and then if something better came along, I hadn't wasted any time."
But in the late 1990s, "suddenly my world exploded," Kelsey says. While he was a student at UH, Hawaii Opera Theatre received a large grant from the Arthur and Mae Orvis Foundation to open its own opera studio. "You know, everybody wanted to come to Hawaii in January to March to work with young singers," he says. A master class there led to a Chautauqua summer fellowship in upstate New York, where Kelsey joined singers from schools such as Juilliard and Yale. From there he won admission to young artist development programs at the San Francisco Opera and Lyric Opera Chicago. While Hawaii can seem as far from the opera scene as it's possible to get, "I feel a great sense of responsibility to Hawaii Opera Theatre," Kelsey says, "because I don't know what I would have done otherwise without them."
Costumes for Rigoletto hang backstage at the Met.
Shanahan practices at the keys. "Jordan is always working on music," says Kelsey. "Even when he's already on the job."
Kelsey's sense of kuleana (responsibility) extends to Hawaii performers off-island, too. To celebrate Shanahan's debut, he posted "Two Hawaiians walk into the Met ... finally on stage with @baritoneshanahan. Only took 25 years" to his Instagram. The singers have been friends since they were music performance majors at UH studying with the same voice professor, John Mount.
"Three Hawaiians in the Met! I'm singing in Ainadamar," replied Tasha Hokuao Koontz in the comments. Kelsey immediately invited her for dinner. Kelsey's buddy, chef Kini Kahauolopua, "works at one of the big hotels and really cares about authentic Hawaiian food, so when I realized that Tasha was already here in rehearsals for Ainadamar, all three of them came over to my place for a big pile of Hawaiian food."
Kelsey is quick to honor Hokuao Koontz as the first Native Hawaiian woman to ever sing a role at the Met, then drops the tea that she will be in the world premiere of The Sheltering Tree, set during the Hawaiian monarchy, sung in both Hawaiian and English, which will debut at Hawaii Opera Theatre in spring 2026. "It is so interesting to do that piece given my family history," says Hokuao Koontz, who is the multi-great-granddaughter of one of Queen Liliuokalani's ladies-in-waiting and a manservant to King Kalakaua.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Hokuao Koontz never used her full Hawaiian name, though her mother was a professional hula dancer and she herself had joined Pacific Islander clubs as a kid. When she made the choice to embrace her Indigenous ethnicity as a performer it was, "an effort to ... make myself a fighter," she says. "It hadn't occurred to me to include that part of myself so openly and publicly before, so it was a really very special and beautiful moment to see 'Tasha Hokuao Koontz' printed in the program. I finally feel like my whole self-esteem is presented on stage."
"That's 'local boy' attitude," says Kelsey of this photo with Shanahan. "We may be doing something devious, or we may be just hanging out. I love that."
Shanahan's wig for his role as Count Monterone, the moral center of director Bartlett Sher's production of Rigoletto, set in Germamy's Weimar Republic.
Opera, like most modern storytelling, can stumble on the rocks of representation—whose stories get told and who gets to tell them. Where Hollywood tells mostly white stories for a diverse international audience, opera delivers international narratives to an overwhelmingly white (and old and rich) crowd. Opera's benchmark tales span the globe from China and Japan, to Egypt and Sri Lanka, to Scandinavia and the American South, and when it comes to casting, opera can be one of the most welcoming and diverse modern media, race-blind by necessity for the past hundred years if only from a dearth of skilled performers—opera singers are the Olympians of performing arts. But equitable casting does not make the opera scene as sensitive as one might hope, something Kelsey and Hokuao Koontz both seek to change. (It was only ten years ago that the Met dropped blackface from its Othello.)
So it is far more than a matter of Hawaii pride when Kelsey, too, celebrates his own Native roots; he encourages musicians to embrace identity. "We can trace our family heritage all the way back to two of the main deities in Hawaiian culture: Papa is considered the earth mother, and Wakea the sky father. My mother's maiden name is Papa—I don't think you get much more specific than that."
In this vein, Kelsey has tried to incorporate Hawaiian music into solo performances. "The Hawaiian ballad aligns perfectly with the French, German, Italian or English art song recital framework, I mean to a T," he says. But Hawaiian vernacular music has mostly not been notated. "It's just a few chords on a piece of paper," Kelsey says, and when it's written down in detail, the improvisation, fills and local accents remain a challenge for continental accompanists. "My pianist [was] brilliant—he could bang through it no problem—but it was just ... not how the music was supposed to be played."
As a wild thunderstorm storm rages, the "Act 3 Quartet" sets up the tragic ending, where a furious Rigoletto (Kelsey, at far right) seeks revenge as his daughter, Gilda, played by soprano Nadine Sierra, sobs. Upstairs, the Duke seduces the prostitute, Maddalena, who has been paid to kill him. PHOTO COURTESY NINA WURTZEL / MET OPERA
A great voice isn't enough to break through to operatic superstardom, just as being beautiful is never enough to make an actress a movie star. For an opera singer to rise above other headliners, as Kelsey has, he must not only have a gorgeous voice but physically embody the story without allowing emotions to affect the singing—it wouldn't do, for example, for a singer to actually cry. But Kelsey is an actor, delivering insightful, generation-defining performances with the meatiest roles in the repertoire. So I can't help asking if becoming a dad to a little girl has changed his interpretation of Rigoletto, the mourning father. He says no, crediting his co-stars with making the performance look natural. "The sopranos are always such wonderful actresses," he says of the various singers who've played Gilda to his Rigoletto.
Then he takes a beat and reconsiders: Last season he sang the title role in Simon Boccanegra, a father who had been separated from his baby daughter and then reconnects with her as an adult. "The setup of that initial scene when the two of them meet, that kind of allowed it all to rush in, and I did find myself at one point just really feeling it. And I'm sure that will happen more the older [my daughter] gets, the older I get and the more experience I have being Dad."
Kelsey is married to a mezzo-soprano, Toronto-based Deanna Pauletto, and thinks about passing on a musical patrimony now that they have a family. "It is the one thing I wish I could ask my mom: Did you always have it in your head that you wanted us to be singers? Or was it just that you loved music and singing so much you just wanted us to love it as much as you did?"
After his mother died in 2020, Kelsey understood it was time to write his family history—in the form of a Hawaiian kakau (tattoo) all the way down his leg. As the artist Kawika Au was showing him sketches for the genealogy, he remarked, "We just have to figure out what that last little bit is going to be." Who is Kelsey? How would he be represented at the end of the line? "Prior to Western contact," Kelsey wondered, "who would I have been?"
Soprano Tasha Hokuao Koontz debuted in 2024 as the first Native Hawaiian woman to sing a role at the Met, as a Nina, part of the chorus in the Spanish opera Ainadamar, based on the story of poet-playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca and his muse, Margarita Xirgu. PHOTO COURTESY NINA WURTZEL / MET OPERA
"You would have been the storyteller, the orator," Au said.
"So I am a storyteller," announces Kelsey. "The audience pays their money to be told a story, and you just can't fulfill that with the voice alone."
Now that he has reached the highest pinnacle of musical storytelling, what happens next?
"I want to be in the position to decide when I get to the last day of singing," he says. "I don't think it will happen that my voice or my body will decide for me."
A daughter who will start school one day and a wife with her own singing career will both shape Kelsey's future choices. He's considered academia but says he doesn't have credentials for music education. He muses about maybe returning to Hawaii Opera Theatre to help raise up a roster of more local young performers.
"We will just have to make those plans as that comes along. But for now ..." he stands, looks around backstage, takes it all in. "It's the Big House."
