White men in the arts living in fear they are too 'pale, male and stale to succeed', says leading opera singer

White men in the arts are living in fear that they are too “pale, male and stale to succeed”, according to a leading opera singer.

Danielle de Niese, a soprano who is campaigning to raise the profile of “forgotten” female composers, said that such was the momentum behind the drive for equality across society that men were petrified their careers would be ruined as women and ethnic minorities come to the fore.

De Niese said she had heard “even wonderful, esteemed” colleagues and friends worry that they “might not get a chance at a job because ‘I’m pale, male and stale’”.

The singer added: “I had a conversation with an American artist who said: ‘If I was more ethnic I’d definitely be working more’. I was taken aback. They didn’t mean it to be judgmental at all. But it’s a natural thing for people to feel frightened that their opportunities will be taken away to afford opportunities for others.

“I guess it really does depend on which side of the shore you are standing. For those people who may have always had access to opportunity, the idea that those slots may not automatically be theirs any more would, I guess, make them rather anxious.”

De Niese will this week host a BBC Four programme about the “unsung heroines” of the classical music world, entitled The Lost World of Female Composers.

Focusing on five women – Hildegard von Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Clara Schumann, Florence Price and Elizabeth Maconchy – it will aim to show how women’s work has been overshadowed by their better-known male contemporaries.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, de Niese moved to Los Angeles when she was 10. At 19, she was the youngest singer ever to be accepted on to the young artists programme at the Metropolitan Opera.

Discussing her white male contemporaries, she said she believed the culture of fear was doing “funny things”.

“It makes people insecure. If they think there’s one piece of pie and they’ve always had it up until now, then they think ‘hang on a minute, now we’ve got to share it? Oh God!’ ”

To those who “fear they will now have to fight for a seat at the table”, she said: “These are the people who never had even a chair to begin with. All we’re saying is, let’s add a seat for them. Not can you get up and someone else can take your seat: let’s add a chair for them.”

Speaking at the Royal Opera House, where she is performing the role of Musetta in La Bohème, de Niese said the television production, which has been in development since 2016, had “suddenly become extremely timely” in the wake of the Time’s Up and #MeToo campaigns, and the “stories that have come to light regarding society’s leaning towards male-dominated decision making”.

Nevertheless, she said: “I have gone to lengths to stress that this isn’t a show about blaming men, it really isn’t. All of the greats are male.

"When I think about that, I don’t think how unfair is it that they’re all male: they’re all wonderful, they all just happen to be male.

"I don’t think it’s right to penalise those wonderful males who triumphed, but lived in a time when society allowed them to triumph and gave them a platform.

“The great shame is not that we can name Schubert, Beethoven, Bach, but we will never know whether there was another one like that who happened to be female because there was not a place in society that allowed a woman to flourish in that way.

"For me, that’s the sadness. If you don’t have those stories going down through the generations, it’s like you’ve got a door and there’s no key. In fact there’s no keyhole even.

“And I really want to see a show like this being shared for all the future daughters of the world and say: ‘Look, you can do it, darling’.”

The BBC has recently launched a campaign to record the works of “lost” female composers, while playing them in public for the first time since they were created, often centuries ago.

De Niese, who has a three-year-old son and is married to Gus Christie, the chairman of Glyndebourne, said she had not experienced personal discrimination as a result of her gender, saying it was “never presented to me as a child that this was a thing that could hold me back”.

Asked whether she thought major British arts institutions should bring in measures such as quotas to boost the number of works by women, she said: “The desire to set forward a pledge to include women is extremely wonderful, valiant and the right thing to do.”

But she added that she was unsure how it could be done fairly in practice.

Unsung Heroines: Danielle de Niese on The Lost World of Female Composers is on BBC Four on Friday at 8pm.