Perspective | Seven years ago, he was working at Chipotle. He just sang opera on the National Mall. (2024)

“Standing here, near the steps where Marian Anderson sang,” he said on Saturday as he got ready to sing Puccini. “This is so special.”

He has no relation to the contralto who famously sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial 85 years ago after she was banned from a concert hall because of her race. But they share talent and grit and a barrier-breaking place in our nation’s fraught history.

At the Saturday concert on the National Mall, Anderson’s velvet baritone unfurled at dusk, and opera aficionados, Italian diplomats, tourists, picnickers, his former public school teachers and his mom watched, gasped and even cried.

“That’s my baby! That’s my baby!” Charlene Anderson shouted, as her son — the youngest of seven children she raised alone after his father was killed in a drive-by shooting — sang Italian opera alongside international stars in front of his hometown crowd.

He was the perfect man for the night, for so many reasons.

The concert was a free, open-air event to bring opera to the masses. No tickets, ties, cute little opera glasses or understanding of the themes of Turandot needed.

“For over 400 years, opera was considered ‘pop’ music and only very recently wrongly perceived as music for the elites,” said Alvise Casellati, the maestro and founder of Opera Italiana is in the Air, which gives free, open concerts in Italy and in Central Park, Miami and D.C. “In its purest form, it is sheer entertainment for everyone.”

And who better to showcase this idea than Anderson, who found opera while he was a student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in D.C.

I wrote about Anderson after someone told me a college student who had to drop out because he couldn’t afford tuition was putting on a free concert in a D.C. church on a June night seven years ago. I should check him out, he’s pretty good, the guy said.

I popped in and saw a small audience watching a string-bean kid in a tuxedo.

But even my untrained ear told me I had walked into something phenomenal, a two-hour tour-de-force solo ranging from “Come raggio di sol” in Italian to “Nacht und Träume” in German to a bouncy, bawdy Gershwin tune.

“That? What you heard up there tonight? It’s hard to believe that’s coming from an 18-year-old. You have to understand, this is really, really rare,” Michael Crabill, a man who has taught in Austria and accompanied Anderson on piano during the concert that night, told me.

We wrote about him and the music world noticed. He showed off his talent and hard work in auditions and received offers from Julliard, Oberlin, Hopkins.

He chose Oberlin, and then went on to the University of Maryland, where he just graduated with a master’s degree in voice studies.

This summer, he’s got a gig with Opera in the Ozarks. Yes, singing opera in Arkansas, stepping outside the box again.

“It’s just so beautiful there,” he told me. “And the people are so nice.”

He flew back to D.C. for the weekend, to finally sing in his hometown. The concert series started off with a show in the atrium of Children’s National Hospital because Casellati also likes to promote the therapeutic properties of music, and opera in particular.

When Anderson and tenor Antonio Poli sang a piece from “Madama Butterfly,” a child waiting for a blood draw stopped, listened and ran toward the music.

Then soprano Ewa Plonka hit soaring notes in an aria from “Tosca.”

“Oh. I like that,” said Madison White, who is 7 and happened to be at the hospital to have her eyes examined. We started talking about the music. She likes “Hamilton,” and it reminded her a little of it. Turns out she was there with her dad, D.C. Councilmember Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large). Madison said the music calmed her.

“It made me feel better about maybe getting glasses,” she said, riveted, watching, listening.

At the National Mall the next day, after the show, Anderson had a hard time leaving because so many people wanted to shake his hand or get a selfie.

“We’ve heard about him,” said a couple of women who took photos with him and admitted they’re now fangirls.

His mom stepped back after being a little jostled by the crowd. Though she raised seven kids in D.C., this was her first time at the Lincoln Memorial.

“He got me here. And he got me on a plane for the first time,” she said, reminding me of the trip she took to see him sing at a gala in Fort Worth. “I’m so proud. So proud.”

This was all new to Anderson, 25. And thrilling.

“One person actually came up to me and was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve never heard this, this style of music before,’” Anderson said.

And sure enough, I heard something similar from a young boy after he took a photograph with Anderson.

“I’ve never heard anything like it,” said Israel Roberts, 8, whose mom brought him to the show because her son loves to sing. “It made me think I can do this when I grow up.”

That is exactly what Anderson wants to hear.

Because he doesn’t see himself blending into a rarefied world of old music and elite audiences. He wants to be part of the vanguard of opera’s next iteration, the modern, more inclusive works that go beyond old stories from Europe.

“They’re coming from stories of different cultures, like Hispanic culture and Black culture,” he said. “I’m standing on that precipice, and I’m hoping that even though I’m the future, that the future doesn’t end with me.”