The Pasadena Vocal Competition presents the Courtney B. Vance Chevalier Award to a singer whose performance includes an aria from an opera written by a composer from the Black diaspora. The award recognizes artistic excellence while affirming the importance of repertoire shaped by a broader range of histories and lived experience than opera has traditionally presented.

Opera has always been built to carry human experience. Its emotional language endures: love, loss, loyalty, joy, betrayal, longing. These feelings do not belong to one culture or one era. They persist because they are shared. What keeps things exciting over time is not the substance of the plot lines, but different lives and perspectives that are allowed to give them voice.

When the same emotional narratives are told through a limited range of voices, the art form can begin to feel settled... not because it has lost relevance. Opera, like any audience-driven endeavor, grows when more voices are invited in. Community widens, interest deepens, and the art form gains strength through wider participation. The stories do not change; our understanding of them does.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, exemplifies this widened plane. A composer, conductor, and violinist of exceptional ability, his career unfolded at the center of European musical life. His work was substantial; music enduring without pushing a marketing narrative, yet remaining available long enough to be heard again in an era that needs it.

History does not surface everything it contains on its own. Recognition needs intention, attention and moreover? Effort. In the status quo, absence is often mistaken for mediocrity, when it is more accurately the result of meritocracy. The long push of a glistening trickle of water against a blocked passage eventually finds its way through.

The Chevalier Award reflects this understanding in practice. It does not seek to replace tradition or revise history, but to allow the field to hold more of what it has always been capable of carrying.

What looks minimal is often what holds the most. A newly paved parking lot can appear stark in its minimalism. Flat and open, it is easy to mistake it for emptiness, when in fact it is built for countless stories to take place on its cleared monolithic slab.

And still, there are moments no parking system fully plans for. Pressure builds. A fissure forms. A green stalk and leaf breaks through the prescribed order, quietly and without permission.

The Chevalier Award honors the artists who make that emergence possible — and in doing so, allow opera’s enduring truths to be heard again with greater clarity and room for many more stories.