Hello, I'm Kesti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My car's the way this week is an opera singer. In a difficult childhood in Jamaica, he learned to escape through singing.

His rich talent took him to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he wrestled with French, Italian, and the cold weather to emerge on the stage of the city opera.

Nearly 25 years ago, he came to Britain, and it was here at the English Scottish and Welsh National Opera and at Covent Garden that he established his reputation as a leading bass baritone.

He's played many famous roles, but his porgy in the Glignborne production of porgy and bass stands out as possibly his greatest performance.

Singing, he says, is about reaching peace. It does something for my soul. He is Willard White.

I don't know if you object to my saying porgy was possibly your greatest performance, Willard, but I remember a critic at the time saying it was as if you were born to the role. Do you have a sort of sense of ownership about it?

No, I have no sense of ownership about it at all. It's something that I enjoyed doing, and it was an exploration that I found very pleasurable, very painful in many areas, but it was good.

Why painful? Because I know there were stories of you actually weeping off stage at certain points during it.

Yes, I broke down crying one day in rehearsals, because the emotion was so great, and it touches parts that most other situations in your life don't allow you to touch.

It's because it's a wonderful story, isn't it, about this terribly decent, but desperately crippled man who lives in a tenement in South Carolina who falls in love with the local beauty, and she messes him about something rotten.

How did you play it, because Gershwin, of course, wrote that porgy should be pulled around on a goat cart, didn't he?

He did, and when I did it at Glangbourne, the question between myself and Trevor Nunn, well, Trevor Nunn proposed the question, I felt it before, and he said, how do we do this? Do we want him on his knees?

And I said, well, my knees are not the greatest knees in the world, and I've heard of many injuries suffered by porgy's on their knees, and he says, great.

I don't want him on his knees because it kills the drama, I think it inhibits the drama anyway. I said, okay, we'll find a way to do it.

So I spoke with a proper department, and we devised, I suggested two sticks, one shorter than the other, to give a sort of twisted feature, and it was very acceptable.

But did you, you know, call on your experience at all, you know, your childhood and Jamaica and so on, did you feel something for the part, something from inside you?

Oh yes, absolutely. One particular experience that I had was watching a man when I used to go to the market with my mother, state mother, in Kingston.

There was a man who used to get around on roller skates, it's all he had on a small piece of board, and he was so badly deformed, he sat on this little device that he had put together, and propelled himself through the streets, and he had a very strong set of eyes.

And if you had some money to give him, he'd be very grateful and he'd smile. But never like he was begging or inadequate in any way, and in this interpretation of Porgy, there it came flooding back.

Another great black dramatic role is, of course, a fellow, which you couldn't play in operatic terms, because Freddy's a fellow is a tenor.

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