Although Paul Robeson possessed a rich, smooth bass-baritone voice, he did not appear in opera not only because of the racial barrier firmly in place at the time, but because he was not incilned to sing opera. He was a splendid actor and often performed Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, but when the Metropolitan produced Louis Gruenberg’s operatic setting in 1933, the assignment automatically went to Lawrence Tibbett. Robeson did sing excerpts from the opera in 1940 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy, and eight years before had sung chunks of Boris Godunov in concert. Peter G. Davies comments in The American Opera Singer
But it was too soon to ask for more, and all an approving critic like Olin Downes could do was lament that such “an exceptional endowment as a singer and dramatic interpreter” would never be heard and seen as Boris, Méphistophélès, or the Emperor Jones. Perhaps it could never have happend anyway, since Robeson’s priorities lay elsewhere. “I am essentially a folk song singer,” he once said when asked why he seldom strayed from the repertory of spirituals in which he specialized. “I am not especially at home with Brahms or Schumann.” Posterity will always most closely identify this resonant voice with “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat, a song that Jerome Kern wrote specifically with Robeson’s rolling tones and expressive intensity in mind.An interesting side note: Paul Robeson was in the distinquished line of singers descended from the great Spanish tenor Manuel Garcia and his children, Maria Malibran, Pauline Viardot and the most celebrated singing teacher of the nineteenth century, Manuel Garcia (the younger), who also introduced Italian Opera to New York. Vocal descendants of this family of singers include Jenny Lind, Julius Stockhausen and Matilde Marchesi who in turn cultivated the voices of Charles Kullman, Risë Stevens, Mack Harrell, Nellie Melba, and of course, Paul Robeson.