Willie Anthony Waters, a Frost School of Music alumnus whose storied career included serving as artistic director of the Florida Grand Opera, quietly passed away March 9 at age 74. No cause of death was released, but he had been in failing health after a 2019 stroke and 2020 case of Covid. He spent his final years at a nursing home in South Miami-Dade, near where he was raised.
As one of the first Black opera conductors in America, Waters was a pioneer who became a leading artist in the field. He grew up in hardscrabble circumstances in the Miami-Dade community of Goulds, one of six children of a hairdresser and a packinghouse worker. He resolved to become a classical musician his sophomore year of high school, after first hearing a recording of the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s operatic tragedy “Aida.”
“Something about that just really clicked with me,” Weeks told the Frost School’s Score magazine in 2011. “It was something I’d never really heard before, and I just decided I had to hear more of it. Very simply, it was the voice. I was just captivated by the sound of the human voice; there’s no instrument like it. That’s what resonated.”
Waters had started playing piano with his church choir at age 7, after his grandmother began teaching him the instrument at age 3. His operatic epiphany led Waters to tune in to Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera to hear more. A local patron sponsored piano lessons for Waters throughout his youth, and he dedicated himself to his studies, earning a federally sponsored Upward Bound scholarship to study piano and music education at the University of Miami’s School of Music. After earning his Bachelor of Music in 1973, he went on to graduate school at the University of Memphis.
Waters made his professional conducting debut in 1979 with the Utah Symphony, and worked for the San Francisco Opera in an administrative capacity. Then he came home to Florida in 1986 for a conducting job with the Greater Miami Opera (now the Florida Grand Opera).
The Greater Miami Opera planned for Waters also to become artistic director after five years, but he was successful enough to earn the post in three years. At that time, he was the first Black artist to hold that title for a major opera company anywhere in America.
After nine years in Miami, Waters went on to stints as a conductor and artistic director at the Houston Ebony Opera Guild and Connecticut Opera. During the latter job, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford in 2005. Other honors included the National Opera Association’s Lift Every Voice Legacy Award in 2013, and the 1991 Prix de Martell recognizing champions of classical music.
Throughout his career, Waters also stayed busy as a freelance conductor, leading operas and symphonies around the world. One of his biggest milestones came in South Africa after the fall of apartheid, when Waters conducted that country’s first performance of George Gershwin’s classic “Porgy and Bess” in Cape Town. He also worked with orchestra and opera companies in Europe, Australia, New York, Houston, San Diego, Detroit and Fort Worth. His passing was noted in the leading classical music publications The Violin Channel, Slipped Disc, and OperaWire.
Waters never married, and he was the last of his family’s six siblings to pass.
