 as Pinkerton in Puccini's Madame Butterfly or Alfredo in Verdi's La Traviata, George Shirley made up as white and alternated with white tenors, just as Lawrence Tibbett might have alternated with Jules Bledsoe in Another World. In the 1960s, when George Shirley was singing Mozart at the Met, board members of the Houston Grand Opera rejected the possibility of casting him as a black Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute.