Cover: Jessye Norman
Soprano Jessye Norman was an extraordinary singer with an unforgettable presence, beloved and respected by the classical musical world and the black population whom she championed throughout her life. Naomi André looks at her legacy
Naomi André looks at the life and legacy of the pioneering American soprano, who overcame major obstacles in her path to success
Jessye Norman’s singing career alone would be enough to guarantee her a place in the pantheon of great singers – the breadth of her opera roles, her Strauss Four Last Songs, her Wagner Wesendonck Lieder… But she was so much more, including a supporter of young talent and a formidable champion of her fellow black artists. When she died in September 2019, the tributes and obituaries in publications and on websites across the world proved all this in abundance, and two notable celebrations of her life took place – in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia, her death prompted four days of mourning, while a month later, a special, star-studded memorial tribute at New York’s Metropolitan Opera featured sopranos Lise Davidsen and Renée Fleming and bass-baritone Eric Owens, who bade her farewell with a performance from Wagner’s Ring cycle.
NORMAN WAS BORN IN 1945 and grew up in Augusta, Georgia. As a result of redlining, the illegal and discriminatory practice across the US that drew red lines around portions of a map to deny mortgage loans, insurance and other financial services to black families, racially integrated neighbourhoods were almost unheard of before the Civil Rights movement took off in the 1950s. But an under-acknowledged by-product of segregation and the Jim Crow South was that there were many strong networks of black communities.
The Norman family was part of one such community: her father Silas was an insurance manager and served as a deacon in church. Her mother Janie was educated as a middle-school teacher and also participated in church leadership. Both were active in the school Parent Teacher Association. Having the University of Georgia medical school in Augusta was an inspiration for the Norman children. Her brother, Silas Jr, became a physician and Jessye initially planned to study pre-med at Howard University, though she ended up receiving a full scholarship for, and focusing on, vocal performance.
Silas and Janie had high aspirations and expectations for the education of their children. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown vs Board of Education, confronted the fraudulent claim that racial segregation allowed for ‘separate but equal’ educational opportunities. In addition to the core classes the liberal arts, an important part of the educational vision for the Norman family and many other black families in their community, included music. ‘I studied piano from the time I was very young,’ said Jessye in 2012, ‘and all of us were sent out to piano, whether you wanted to or not. The boys in my family had to study piano along with my sister and myself, and cousins and everybody at school went to study piano lessons, and to participate in various sort of musical things at the churches and schools. It was a very normal thing to have music in the house.’
Music, she added, was not unusual in the community growing up, but her family was, perhaps, a little more musical than most with their Christmas tradition. ‘My mother played piano,’ Norman recalled, ‘and one of the things that I talk about all the time is at Christmastime, we do a version – if you can imagine it – of The Messiah’s “Hallelujah Chorus”. Now with my mother playing the piano, and I’m singing all of the parts of the chorus, and one of my brothers is playing the tuba, somebody else is playing the trumpet, and somebody else is playing the trombone, we would simply look at the music and choose a line of it to play. And there we were, sort of doing this thing that really calls for a chorus and an orchestra, not five people in the hallway on the upright piano.’
The contralto Marian Anderson was a part of Norman’s early connection to music. Though Anderson had sung at Paine College in Augusta before Norman was born, it was an important part of the town’s oral history that she had been there – something that made an impression on the young Jessye. In her memoir Stand Up Straight and Sing! she remembers growing up listening to Anderson sing Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody in a recording on a neighbour’s phonograph. In fact, Norman competed in the
Marian Anderson Competition at the very beginning of her career, entering at the youngest qualifying age of 16. Suggested by her choir director from middle school, the competition was open to people up to aged 30. Norman didn’t win, but the support she had behind her was huge. ‘My school principal decided that the school should participate in my going to Philadelphia,’ she recalled. ‘So on one particular day – and this is amazing when I think about it – he said that all of the children in
this big school, instead of spending their money for lunch, should give their money to me so that I would have extra money to go to Philadelphia, and the Board of Education paid for their lunch that day.’ Despite not winning, Norman had what was clearly a life-changing encounter – with Marian Anderson’s sister. ‘“Now you are very young”,’ Norman recalled her saying, ‘“but I want you to come back and sing for us once you’ve actually studied singing, because we’re going to keep an eye on you.”’ As far as Norman was concerned, she had won everything: ‘Marian Anderson’s sister actually spoke to me!’
After completing high school, Jessye Norman benefited from the strong musical and liberal arts education she received at Howard University, a leading HBCU (Historically Black College and University). Organist, vocal coach and pianist Julius Tilghman met her in the autumn of 1963 as students at the university’s School of Music. ‘I was enrolled there the previous year,’ he says. ‘We became friends and she asked me to work with her, after which I then became her principal pianist throughout those years until
1969 when she moved to Europe.’ After Howard University, Norman studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the School of Music at the University of Michigan. At Interlochen and the School of Music at the University of Michigan, Norman had the opportunity to work with Dr Willis Patterson, who also helped launch her in preparation for her next big competition in Munich, Germany.
An early important moment in her career was winning the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 1968, with Tilghman as pianist. It led to a threeyear contract with the Deutsche Oper in Berlin where she carefully chose her repertoire and sang a range of roles that suited her voice as it evolved, rather than conform to the traditional German Fach vocal system. For this reason, she made recital singing a large part of her early career after the Deutsche Oper.
In the 1970s she primarily sang in Europe, and along with the recitals, appeared in a wide range of operas including the title role in Handel’s Deborah, Sélika in Meyerbeer’s L’africaine, Countess Almaviva in Mozart’s Figaro, the title role in Verdi’s Aida and Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (an early favourite, and the role for which she won her first Grammy). When she did focus on opera, particularly after her Met Opera debut in 1983 as Cassandra in Berlioz’s Les Troyens (and she also sang the other female lead, Didon – once both on the same night!), she kept Berlioz and added another
French role, Madame Lidoine from
In Berlin, Norman sang a range of roles that suited her voice as it evolved
Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmélites. Though she perhaps became best known for her Wagner roles (Sieglinde and Kundry) and Strauss, she also broke new ground with her ability to sing canonic repertoire, as well as many works that were considered modern, complicated and unusual, including Jocasta from Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, the Woman from Schoenberg’s Erwartung, Judith from Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Emilia Marty from Janá ek’s The Makropulos Affair.
In addition to performing in recitals and operas, she received many awards (including the Kennedy Center Honours, the National Medal of Arts presented by President Obama and the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP) plus over 30 honorary doctorates and five Grammy Awards, including one for lifetime achievement. She sang for the secondterm inaugurations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and at the 1996 Olympics, and performed the Marseillaise at the bicentenary of the French Revolution and received France’s Légion d’honneur.
As a colleague, Jessye Norman was known as a regal and stately presence, whose work around educating people about the legacy of black opera singers became an important goal later in her life. According to Metropolitan Opera soprano and Manhattan School of Music voice professor Harolyn Blackwell, ‘Jessye never walked onto the stage or into a room. Rather she glided, and her presence made you realise immediately that you were in midst of operatic royalty. The way she would address you or speak to you was always poetic and, like her singing, beautiful and soulful.’ Producer and dramaturg Adina Williams worked over the past few years with Blackwell and Norman on the Sissieretta Jones: Call Her by Her Name! project about the soprano who in 1892 became the first Africanamerican artist to perform at Carnegie Hall. Williams writes about how she invited Norman to a youth choir event at the American Museum of Natural History but didn’t expect her to come… ‘[But] show she did and how gloriously – with all the elegance and regal fire that she always carried. Private car at the top of the driveway. Turban expertly adorned. Skin smooth as silk… Fresh as a daisy and mighty as a lioness.’
In a career that is considered to be elitist and overly white, Norman was in the generation that immediately followed that first group of black singers (that included Marian Anderson, George Shirley, and Leontyne Price) at the Metropolitan Opera. Crossing between theatre, television and opera stages at the same time was Damon Evans, well known as the second actor to portray Lionel Jefferson in the CBS sitcom The Jeffersons. Evans was also Sportin’ Life in several productions of Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess, including the one at Glyndebourne directed by Trevor Nunn and conducted by Simon Rattle. Evans speaks openly about the complications surrounding blackness and race that he and Norman faced in the last few decades of the 20th century. He remembers in the 1980s, as he was pursuing a classical career, being advised never to speak openly about any racism he might encounter in the industry, warnings that came from both black and white people.
But Norman, he adds, refused to follow the rules, recalling an interview she gave at the time in which she said, ‘I look at symphony orchestras around this country and I want those orchestras to look more like the demographic they’re meant to serve. I would like to see more African Americans on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera here in New York. There are certainly some, but not nearly enough, and I come across so many singers who are terribly gifted and that would be an asset to these opera companies around our country.’
‘Norman had the courage to speak about the lack of diversity in the classical music industry at about the same time that the industry was realising that it was losing its key audience,’ says
‘I want orchestras to look more like the demographic they serve’
High notes and high praise
Jessye Norman’s life in brief
1945: Jessye Norman is born in Augusta, Georgia. Her father, Silas, sings in a local choir and her mother, Janie, is an accomplished pianist.
1962: Returning home from the
Marian Anderson Vocal Competition in Philadelphia she auditions for, and earns, a place at Howard University in Washington DC.
1972: A successful early career in Germany leads to her landing the title role in Verdi’s Aida at La Scala, Milan. The same year also sees her first appearance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, among other high-profile engagements in Europe.
1983: She flies behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany to record Strauss’s Four Last Songs with the Leipzig Gewandhaus and conductor Kurt Masur. The disc soon becomes a best seller.
1997: Twelve years after singing at the second presidential inauguration of Ronald Reagan, she does likewise for Bill Clinton (above), having also sung at the opening of the Olympic Games in Atlanta the previous year.
2009: She curates Honor!, a multiarts celebration of African-american trailblazers, in several venues across New York City.
2019: She dies aged 74 in Manhattan as a result of complications from a spinal cord injury suffered in 2015.
Evans. ‘Had the industry taken notice of what she was saying, they would have realised that their audience would have increased exponentially had they only included more racially diverse artists on their classical music stages and platforms. I remember going to the Carnegie Hall recitals of Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett and José Carreras. There were tons of black and brown people in the audience. People who would not have normally set foot in a classical music concert hall came out en masse to support these great artists. Why has it taken them so long to realise that they can only benefit in the long run if they are just fair to us?’
As a way of increasing black music concerts across Europe and the US, and to ensure that these performances included idiomatic and appropriate representation, Norman returned to her early supporters when she was at a point in her career to boldly shape concert programming.
She called on Dr Willis Patterson (from her university days) when she needed a specialist in black classical art song and spirituals. Patterson recounts the time when Norman was asked by the BBC to take part in a televised concert of negro spirituals. ‘She didn’t want the choir to be televised with a European conductor (not of colour), so she asked me to come and serve in that capacity. It was a very successful concert and led to Philips asking her to do the recording – which enjoyed even greater success.’
Jessye Norman changed classical music forever. But beneath her international stardom, she never forgot the importance of the strong black community that nurtured and sustained her from her childhood into her early career. That support is impossible to overstate. Her parents, neighbours and schoolteachers from elementary through high school recognised and supported her musical talents. Even after the world celebrated the unique elements about her talents and accomplishments, Norman retained her connections to black people – particularly her family and other black musical artists.
One year after her death, she remains a critical presence in the black community through the Jessye Norman School of the Arts (a free after-school programme to nurture students’ artistic and creative talents) and the educational mission she began that honours Sissieretta Jones. George Shirley was one of the first black tenors to sing professionally in opera houses around the world and in 2015 was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Obama. ‘It is no exaggeration to describe Jessye as a prodigious force of nature,’ he says. ‘For me, her crowning aura was that genuine majesty of spirit shared by other iconic figures like Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes that, combined with miraculous vocal and artistic endowments, placed Jessye Norman in that panoply of souls never forgotten.’
15 September 2020 would have been Jessye Norman’s 75th birthday, and 30 September marked the one-year anniversary of her passing. This incredible force of nature will forever be missed.