Mattiwilda Dobbs: Trail-blazing African-American opera singer
1925-2015
MATTI WILDA Dobbs, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the first black singers to appear at Britain’s annual Glyndebourne Opera Festival and the first to appear at La Scala, Milan, where she made her operatic debut as Elvira in Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers in 1953.
Her voice was bright, sweet and flexible, and she was renowned for bringing the stage to life with her presence and seductive singing.
After she performed to packed houses as the Queen of Shemakhan in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel at Covent Garden in 1954, one reviewer spoke of her “dazzling brilliance” adding that she “poured out fluent coloratura and dramatic enchantment”.
In 1956, she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, where Marian Anderson had famously broken the colour barrier the previous year and Leontyne Price would soon follow.
Yet because she refused to sing before a segregated audience, she was not heard professionally in her home town of Atlanta until 1962.
Her professional career had begun in Europe when she won first prize in the Geneva Competition in Switzerland in 1951 despite spraining her ankle on the cobbled streets the night before and appearing on stage on crutches.
After starring with the Royal Dutch Opera in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol at the Holland Festival in 1952, she made a recital debut at the Wigmore Hall in January 1953, after which one critic noted approvingly that “her voice, a soprano leggiero, is tender, almost feathery, in quality”.
Dobbs was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 11 1925. She was the fifth of six daughters of John Wesley Dobbs, a railway clerk who, because the public library did not lend books to African-Americans, borrowed books from libraries on his route for his daughters. After retiring in 1935, he founded the Atlanta Civic League and the Atlanta Negro Voters League. He banned his girls from going to segregated theatres because it was “no pleasure to go in the back door”.
From the age of seven all the sisters were required to take piano lessons for at least 10 years. Mattiwilda was so keen on vocal music that their mother often had to call: “All right Mattiwilda, stop that singing and practise your piano.”
Her first solo recital had been in church at the age of six, but she was so nervous that she never stopped leaning on the piano for support — a habit that lasted throughout her school and college years.
She wanted to be a fashion designer and studied home economics at Spelman College, but, encouraged by her teachers, she continued her music and her father agreed to fund her vocal studies privately with Lotte Leonard in New York.
She also completed a master’s degree in Spanish at Columbia University. A scholarship took her to Paris to study with Pierre Bernac. At first she concentrated on learning the recital repertoire, explaining years later that in those days “there weren’t too many opportunities for black singers in opera”.
She sang Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne in 1953.
Her US debut came in 1955 in San Francisco as the Queen of Shemakhan, and soon she was the first African-American to be offered a long-term contract at the Met, serving as a member of the company for nine years.
During the ’60s she appeared at a number of European festivals, yet her international career was relatively short-lived as heavier voices such as those of Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland came into fashion. Meanwhile, she settled in Sweden with her second husband, appearing at Drottningholm Opera from time to time.
In 1974, she sang He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands at the inauguration gala for Maynard Jackson, her nephew, as the first African-American mayor of Atlanta. Soon afterwards she retired and took up a position at the University of Texas in Austin, becoming professor of voice at Howard University in Washington, DC.
Martin Luther King snr, a friend of her parents, tried to arrange for Dobbs to marry his son because he believed that King jnr’s choice of Coretta Scott was “beneath” the family.
Instead, in 1953 she married Luis Rodriguez, a Spanish playwright and journalist, but he died 14 months later from a liver condition; ever the professional, she sang a Royal Command performance at Covent Garden the night before his funeral. In 1957, she married, secondly, Bengt Janzon, public relations director for the Royal Opera in Stockholm, who died in 1997. — ©