Jessye Norman: Larger-than-life diva 1945-2019
● Jessye Norman, who has died aged 74, ranked at the pinnacle of the operatic pantheon as an authentic dramatic soprano superstar, combining a sumptuous sound with a majestic stage presence.
Hailed as a “once-in-a-generation singer”, she had a huge voice that could fill the grandest of auditoriums with breathtaking ease, losing nothing in beauty of tone or passion of performance.
“The immensity of her voice struck like a thunderbolt,” noted one dazzled critic. “It was like an eruption of primal power.”
She became a sublime interpreter of most of the operatic and German lieder repertory from Purcell on, but especially of Wagner, Mahler and Richard Strauss. Norman also embraced the contemporary and American repertoire, singing pop by the French composer Michel Legrand, sacred music by Duke Ellington, scored for jazz combo, string quartet and piano, as well as the traditional spirituals and gospel songs she had learnt as a girl growing up in the Deep South.
By the 1970s she had become a fully fledged and larger-than-life diva, who in 1981 inspired the character of the opera singer in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s debut film Diva. She sang at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and millions worldwide watched her on television in March 2002 when she sang America the Beautiful at a memorial service at the site of the former World Trade Center in New York for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks the year before.
As one of the world’s great divas, Norman was acclaimed for a “voice as near perfection as one could hope for”. She could command an opera stage like no other and few in the audience did not leave feeling emotionally moved.
The daughter of an insurance broker, Jessye Mae Norman was born on September 15 1945 in Augusta, Georgia. Both parents were musical, her father a singer at the Baptist church, her mother (a secretary for the Democratic Party) an amateur pianist.
It was while scrubbing the kitchen floor to the accompaniment of radio broadcasts from the New York Met on Saturday afternoons that Norman became hooked on opera. She won a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, graduating in 1967 with a music degree.
Although by then the last legal barriers impeding black artists in the US had been dismantled, she still made her early career in Europe, winning the Munich International Music Competition in 1968, and making her operatic debut at the Berlin State
Opera the following year as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.
In 1970 a studio performance at the BBC in London brought her to the attention of Colin Davis, then chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who invited her to sing Countess Almaviva in his recording of The Marriage of Figaro. In 1972 she made her debut at La Scala, Milan, in Verdi’s Aida.
In spite of such a precocious start, Norman did not perform on an American operatic stage until 1982, when she sang Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Philadelphia, and only at the Metropolitan Opera in New York when she sang Cassandra there in Berlioz’s Les Troyens in 1983.
By then she was acknowledged as one of the great exponents of her art, with a voice described as “one of the wonders of the world” and a majestic bearing that shimmered in the beam of the personal spotlight on which she always insisted.
Among the many events at which she performed, Norman sang at the 1985 and 1997 US presidential inaugurations, the Queen’s 60th birthday in London in 1986, and in 1989 at the bicentennial of the French Revolution celebrated by a pageant in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, at which she sang La Marseillaise.
In 1997 she received the US’s highest award in the performing arts, the Kennedy Center Honour: she was the youngest recipient in its 20-year history. In 1989 she was appointed to France’s Légion d’honneur.
In 2006 she was awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement. She was a life member of the Girl Scouts of America and a board member of several charities. In 2015 she suffered a spinal cord injury that confined her to a wheelchair for the past few years. She was unmarried and is survived by two of her siblings.
The immensity of her voice struck like a thunderbolt