Dorothy Maynor, legendary soprano who took the opera world by storm
In a brief decade, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot wrote in 1940, a hometown girl with a soaring soprano voice had risen “from obscurity to national eminence.”
They were talking about Dorothy Maynor, a Black singer who by her early 20s was performing before audiences around the world.
Maynor was born in Norfolk in 1910, the daughter of a pastor at St. John’s Methodist Church, where she sang in the choir. She went to Hampton Institute — what would later become Hampton University — to study home economics but quickly switched over to earn a degree in music.
She also joined the prestigious Hampton Choir, joining them on a tour of Europe in 1929. After Hampton, she got a scholarship to study choir direction at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey.
Upon hearing her sing at the 1939 Berkshire Symphonic Festival in Massachusetts, according to the New York Times, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky reportedly jumped up and down, shouting: “It is a miracle! It is a musical revelation! The world must hear her!”
She made her solo debut a few months later at Manhattan’s Town Hall, to a sold-out crowd.
Maynor went on to have an illustrious career as a concert singer, including performing at the presidential inauguration galas of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
“Her voice has been widely acclaimed for its emotional intensity, communicative power and accuracy of intonation,” the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot wrote in 1942. “Norfolk alone can claim Dorothy Maynor famous, but perhaps it would be too much to say that it gave her generous sustenance in the days of her unknown endeavor.”
In 1963, Maynor retired with her husband, a pastor at a Harlem church, and founded the Harlem School of the Arts. It offered classes in the arts to poor children at little cost. She taught at the school and served as its director until 1979. She also became the first Black member of the Metropolitan Opera Board.
“What I dream of is changing the image held by the children,” Maynor said, according to the Times. “We’ve made them believe everything beautiful is outside the community. We would like them to make beauty in our community.”
Maynor died in early 1996 in Pennsylvania. Six years later, she was one of the first entertainers inducted into Norfolk’s Legends of Music Walk of Fame.