Jessye Norman’s magnificent voice smashed racial barriers

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/06/jessye-norman-magnficent-voice-smashed-racial-barriers

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When the US soprano Jessye Norman appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1981, her first choice was Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, with the great African American contralto Marian Anderson. Norman was 10 years old when she first heard that recording. “I listened, thinking, ‘But this can’t just be a voice! A voice doesn’t sound this rich and beautiful,’” she told the music critic Matthew Gurewitsch. Many felt the same about Norman, who died last week. Sumptuous. Voluptuous. Shimmering. Majestic. The descriptions of her voice inevitably embody a sense of awe.

Born in 1945, in Augusta, Georgia, Norman grew up in the Jim Crow south. The racial barriers in 1960s America meant that her operatic breakthrough necessarily came on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1968, she won the Munich International music competition. The following year, she made her operatic debut at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper as Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Through the 1970s, she sang in most of Europe’s great opera houses, from La Scala to the Royal Opera House. Her US debut, however, was not until 1982 and her debut at New York’s Met not until the following year.

Her repertoire ranged from Purcell to John Cage. But her voice seemed particularly crafted for German romanticism. Her version of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is one of the great recordings of modern times.

Norman always acknowledged the trailblazing work of African American opera signers before her, such as Anderson and Leontyne Price. “They have made it possible for me to say, ‘I will sing French opera’,” she observed, “or, ‘I will sing German opera’, instead of being told, ‘You will sing Porgy and Bess’.”

I love Porgy and Bess. But to be able to listen to Norman singing Strauss is to be transported somewhere quite transcendent.