Anne Brown

Anne Wiggins Brown was born on the ninth of August 1912 at Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Harry F. Brown — a physician and one of the principal Black physicians of Baltimore — and Mary Wiggins Brown, a homemaker of Russian-Jewish-Cherokee-African American descent.

She was placed at six at the Baltimore Peabody Preparatory Music School but was refused enrollment at the senior Peabody Conservatory of Music on the colour bar of the institution. She was placed instead at the Catholic Morgan State College at Baltimore for her preparatory secondary education.

She was admitted in 1929 at sixteen to the Juilliard School at New York — the first Black voice student admitted to the institution — and completed the diploma in 1932 under Lucia Dunham. She took further graduate study at Juilliard from 1932 to 1935.

She wrote on her own initiative in October 1933 to George Gershwin at the New York Steinway Hall studios, requesting an audition for the new opera Gershwin was reported to be composing on the DuBose Heyward play Porgy. She auditioned for Gershwin in the early winter of 1933 and was cast in the role of Bess in March 1934.

Porgy and Bess premiered at the Colonial Theatre at Boston on the thirtieth of September 1935 and at the Alvin Theatre, New York on the tenth of October 1935. Brown was at the time of premiere twenty-three. She sang the role of Bess in the original Broadway run, the 1936 national tour, the 1937 Carnegie Hall concert version, and the 1942 Cheryl Crawford revival.

She moved to Oslo, Norway in 1948 — having married the Norwegian Olympic ski jumper Thorleif Schjelderup in 1948 — and lived there for the remaining sixty-one years of her life.

She sang at the Det Norske Teatret of Oslo and at the Royal Swedish Opera at Stockholm across the following twenty years — among the principal soprano roles of the Norwegian and Swedish opera houses of the 1950s and 1960s — and recorded the title role of Bizet’s Carmen for the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company in 1953.

She taught voice at the State Music Conservatory of Oslo from 1965 to 1985 and was knighted by King Olav V of Norway with the Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav, First Class, in 1981.

She died at Oslo on the thirteenth of March 2009 of complications of stroke, at ninety-six.

She is honored here as the original Bess.