Grace Bumbry

Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on the fourth of January 1937 at Saint Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three children of Benjamin James Bumbry — a railway freight handler at the Cotton Belt Railroad of the Saint Louis terminal — and Melzia Walker Bumbry, a teacher of the Saint Louis public schools and the soprano soloist of the Union Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church.

She was placed at six at the Union Memorial Methodist Church junior choir under her mother’s direction and at fourteen at the Saint Louis Sumner High School Choir under the same Charles McCain who had taught Ruby Elzy (placed in this archive) at Ohio State twenty-five years earlier.

She won the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts television audition of the seventeenth of February 1954 — the same audition Shirley Verrett (placed in this archive) would win eighteen months later — and used the prize money to enroll at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1955.

She was admitted in 1956 to the studio of Lotte Lehmann at the Music Academy of the West at Santa Barbara — the principal post-war American Lieder-and-opera summer programme — and remained at Lehmann’s studio for three years through 1958. She gave her Paris Opéra debut on the third of February 1960 in the role of Amneris in Verdi’s Aïda — the first Black mezzo-soprano at the Paris Opéra.

She was engaged in 1961 by Wieland Wagner — the grandson of Richard Wagner and the principal director of the Bayreuth Festival of the period — for the role of Venus in his new production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Festspielhaus. The Bayreuth premiere of the twenty-third of July 1961 was the first appearance of a Black singer at the Festival in its eighty-five-year history — the appointment drew protests from a faction of German nationalist commentators and the protective intervention of Wieland Wagner himself.

She made her Metropolitan Opera debut on the seventh of October 1965 in the role of Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo, and sang at the Met across the following twenty-two seasons in fifteen principal roles in both the mezzo-soprano and the dramatic-soprano repertoire.

She was the first Black singer to perform the title role of Bizet’s Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera, on the eleventh of November 1967.

She was awarded the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors and lived from the 1970s at Salzburg, Austria.

She died at Vienna on the seventh of May 2023 of complications of a stroke, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as the first Black singer at Bayreuth.