Jessye Norman

Jessye Mae Norman was born on the fifteenth of September 1945 at Augusta, Georgia, the third of five children of Silas Norman — a vendor of life insurance and the choir director of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church of Augusta — and Janie Norman, a public-school teacher and the church organist. She was raised in the Black middle-class Augusta of the closing years of the segregated American South.

She was placed at three at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church junior choir under her father’s direction and at sixteen took the bachelor’s scholarship at the Howard University School of Music at Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of the Howard contralto Carolyn Grant. She completed the Bachelor of Music at Howard cum laude in 1967.

She took the Master of Music at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1968 under Pierre Bernac — the same teacher who had supervised Mattiwilda Dobbs (placed in this archive) at Paris in 1950–1953 — and won in 1968 the International ARD Music Competition at Munich.

She gave her European operatic debut at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on the seventh of December 1969 in the title role of Wagner’s Tannhäuser — the role for which Grace Bumbry (placed in this archive) had broken the Bayreuth colour bar eight years earlier. She sang at the Deutsche Oper as a principal dramatic soprano from 1969 to 1975.

She gave her La Scala debut on the third of February 1972 in the title role of Verdi’s Aïda and her Royal Opera House Covent Garden debut on the second of October 1973 in the title role of Cherubini’s Médée.

She made her Metropolitan Opera debut on the twenty-sixth of September 1983 — at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s centennial season — in the title role of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, opposite Plácido Domingo as Énée and Tatiana Troyanos as Didon, under the direction of James Levine. She sang at the Met across the following twenty-three seasons in eleven principal roles.

She sang the Marseillaise at the Place de la Concorde at Paris on the fourteenth of July 1989 — the bicentennial of the Storming of the Bastille — to an audience of over a million.

She was the principal recitalist of the American Lieder-and-spiritual concert tradition of the 1980s and the 1990s and gave over a hundred and twenty concerts at the Carnegie Hall alone across the active career.

She was awarded the 1997 Kennedy Center Honors, the 2009 National Medal of Arts, and five Grammy Awards across the recording career.

She died at New York on the thirtieth of September 2019 of complications of septic shock and multi-organ failure, at seventy-four.

She is honored here as the principal dramatic soprano of the late twentieth century.