Lillian Evanti

Annie Lillian Evans was born on the twelfth of August 1890 at Washington, D.C., the daughter of Wilson Bruce Evans — a high-school principal and the first Black member of the District of Columbia Board of Education — and Anne Brooks Evans, a public-school teacher and the niece of the abolitionist John Brown. She was raised in the Black professional Washington of the Reconstruction period in the household at 1334 V Street, Northwest.

She was placed at six at the Howard University Conservatory of Music at the Howard preparatory programme, and at sixteen at the Howard University proper, completing the bachelor’s in music in 1917 — among the first Black women to take a Bachelor of Music at Howard.

She took further private study under the soprano Estelle Liebling at Manhattan in 1919 and at the Paris studio of the Hungarian baritone Maurice de Mauret from 1921 to 1924.

She was hired in February 1925 by the Casino Theatre at Nice for the role of Lakmé in the Léo Delibes opera of the same name, premiering on the twentieth of February 1925 — the first Black American to sing professionally with a European opera company. The Casino engagement was followed by engagements at the Pavillon Royal at Marseille, the Théâtre des Variétés at Toulon, and the Opéra de Marseille across the spring of 1925.

She sang at the Salle Gaveau at Paris on the twelfth of November 1925 the European premiere recital of the H. T. Burleigh (placed in this archive) concert-spiritual settings — to a Parisian audience that included the French composers Charles Koechlin and Henri Duparc.

She was received by President Calvin Coolidge at the White House on the fourth of March 1925 between European engagements, and by King Alfonso XIII of Spain at the Palacio Real of Madrid in October 1926.

She co-founded in 1943 the National Negro Opera Company at Pittsburgh with the conductor Mary Cardwell Dawson — the first Black-organized opera company in the United States — and sang the title role of Verdi’s La Traviata at the Watergate Concert Shell at Washington, D.C. in August 1943 under Dawson’s direction.

She died at Washington, D.C. on the sixth of December 1967 of complications of cancer, at seventy-seven.

She is honored here as the first Black American at a European opera house.