Todd Duncan

Robert Todd Duncan was born on the twelfth of February 1903 at Danville, Kentucky, the son of John Duncan — a brick mason — and Lettie Cooper Duncan, a teacher and the soprano soloist of the Danville Second Baptist Church. The family moved to Indianapolis in 1909.

He was placed at five at the Second Baptist Church junior choir under his mother’s direction and at fourteen at the Indianapolis Crispus Attucks High School — the segregated Black high school of Indianapolis. He took the bachelor’s in fine arts at the Butler University at Indianapolis in 1925 — among the first Black graduates of the institution — and the master’s in voice at the Columbia University Teachers College in 1930.

He was hired in 1931 by the Howard University at Washington, D.C. as instructor in voice in the School of Music, the position he held for forty-five years across two interrupted appointments until his retirement in 1976.

He was cast in 1934 by George Gershwin in the principal role of Porgy in the premiere production of Porgy and Bess. Gershwin had heard him at a private recital at the home of Olin Downes — the New York Times music critic — in March 1934, and engaged him on the spot. Duncan was at the time thirty-one and had given only ten paid public recitals in his life.

Porgy and Bess premiered at the Colonial Theatre at Boston on the thirtieth of September 1935 and opened at the Alvin Theatre, New York, on the tenth of October 1935. Duncan sang the role of Porgy in the original Broadway run, the 1936 national tour, the 1937 Carnegie Hall concert version, the 1942 Cheryl Crawford revival, and the 1952 international State Department tour to Vienna, Berlin and Leningrad.

He was the first Black member of the New York City Opera on the twenty-eighth of September 1945 in the role of Tonio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci — ten years before Marian Anderson (placed in this archive) at the Metropolitan Opera and nine years before the Robert McFerrin Met debut.

He sang at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the 1952 international tour of Porgy and Bess and was received in private audience by Queen Elizabeth II in November 1952 at Buckingham Palace.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the twenty-eighth of February 1998 of complications of a heart attack, at ninety-five.

He is honored here as the original Porgy.