William Warfield

William Caesar Warfield was born on the twenty-second of January 1920 at West Helena, Arkansas, the son of Robert Warfield — a Black Baptist preacher of the Mississippi Delta — and Bertha Warfield. The family migrated north to Rochester, New York in 1925 when his father took a Rochester pastorate.

He was placed at fourteen at the Rochester Washington Junior High School and at the Eastman School of Music Preparatory Department at the same time — among the first Black students in the Eastman preparatory programme — and completed the Eastman School of Music Bachelor of Music in 1942 under Adelaide Lippe.

He served the United States Army from 1942 to 1946 in the Military Intelligence branch as a German linguist at the Office of Strategic Services posting at Frankfurt and Munich. He returned to Eastman after demobilisation and completed the Master of Music there in 1946.

He took further private study under the German bass-baritone Otto Herz at New York from 1946 to 1949.

He made his New York Town Hall recital debut on the nineteenth of March 1950 in a programme of Schubert Lieder, Brahms art-songs, and the H. T. Burleigh (placed in this archive) concert spirituals. Olin Downes of the New York Times reviewed the recital as ‘the season’s outstanding new bass-baritone, of full and resonant tone and impeccable musical schooling.’

He was cast in 1950 by MGM in the role of Joe in the George Sidney film Show Boat — the second sound-film version of the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein II 1927 musical — including the principal song of the role, Ol’ Man River. The film was released on the thirteenth of July 1951.

He sang the title role of Porgy in the 1952 Robert Breen international State Department tour of Porgy and Bess across Vienna, Berlin, Belgrade, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Athens and Leningrad, alongside Leontyne Price as Bess — to whom he was married from August 1952 to 1972.

He sang the role of De Lawd in the 1957 Hallmark Hall of Fame television production of Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures — the principal television Bible-play of the period — and in the 1959 Hallmark revival.

He was appointed in 1974 to the Voice Faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and held the position for twenty years.

He died at Chicago on the twenty-fifth of August 2002 of complications of a fall, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the principal concert bass-baritone of the post-war period.