The High Notes: Black Opera Singers — a History from Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price to Today
The full line of Black opera singers, history in the making: from Marian Anderson to Leontyne Price and on to today — the voices that claimed the grand stage, the companies carrying them now, and the recordings to start with.
There is a moment, in every great opera house, when the lights go down and a single unamplified voice has to fill three thousand seats and four hundred years of tradition at once. For a very long time, the grandest stages in America pretended that voice could not belong to a Black singer.
The history of Black opera singers — from Marian Anderson to Leontyne Price to today — is the story of that pretence ending, voice by magnificent voice. It is not a story of doors politely opened.
It is a story of artists so undeniable that the doors became irrelevant: a contralto who sang to 75,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a soprano from Laurel, Mississippi whose Metropolitan Opera debut stopped the show for the better part of an hour, and a present generation — singing Aida at the Met, premiering new works, running companies — for whom those stages are simply home.
This is their line, and it is one of the great inheritance stories in American music. For the wider musical inheritance, see our canon article, The Sound Before Everything.
Marian Anderson: The Voice That Opened the Door
Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia in 1897 and received her earliest musical training in the choir of the Union Baptist Church, which she joined at six; her church raised the money for her private voice lessons.
She won a competition to sing with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium, placing first among 300 competitors, then built her reputation in Europe before returning in triumph.
The defining episode of her early career came in 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. The answer became one of the most famous concerts in American history: a group of citizens arranged a concert held on April 9, 1939, at the Lincoln Memorial that drew an audience of 75,000, opening with "My Country 'Tis of Thee," with Eleanor Roosevelt among those who resigned from the DAR in protest.
We tell that episode briefly here, the way this magazine tells such things: the slight is a paragraph; the voice is the story.
The voice's story reached its formal summit sixteen years later.
On January 7, 1955, she became the first African American to perform with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, singing Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera — the only staged opera role of a career spent, by her own preference, in concert and recital, where her repertoire ran from lieder to spirituals.
She sang at presidential inaugurations, served as a United States delegate to the United Nations, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Every Black singer who has stepped onto a great stage since walks a path whose first paving stone is hers.
The Generation That Walked Through
Anderson's Met debut did not open a floodgate; it opened a door, and a remarkable generation pushed it wide, one documented first at a time.
The chronology kept by Afrocentric Voices records the pace of it: in 1953, soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs became the first African American to sing at La Scala, in the role of Elvira in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri; in 1955, Robert McFerrin made his Met debut — the first African American male to do so — as Amonasro in Verdi's Aida; and in 1958, soprano Gloria Davy was the first African American to sing the title role in Aida with the Metropolitan Opera.
Around them stood William Warfield, Camilla Williams, Dorothy Maynor and others — concert artists of the first rank who built the audience, the repertoire knowledge and the expectation that the next voice was coming.
The chronology keeps filling in around the famous names: in 1953, soprano and educator Dorothy Maynor performed the national anthem at the inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower — the first time an African American sang at an American inaugural — and in 1956 Mattiwilda Dobbs became the first soprano to sing a principal role on the Metropolitan Opera stage, as Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto.
One work deserves its own sentence in this generation's story: Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, the folk opera whose Black cast made it both a showcase and a training ground — Price herself came up through its touring company, and, as performance histories note, Willard White and Angel Blue are both celebrated for their performances in Porgy and Bess, White as Porgy and Blue receiving acclaim as Bess.
Generations of singers learned their stagecraft in that one score. What they could not yet build was a star career at the centre of the art form, on both sides of the Atlantic at once. That required Leontyne Price.
Leontyne Price: The Standard
Leontyne Price was born in 1927 in Laurel, Mississippi, and — in a detail this magazine loves, because inheritance is our subject — she first was inspired to become a singer when, on a school trip as a teenager, she heard Marian Anderson sing. She intended to teach; instead, Juilliard, a Broadway Porgy and Bess, and Europe claimed her.
In 1955 she appeared on NBC television in the title role of Puccini's Tosca — the first time an African American sang in an opera telecast. She became the first African American to sing a leading role at La Scala when she debuted there in 1960, and then came the night that set the standard.
In 1961, she made her Met debut alongside Franco Corelli, also in his debut, and received one of the longest ovations in Met history — as Leonora in Il Trovatore. Accounts of that ovation differ, and we report them as they stand: some accounts say 35 minutes, others 42 minutes.
What followed was not a breakthrough but a reign.
Price became, as Bachtrack's profile puts it, the first African-American to build a singing career both in Europe and the US, and she stood at the centre of the art form's grandest night when she was the centerpiece of the 1966 opening night of the new house in Lincoln Center, leading a production of Barber's Antony and Cleopatra.
On January 3, 1985, she sang her final Aida at the Met in a farewell performance. Her recordings remain the reference shelf for Verdi sung in English-speaking houses — and even her honours are counted differently by different profiles: OperaWire's tally credits her with 13 Grammy Awards, while other profiles, folding in lifetime honours, count 19.
Either way, the shelf is full — her honours, as her biographical profiles record them, run from the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Kennedy Center Honors to the National Medal of Arts and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — and the standard she set — vocal opulence joined to absolute dignity — is the one every soprano since has been measured against, whether the programme says so or not.
Jessye Norman: The Grand Mansion of Sound
If Price was the standard, Jessye Norman was the scale. Born in Augusta, Georgia, Norman won first prize at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 1968 and built a career that moved between opera house, concert hall and recital stage with a voice critics reached for architecture to describe.
She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1983 as Cassandre in Berlioz's Les Troyens, went on to sing more than 80 performances at the Met, and was especially suited to Wagner and Strauss; her honours, as Carnegie Hall's celebration of her records, include Grammy Award-winning recordings of Songs of Maurice Ravel and Wagner's Lohengrin and Die Walküre, with Bluebeard's Castle receiving the Grammy for best opera in February 1999, and in 2006 the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — only the fourth opera or classical singer so honoured at that point, in the company of Caruso, Anderson and Price.
The Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, said it plainly at her passing:
One of the greatest artists to ever sing on our stage.— Peter Gelb, Metropolitan Opera general manager, on Jessye Norman, via the linked source
Norman also matters to this magazine for what she did offstage: boards of libraries, botanical gardens and Dance Theatre of Harlem; a school of the arts founded in her hometown; a lifetime of treating the voice as an instrument of public generosity. The high notes were never the whole of it.
The Present Generation
Today's stages belong, as a matter of course, to Black singers — and the loveliest thread in the story is how directly the line descends.
Soprano Angel Blue, now a regular on the world's leading stages, carries a family story her biographies repeat: according to family lore, when she was born her father, Sylvester, predicted that she would be "the next Leontyne Price".
Blue earned degrees at the University of Redlands and UCLA, trained in Los Angeles Opera's young artist programme, and has since sung at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Royal Opera House and the Vienna State Opera; her assumption of the title role in the Met's Aida drew a colleague's summary that doubles as a review of the whole present generation — Renée Fleming called her a consummate musician with a sympathetic and powerful presence onstage.
Beside her stand J'Nai Bridges and Latonia Moore among the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos headlining American houses, tenor Lawrence Brownlee and bass-baritone Morris Robinson among the men, and a young-artist pipeline that companies now treat as central to their work: Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, to take one strong example, counts among its notable alumni Jamie Barton, Lawrence Brownlee, Denyce Graves and Morris Robinson, and notes that the Met's annual roster regularly includes as many as 60 artists who previously appeared there.
The Composers Arrive
The newest chapter is being written by composers.
Terence Blanchard — the jazz trumpeter and film composer — crossed into opera history when the Metropolitan Opera opened its 2021–22 season with his Fire Shut Up in My Bones — the first work by a Black composer the company had ever presented; the work had premiered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, whose own history notes the same milestone.
A year later the Met premiered another Blanchard opera, Champion.
In Detroit, meanwhile, Anthony Davis's X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, in Robert O'Hara's staging, began at Detroit Opera before the Met took it up — a production that, as one account notes, began life a year and a half earlier in Michigan; the Met asked Detroit if it could join the production, not the other way around, under a company led from 2014 until his retirement at the end of 2023 by Wayne Brown, one of the few Black chief executives in the field.
Singers, composers, executives: the whole house, at last, is being built by the people the music always belonged to.
Essential Recordings: Where to Start
Start with the voices in their signature documents. Marian Anderson in spirituals and Schubert — the recital repertoire she made her own. Leontyne Price's Aida and her Verdi aria recitals, the sound of the standard being set.
Jessye Norman's Strauss Four Last Songs, which won London's Gramophone Award, and her Wagner. Then the present: Angel Blue's Aida and Porgy and Bess performances, and Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones — an opera by a jazz musician, which tells you in one title how the American inheritance keeps braiding itself together.
Hear them in a good room, in good company, and take the young people with you: if our guide to the season, The Art Season, is about anything, it is about showing up for the rooms where this art lives.
The high notes were never out of reach. They were only ever waiting for the houses to listen properly. Now they do — and the line from a Philadelphia church choir to the centre of the world's stages runs unbroken, in the care of the finest generation yet.
The Sound Before Everything: Classic Black Music and Its Makers
The Art Season: Fairs, Auctions, and Opening Nights
Women — Profile Collection
African American Registry — "Marian Anderson, Contralto"
Afrocentric Voices in "Classical" Music — "Chronology"
OperaWire — "Artist Profile: Leontyne Price, A Revolutionary Soprano"
WWFM The Lyric Stage — "Leontyne Price"
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis — "Mission & History"
Carnegie Hall, Honor! Festival — "Jessye Norman"
Wikipedia — "Angel Blue"
Wikipedia — "Terence Blanchard"
Bachtrack — "Opera Greats, Part 2: Marian Anderson's Legacy"
The New York Times obituary via Jazz Promo Services — "Jessye Norman, Regal American Soprano, Is Dead at 74"
ArtDaily — "In Detroit, an Opera Leader Finishes with One Last Triumph"
PD Music — "21 Most Famous Black Opera Singers of All Time"
She Made History — "Her Story: Leontyne Price"
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